Kruse Kronicle

The Future of the American Dream

For most Americans today, there has been a presumption that our children's lives will be more prosperous than ours. The American Dream, whatever particularities might include, has always included this assumption. It is virtually a social contract. Is the idea that most of our children will have a more prosperous life than we did really valid?

Robert Gordon, economic historian at Northwestern University, released a book earlier this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Gordon's mammoth tome documents changes in American living standards over the past 150 years. His research leads him to conclude that not all innovations significantly improve living standards. From 1870-1970, a wave of technological and social innovation emerged that radically improved worker productivity, improving our living standards. There has been innovation since 1970, but most of it, apart from communication and entertainment, has been an extension and a deepening of the innovations before 1970. The period from 1870 to about 1920 was a period of development and implementation of innovations that began to have a full impact after 1920. Gordon estimates the average annual growth rate in output per hour like this:

1890-1920 = 1.50%

1920-1970 = 2.82%

1970-2014 = 1.62%

For those familiar with American history, you will remember that income inequality was relatively high going into the 1920s. Inequality shrank steadily and substantially over the next fifty years until the mid-1970s. This corresponds with Gordon's estimates of rapidly improving worker productivity. Since the 1970s, there has been slower growth, which is more related to capital investment than improving worker productivity. We have seen income inequality grow since the 1970s.

Gordon is doubtful that we will ever again have a convergence of innovation as we had from 1870-1970. This and certain demographic headwinds will make sustainable high growth improbable for present generations. I hope to write more about this in the coming days, but this graphic posted by William Easterly on Twitter caught my eye. It comes from an article by David Leonhardt, The American Dream, Quantified at Last. I take it as more evidence consistent with Gordon's thesis.

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The Centennial Generation

The Futures Company: Meet the Centennials

"Centennials are growing up with a less idealist and more pragmatic edge. They’re facing situations that the Millennials didn’t have to deal with until early adulthood. As a result, Centennials are growing up more savvy, in graver times when everybody doesn’t win and when choices are limited and success is harder to come by."

Demography Links

1. Washington Post: Robert Samuelson: America’s demographic denial

... For proof, see Paul Taylor’s new book, “The Next America.” Taylor oversees many of the Pew Research Center’s opinion surveys. His masterful synthesis of polls shows that three familiar mega-trends lie at the core of America’s political and social stalemate. First, immigration. By 2050, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to represent 37 percent of the population, slightly higher than in 1900, when the country last experienced mass immigration. ...

... Second, family breakdown. In 2011, unmarried women accounted for 41 percent of U.S. births, up from 5 percent in 1960. The trend affects all major groups. The rate is 29 percent for whites, 53 percent among Hispanics and 72 percent among African Americans. Although 60 percent of single mothers have live-in boyfriends, half of these relationships end within five years. Single parenthood’s stigma is gone. ...

... Finally, aging. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65. The retiree flood is swamping the federal budget. ...

2. Economist: How divorce and marriage compare internationally

3. NPR: Walking Down The Widening Aisle Of Interracial Marriages

... More than 5.3 million marriages in the U.S. are between husbands and wives of different races or ethnicities. According to the 2010 Census, they make up between opposite-sex couples, marking a 28-percent increase since 2000. ...

4. Pew: Record share of wives are more educated than their husbands

5. NPR: Older Americans' Breakups Are Causing A 'Graying' Divorce Trend

For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting : Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago. ...

6. Atlantic Cities: The Developing World's Urban Population Could Triple by 2210

... A new working paper (PDF) by my colleagues Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer of NYU’s Marron Institute projects that the world’s urban population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2210, with nearly 87 percent of the 11.3 billion people on Earth living in cities. That urban population will be split unevenly, with just 1.2 billion people living in the cities of what we now think of as developed countries, and a whopping 8.6 billion making their homes in the cities of the developing world. These projections, based on UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Data, are some of the largest that I’ve seen to date. ...

7. Conversable Economist: U.S. Teen Birthrate Plummets

8. The Diplomat: Japan's Demographic Crisis: Any Way Out?

... However positive the macroeconomic outlook for the Japanese economy and however successful Abe might be at normalizing Japan’s military stance, Japan isn’t back — its falling birthrate and shrinking population will significantly damage its international competitiveness. Japan’s population fell by a record 244,000 last year, further evidencing that this trend is accelerating. Is it all doom and gloom for Japan from here on out or is there a possible way out? ...

... The immigration solution to demographic problems presents a novel scenario for Japan, which has traditionally been ethnically homogenous despite its high level of integration with the global economy. According to the Japanese government, the number of foreign residents in Japan is slowly but surely rising. Should the government’s plan to add an additional 200,000 immigrants per year succeed, Japanese society will begin to look very different within a decade, raising possible national identity issues. Currently, less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is non-ethnically Japanese. Should immigrants comprise a greater percentage of the whole, the idea of Japan will have to change, incorporating its new residents into the fold. That change won’t be easy, but it might be necessary to avert the alternative scenario: a country that shrinks its way into ruin.

9. USA Today: 'Do it for Denmark' ad encourages Danes to have more sex

... Denmark has the lowest birth rate in 27 years, according to the "Do it for Denmark" campaign the travel company launched Wednesday. "The Danish government has not found a solution," the ad says. "But there has to be one."

That solution, according to the company, is to travel, see your partner in the light of a different city and get romantic.

The ad claims that Danes have 46% more sex on vacation and that 10% of all Danish children are conceived on getaways. It's unclear where these stats came from, so take them with a grain of salt. ...

10. Atlantic: There's Something About Cities and Suicide

As more people move to a city, you’d expect about a one-to-one increase in shirts being worn, for instance, or the number of house keys issued. If something doubles as population doubles, that’s not surprising. What is unusual, though, is when something grows faster or slower than a population. That means people seem to be doing more or less of it, on average, and that could signal an interesting societal quirk. ...

... The authors found that if they doubled the size of a Brazilian city, car-crash deaths would also double, as predicted. But the rate of murder would grow by 135 percent—that is, homicides would more than double.

The rate of suicides, meanwhile, increased slower than population growth, rising just 78 percent when population went up by 100. A similar trend was true among the U.S. counties. There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so. ...

11. New York Times: Why Black Women Die of Cancer

SINCE the early 1970s, studies have shown that black Americans have a higher death rate from cancer than any other racial or ethnic group. This is especially true when it comes to breast cancer. A study published last week in the journal Cancer Epidemiology found that, in a survey of 41 of America’s largest cities, black women with breast cancer are on average 40 percent more likely to die than their white counterparts.

The principal reason for this disparity is the disconnect between the nation’s discovery and delivery enterprises — between what we know and what we do about sick Americans. ...

12. Christian Science Monitor: Why African-Americans are moving back to the South

... The Coxes' decision is one unfolding in African-American households across the nation. After decades of mass exodus, blacks are returning to the South in one of the most notable migrations of the new century.

It's a subtle but significant shift that experts say provides not only a snapshot of the changing economics and sociology of the nation but of an emerging new South and, in some cases, of a growing disillusionment with the urban North. ...

13. New York Times: Population Growth in New York City Is Reversing Decades-Old Trend, Estimates Show

New York City may be an expensive place to live. Jobs are not easy to find, even as the city rebounds from the recession. And the public transit system is not always reliable or comfortable.

But despite the challenges of city living, the city’s population is growing in ways not seen in decades.

For the third consecutive year, New York City last year gained more people than it lost through migration, reversing a trend that stretched to the mid-20th century. ...

14. Business Insider: How The American Population Changed In One Year

15. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years

16. Watch as 1000 years of European borders change

17. Business Insider: Here's What The World Would Look Like If It Were Divided Into Regions Of 100 Million People

18. Business Insider: 6 Land Transformations That Are Changing The World (GIFs)

As the global population grows past seven billion, our cities continue to expand, increasing the need for natural resources while simultaneously decreasing the supply.

Google's Earth Engine team created these time-lapse maps to illustrate a few of the trends reshaping the world right now. ...

19. Aljezzera America: How the north ended up on top of the map

Why do maps always show the north as up? For those who don’t just take it for granted, the common answer is that Europeans made the maps and they wanted to be on top. But there’s really no good reason for the north to claim top-notch cartographic real estate over any other bearing, as an examination of old maps from different places and periods can confirm. ...

... The McArthur map also makes us wonder why we are so quick to assume that Northern Europeans were the ones who invented the modern map — and decided which way to hold it — in the first place. As is so often the case, our eagerness to invoke Eurocentrism displays a certain bias of its own, since in fact, the north’s elite cartographic status owes more to Byzantine monks and Majorcan Jews than it does to any Englishman.

There is nothing inevitable or intrinsically correct — not in geographic, cartographic or even philosophical terms — about the north being represented as up, because up on a map is a human construction, not a natural one. Some of the very earliest Egyptian maps show the south as up, presumably equating the Nile’s northward flow with the force of gravity. And there was a long stretch in the medieval era when most European maps were drawn with the east on the top. If there was any doubt about this move’s religious significance, they eliminated it with their maps’ pious illustrations, whether of Adam and Eve or Christ enthroned. In the same period, Arab map makers often drew maps with the south facing up, possibly because this was how the Chinese did it. ...

Social Science and Culture Links

1. Atlantic Cities: How Different Generations of Americans Budget Their Time

Example

2. Business Insider: How Women Spend Their Time Vs. How Men Spend Their Time

3. USA Today: Millennial doesn't mean liberal: Column

Bad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.

A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.

Third Way focused on how Millennials' experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not "adaptors." They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available. ...

4. Forbes: Why Millennials Annoy Their Elders

... Anyone who frets over the idea that millennials aren’t drinking the kool-aid should stop and ask “What good has the kool-aid done me?” We raised our kids to be smart and to pay attention to the world around them. Are we going to castigate them now for doing that so well that they end up rejecting the deal-with-the-devil “Just put your career in our hands, focus on pleasing your employer, and everything will be fine!”?

I hope we trust our kids to make good choices, since they’ll be running the world in another few years.

I think we can put our trust in millennials. They have a better sense of priorities than many of their status-and-income-drunk elders do.

5. Atlantic: Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture

Or at least deeply contradictory: They're always connected but distrustful. They're selfish yet accepting of minorities. They're "independents" who mostly vote Democratic and love Obama while hating Obamacare....

6. PBS: How should the U.S. improve opportunity for young men of color?

7. Slate: “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material”

... But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work? ...

8. Atlantic: The Geography of Small Talk

How you start a conversation with a stranger depends on where you live. We survey the diverse geography of American greetings—from Honolulu to Hays, Kansas, from Anchorage to Appleton, Wisconsin, from New Orleans to New York. ...

9. Forbes: 'Where Are You From?' And Other Big Networking Racial Faux Pas

... So what’s the best way to approach ethnicity? If you’re dying to figure out if someone is of Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese heritage, is it ok to ask the first time you meet them? This topic is incredibly nuanced. There’s no right way to ask, though there are plenty of wrong ways. ...

10. Conversable Economist: How Academics Learn to Write Badly

Most of my days are spent editing articles by academic economists. So when I saw a book called Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, the author Michael Billig had me at the title. The book is a careful dissection of the rhetorical habits of social scientists, and in particular their tendency to banish actual people from their writing, and instead to turn everything into a string of nouns (often ending in -icity or -ization) linked with passive verbs to other strings of nouns. (If that sentence sounded ugly to you, welcome to my work life!)

I found especially thought-provoking Billig's argument early in the book about how the necessity for continual publications is relatively recent innovation in academic life, and how it has altered the incentives for quantity and quality of academic writing. ...

11. Gallup: Americans Most Likely to Say Global Warming Is Exaggerated

12. Gallup: Americans 'Level of Worrry About National Problems

13. Atlantic Cities: The Reason Songs Have Choruses

The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition.

It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequence every 20 minutes, or a book that repeats every other chapter. 

Yet, in popular music, the chorus seems necessary. It is, in many cases, the point of the song.

And now, in a wonderful essay on Aeon, Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, argues that repetition is the point of music. The chorus is merely our culture's embodiment of a deeper human desire to play it again. ...

14. Atlantic Cities: Watch Your Name Grow and Shrink in Popularity Across the U.S.

Loved this one. The Matrix effect.

15. PBS: Note-takers volunteer to help the elderly during doctor visits

... Wolozin is a volunteer for the Northwest Neighbors Village in Washington, D.C., one of the more than 200 “villages” across the United States. These neighborhood membership organizations provide volunteers and other resources to help with everything from transportation and snow shoveling to hanging curtains and solving computer glitches. ...

 16. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years

17. NPR: With Sobering Science, Doctor Debunks 12-Step Recovery

Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country's go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts.

Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. His latest book on the subject is The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.

Dodes tells NPR's Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn't work, despite anecdotes about success. ...

18. Atlantic: Americans: Republicans in General, Democrats in Particular

When Americans think about government in the big picture, they can seem like a nation of Ayn Rands. People want to lay waste to the Leviathan. But when Americans consider specific aspects of government, a curious thing happens. People rediscover their love of Washington. On issue after issue, Republicans are winning the argument in general, whereas Democrats are winning the argument in particular. ...

19. Huffington Post: Native Americans' Ancestors Got Stuck On Land Bridge On Way To Americas, New Research Suggests

Native Americans along the Pacific Coast and aboriginal Siberians may have both originated from populations living on the land bridge now submerged under the Bering Strait, a new language analysis suggests. 

The language analysis, detailed today (March 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is consistent with the notion that ancestors to modern-day Native Americans were stuck in the region of the Bering Strait before making their way into North America.

Social Science and Culture Links

1. Two informative articles in Forbes: A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having More Money Than Your Friends and A Tale Of Two Incomes: How To Handle Having Less Money Than Your Friends

2. New Yorker: Why Your Name Matters

... The effects of name-signalling—what names say about ethnicity, religion, social sphere, and socioeconomic background—may begin long before someone enters the workforce. In a study of children in a Florida school district, conducted between 1994 and 2001, the economist David Figlio demonstrated that a child’s name influenced how he or she was treated by the teacher, and that differential treatment, in turn, translated to test scores. Figlio isolated the effects of the students’ names by comparing siblings—same background, different names. Children with names that were linked to low socioeconomic status or being black, as measured by the approach used by Bertrand and Mullainathan, were met with lower teacher expectations. Unsurprisingly, they then performed more poorly than their counterparts with non-black, higher-status names. Figlio found, for instance, that “a boy named ‘Damarcus’ is estimated to have 1.1 national percentile points lower math and reading scores than would his brother named ‘Dwayne,’ all else equal, and ‘Damarcus’ would in turn have three-quarters of a percentile ranking higher test scores than his brother named Da’Quan.’ ” Conversely, children with Asian-sounding names (also measured by birth-record frequency) were met with higher expectations, and were more frequently placed in gifted programs.

The economists Steven Levitt and Roland Fryer looked at trends in names given to black children in the United States from the nineteen-seventies to the early aughts. They discovered that names which sounded more distinctively “black” became, over time, ever more reliable signals of socioeconomic status. That status, in turn, affected a child’s subsequent life outcome, which meant that it was possible to see a correlation between names and outcomes, suggesting a name effect similar to what was observed in the 1948 Harvard study. But when Levitt and Fryer controlled for the child’s background, the name effect disappeared, strongly indicating that outcomes weren’t influenced by intrinsic qualities of the name itself. As Simonsohn notes, “Names tell us a lot about who you are.” ...

3. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Living with Discrimination Can Take a Toll on Health

"... The researchers wrote, "the anticipatory nature of vigilance sets it apart from traditional notions of perceived racial discrimination. For decades, a large body of scientific and lay literature has provided evidence of the pervasive consequences of interpersonal and societal discrimination. In qualitative studies, social scientists often report on the way Blacks continually think about the potential for discrimination."

"Overall, the work shows that in cases where racism-related vigilance is low or absent, Blacks and Whites have similar levels of hypertension. But when people report chronic vigilance, the rates in Blacks rise significantly. They rise a little in Hispanics, but not at all in Whites," Hicken explains." ...

4. Carpe Diem: Women earned a majority of 2012 doctoral degrees in 33 STEM fields, can we stop calling it a ‘national crisis’?

5. Gruntled Center: Men and Women Work the Same Total Hours (There is no 'Second Shift')

This is a finding reported in the excellent new book, The XX Factor, by leading British economic researcher Alison Wolf.

She says of all that she reports in this book, this fact is the one she expects readers to have the hardest time believing.  The belief that men and women now work equally outside the home, and then women come home to an unbalanced 'second shift' is very widespread, especially in the U.S. ...

6. The Atlantic: Why Don't More Women Want to Work With Other Women?

... Pew asked 2,002 people if they would prefer to work with men or women. Most—78 percent of men and 76 percent of women—said they didn't care. But for the 22 percent who did have a preference, "it’s men who get the nod from both sexes by about a 2-1 margin," Pew's Rich Morin writes. In fact, more women said they'd rather work with men than men did. ...

7. The Mercury: As Cohabitation Gains Favor, Shotgun Weddings Fade

... The share of unmarried couples who opt to move in together after a pregnancy surpassed what demographers call “shotgun marriages” for the first time over the last decade. That’s according to a forthcoming paper from the National Center for Health Statistics. ...

8. New York Times: The Childless Plan for Their Fading Days

... Ms. Tint’s situation is one that more and more elderly people will face over the next few decades as fewer women choose to have children. According to an August 2013 report from AARP, 11.6 percent of women ages 80 to 84 were childless in 2010. By 2030, the number will reach 16 percent. What’s more, in 2010, the caregiver support ratio was more than seven potential caregivers for every person over 80 years old. By 2030, that ratio is projected to decline to four to one. By 2050, it’s expected to fall to three to one. ...

... “Many people are extending the notion of family itself, to nieces and nephews, cousins and so on,” he continued. “But it’s also expanding to ‘pseudo kin’ of friends and neighbors. We see this in the L.G.B.T. community, many of whom have been alienated from their families.”

“While it’s great to have kids who are available to help, there are a lot of complications with having kids around,” said Audrey K. Chun, a doctor who is also a medical director at the Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York. “A lot of the dynamics, decisions that have to be made around the end of life, disagreements that arise between siblings, what mom or dad may have wanted, can be very emotional. Many of my patients without kids are interested in not wasting resources at the end of life — when it’s their time, they don’t want unnecessary suffering, or to be a burden on society. They want to die naturally. Because they don’t have children to advocate for them, they’re much more open and direct about that.” ...

9. The Guardian: This column will change your life: gut feelings

... But how many of us would embark on a serious relationship based on a shared passion for The Shining? When it comes to judging character, we prefer to believe gut instinct beats box-ticking. "We have a deep-seated need to feel that we can judge character," Jason Dana, of Yale University, told the Boston Globe recently. But many studies suggest we can't – and a new paper co-authored by Dana is especially damning. ...

... Technically, the problem with unstructured interviews (or dates) isn't that they're insufficiently informative. It's that they're too informative. Bombarded by data, we seek refuge in "sensemaking", clinging to stories that seem to render things clear. But those stories might include racist or sexist stereotypes about who's good at what. Or they might be the seductive stories of candidates skilled at interviews, yet rubbish at the job itself. "Because of sensemaking," the researchers write, "interviewers are likely to feel they are getting useful information from unstructured interviews, even when they are useless." Settling on a coherent story feels good, but that doesn't mean it's accurate.

This gap – between what our guts say and what the data says – will only grow wider. As Big Data quantifies more of our lives, we'll increasingly face dilemmas: if your instincts tell you to date or hire Person A, but the metrics point to Person B, whom will you choose? ...

10. Associated Press: Accident rates improving for older drivers

... Today's drivers aged 70 and older are less likely to be involved in crashes than previous generations, and less likely to be killed or seriously injured if they do crash, according to a study released Thursday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

That's because vehicles are getting safer and seniors are generally getting healthier, the institute said. ...

11. Conversable Economist: How Pedestrian Countdown Signals Cause Auto Accidents

Pedestrian countdown signals at crosswalks show how much time is left before the light turns yellow, thus letting pedestrians know if they should rush to cross the street--or perhaps wait for the next light. But when these signals were introduced in Toronto, the rate of rear-end auto accidents was higher at the intersections with pedestrian signals compared to neighboring intersections. ...

... In short, the pedestrian countdown signals were good for pedestrians. But some of the drivers were watching the signals, trying to squeeze through before the light changed, and rear-ending other cars.

There's are some narrow lessons here about pedestrian countdown signals and a broader lesson about how information works. Here are two narrow lessons, which come out of a  more detailed analysis of the data: "The first is cities might benefit from installing countdowns at historically highly dangerous intersections and from not installing them at historically safe intersections. The second conclusion is that while countdowns can improve safety in historically dangerous cities, they may be detrimental to safety in historically safe ones." Also, instead of having a pedestrian countdown signal that is visible to cars, it might make more sense to have a verbal countdown that could only be heard by pedestrians. ...

12. PBS: Residents of poor countries have greater sense of meaning in life than those in rich nations, research says

According to new research, people living in poor countries have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those living in wealthy countries.

These new findings, published in the Association for Psychological Science’s academic journal “Psychology Science,” suggest that this greater sense of life meaning stems from residents’ strong family ties and solid connections to religious tradition. “Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness, or life satisfaction,” Shigehiro Oishi, a professor at the University of Virginia and original publisher of this study, said. “Given that meaning in life is an important aspect of overall well-being, we wanted to look more carefully at differential patterns, correlates, and predictors for meaning in life.” ...

13. Huffington Post: 13 Predictions About The Future That Were Spectacularly Wrong

While humankind has made great leaps in science and technology, we have yet to master the art of prophecy. It turns out that predicting the future is tricky business, but time and again, we insist on doing so.

In the spirit of learning from our foolishness, we've partnered with Hendrick's Gin to take a peek into the lofty predictions that turned out to be terribly, spectacularly wrong. ...

14. Washington Post: 40 more maps that explain the world

Maps seemed to be everywhere in 2013, a trend I like to think we encouraged along with August's 40 maps that explain the world. Maps can be a remarkably powerful tool for understanding the world and how it works, but they show only what you ask them to. You might consider this, then, a collection of maps meant to inspire your inner map nerd. I've searched far and wide for maps that can reveal and surprise and inform in ways that the daily headlines might not, with a careful eye for sourcing and detail. I've included a link for more information on just about every one. Enjoy.

This one is one interesting example:

  15. Huffington Post: Ancient Town Discovered In Israel Is 2,300 Years Old, Archaeologists Say

On the outskirts of Jerusalem, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a 2,300-year-old rural village that dates back to the Second Temple period, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced. ...

16. Scientific American: 4,600-Year-Old Step Pyramid Uncovered in Egypt

The pyramid, which predates the Great Pyramid of Giza, is one of seven for which its function remains a mystery. ...

17. Discovery: 11,000-Year-Old Settlement Found Under Baltic Sea

Evidence of a Stone-Age settlement that may have been swallowed whole by the Baltic Sea has resurfaced near Sweden, revealing a collection of well preserved artifacts left by nomads some 11,000 years ago. ...

18. Listverse: 10 Lesser-Known Ancient Roman Traditions

Depending on your personal view, ancient Rome was responsible for giving the modern world a number of traditions, including various legal ideas, democracy, and some of our religious celebrations. However, there are still many ancient Roman traditions that are slightly obscure, mostly relegated to the dustbin of history. Here are some lesser known ones. ...

19. Huff Post: CNN Morality Poll Reveals Surprising Trends In America

A recent CNN poll demonstrates the rapidly increasing support for the legalization of marijuana in America, but the survey also revealed American attitudes about the morality of various other actions.

Opinions on behaviors like drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, cheating on taxes, and adultery have shifted since a similar poll was conducted by Time Magazine in 1987. ...

 

Economics Links

1.  Brookings: Prospects for Ending Extreme Poverty by 2030

2. Carpe Diem: World trade and output both reached new all-time record highs in November and are nearly 10% above previous peaks

3. PBS Newshour: More than 200 million people were unemployed in the world in 2013

Worldwide, the number of unemployed people rose by 5 million in 2013 to 202 million, according to the International Labor Organization’s Global Employment Trends report. The global unemployment ratio of youth to adults has reached a new high. The jobless rate for 15- to 24-year-olds hit 13.1 percent in 2013 (or 74.5 million), nearly three times the adult rate.

The organization predicts unemployment will worsen, with 215 million jobless by 2018. Roughly 40 million net jobs will be added each year, the ILO estimates, but that won’t be enough to absorb the 42.6 million people expected to enter the labor force each year. ...

4. Conversable Economist: Limited U.S. Power in a Globalizing Economy

Just to be clear, the U.S. economy is not becoming a economic minnow like Belize or Burundi. But 65 years ago, as the high-income countries climbed out of the wreckage left by World War II and today's emerging economies had not yet engaged in the global economy, the U.S. economy had an extraordinary time of dominance. For a time in the 1960s, it was common to hear that the planned economy of the USSR would outstrip the U.S. economy. In the 1970s and into the 1980, Japan was going to rule the world economy. Around 2000 and the launch of the euro, there was talk about the economic rise of the European Union. But now, we are seeing the rise of a multipolar and distributed world economy, with faster growth happening in the emerging economies, but with stronger linkages of trade and global supply chains reaching across the world economy. The U.S. can certainly be an active and leading participant in shaping the world's economic future. But neither the U.S., nor some combination of high-income countries around the world, has the power to dictate what configurations will emerge.

5. Business Insider: Here's A Chart Of Interest Rates Going Back To 3000 BC

6. PBS: Is the famous ‘paradox of choice’ a myth? Barry Schwartz

"Paradox of choice" is tha notion that too many choices become overwhelming and make life decisions less satisying.

... Often people choose on the basis of essentially irrelevant features of plans, just because the relevant features are too complex to evaluate. Has anyone ever suggested that the sensible alternative to too many options is a single option? Absolutely and unequivocally not. Psychology has known about “single option aversion” for a half century. With too few options, there is the risk that none will be satisfactory, whereas with too many, there is the risk of paralysis, confusion and dissatisfaction.

The trick is to find the middle ground — the “sweet spot” — that enables people to benefit from variety and not be paralyzed by it. Choice is good, but there can be too much of a good thing. Adam Grant and I recently published a paper suggesting that this “too much of a good thing” phenomenon is pervasive in psychology. ...

7. TED: Paul Piff - Does money make you mean?

"It's amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal. In this entertaining but sobering talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. (Hint: badly.) But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there's good news too. (Filmed at TEDxMarin.)"

8. Forbes: Downton Abbey Makes A Powerful Case For Economic Freedom

... One of the great things about Downton Abbey is that it allows fans to escape their worries and fantasize about life on a luxurious estate in early 20^th century England. But the truth is, few of us could tolerate what we’d be forced to live with, and live without, in that world. ...

9. Carpe Diem: The middle class is shrinking ... because they are moving into the upper class! Census data on income distribution reveal evidence of rising income levels for a rising share of American households

10. AEI: This chart shows how tough it is for the poor to recover from a bad start in life

11. Business Insider: Millennials Are The Most Financially Conservative Generation Since The Great Depression

... According to a new report from investment banking company UBS, Millennials are the most financially conservative generation to come around since the Great Depression. The report, which focused on investors between the ages of 21 and 36, found that Millennials are risk averse when it comes to investing — dedicating 52% of their investment portfolios to cash, compared to 23% cash for other investors. They are also more likely to believe that working hard (69%) and living frugally (45%) puts you on the path to success rather than long-term investing (28%). ...

12. NPR: The Middle Class Took Off 100 Years Ago ... Thanks To Henry Ford?

January 1914 was a frigid month in Detroit — much like January 2014 has been, but nonetheless thousands lined up in the bitter cold outside to take Henry Ford up : $5 a day, for eight hours of work in a bustling factory.

That was more than double the average factory wage at that time, and for U.S. workers it was one of the defining moments of the 20th century. Five dollars in 1914 translates to roughly $120 in today's money. While many economists say today's employers could take some pointers from Ford, they also say 2014 is a totally different world for U.S. businesses and workers. ...

... "It was mainly to stabilize the workforce. And it sure did," Kreipke says. "And raised the bar all over the world."

He says to understand why Ford thought this was a smart move in January 1914, you have to go back to another huge shift that happened a few months earlier: By 1913, Model T production totaled 200,000 — a feat made possible by the creation of the first moving assembly line. Conveyor belts transported small parts to workers, each of whom performed a specific task.

This tremendously sped up production, but Ford still had a problem: While he had standardized production, he hadn't standardized his workforce. Now, he didn't need particularly skilled workers; he just needed ones who would do the same repetitive, specialized tasks hour after hour, day after day.

Kreipke says there was chronic absenteeism and lots of worker turnover. So Ford gambled that higher wages would attract better, more reliable workers. ...

... "Today, overwhelmingly employers view the lowest wage as the most competitive wage," Shaiken says.

These days, global supply chains feed a hypercompetitive auto industry where no one wants to give up even an inch of ground, and keeping up with technology takes precedent over stabilizing the workforce. This just isn't Henry Ford's economy anymore, Shaiken says.

"There are very real economic pressures out there that push down on wages," he says. "So it's not a simple story, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a core truth into what Ford found." ...

13. Business Insider: An Economist Explains Why Wage Growth Is Poised To Take Off

14. Conversable Economist: U.S. Household Finances Rebound

15. Greg Mankiw: Does income inequality increase mortality?

Angus [Deaton] writes the following (emphasis added):

Darren Lubotsky and I ⁷ have investigated the relationship between income inequality, race, and mortality at both the state and metropolitan statistical area level. In both the state and the city data, mortality is positively and significantly correlated with almost any measure of income inequality. Because whites have higher incomes and lower mortality rates than blacks, places where the population has a large fraction of blacks are also places where both mortality and income inequality are relatively high. However, the relationship is robust to controlling for average income (or poverty rates) and also holds, albeit less strongly, for black and white mortality separately. Nevertheless, it turns out that race is indeed the crucial omitted variable. In states, cities, and counties with a higher fraction of African-Americans, white incomes are higher and black incomes are lower, so that income inequality (through its interracial component) is higher in places with a high fraction black. It is also true that both white and black mortality rates are higher in places with a higher fraction black and that, once we control for the fraction black, income inequality has no effect on mortality rates, a result that has been replicated by Victor Fuchs, Mark McClellan, and Jonathan Skinner⁹ using the Medicare records data. This result is consistent with the lack of any relationship between income inequality and mortality across Canadian or Australian provinces, where race does not have the same salience. Our finding is robust; it holds for a wide range of inequality measures; it holds for men and women separately; it holds when we control for average education; and it holds once we abandon age-adjusted mortality and look at mortality at specific ages. None of this tells us why the correlation exists, and what it is about cities with substantial black populations that causes both whites and blacks to die sooner.

In a review of the literature on inequality and health, I note that Wilkinson's original evidence, which was (and in many quarters is still) widely accepted showed a negative cross-country relationship between life expectancy and income inequality, not only in levels but also, and more impressively, in changes. But subsequent work has shown that these findings were the result of the use of unreliable and outdated information on income inequality, and that they do not appear if recent, high quality data are used. There are now also a large number of individual level studies exploring the health consequences of ambient income inequality and none of these provide any convincing evidence that inequality is a health hazard. Indeed, the only robust correlations appear to be those among U.S. cities and states (discussed above) which, as we have seen, vanish once we control for racial composition. I suggest that inequality may indeed be important for health, but that income inequality is less important than other dimensions, such as political or gender inequality.¹⁰

16. Pew Research: There's More to the Story of the Shrinking (Gender) Pay Gap

17. The Daily Beast: No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men

... In its fact-checking column on the State of the Union, the Washington Post included the president’s mention of the wage gap in its list of dubious claims. “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women… make it difficult to make simple comparisons.” ...

...  Much of the wage gap can be explained away by simply taking account of college majors. Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths.

But here is the mystery. These and other differences in employment preferences and work-family choices have been widely studied in recent years and are now documented in a mountain of solid empirical research. By now the President and his staff must be aware that the wage gap statistic has been demolished. This is not the first time the Washington Post has alerted the White House to the error. Why continue to use it? ...

18. Atlantic: How When Harry Met Sally Explains Inequality

A new study says that educated people marrying each other has increased inequality by 25 percent.

19. Reuters: The real future of U.S. manufacturing

... The assertion that the United States, or any nation, requires continued investment in the technologies that will drive future production is indisputable. On that score, at least, the Obama White House is fighting the proverbial good fight.

The contention, however, that these technologies and the factories that harness them for production will be sources of well-paid, solidly middle-class jobs, is flawed. In our political debates, we maintain the comforting fiction that a manufacturing revival can and will go hand-in-hand with a jobs revival. Yet, as Obama’s initiative shows, the two can be — and increasingly are — uncoupled.

The issue is not the hollowing-out of manufacturing as defined by less production. Yes, many less expensive, simpler products are now made more cheaply elsewhere and are unlikely to be made in the United States anytime soon — even with the “on-shoring” of manufacturing. Though China ceases  to be the place of low-cost production, Vietnam, the Philippines and who knows where else (even Mexico) will be more attractive for apparel, furniture, electronics and anything plastic for a long time to come.

The high-end production that these new U.S. innovation hubs seek to promote is indeed in demand around the world. It is something where, as yet, China and other low-cost manufacturing centers have not excelled. This is why China actually imports considerable billions of higher-end equipment – particularly from Japan and Germany. So it is true that the United States could have a competitive advantage, especially given the plethora of research universities and the wealth of highly-educated talent that can be used for just this type of production.

But all this is not the same as a job creator for a workforce of at least 120 million and counting in nation of more than 320 million people. These high-tech factories might employ hundreds of people in conjunction with industrial robots, using sophisticated software systems for design and production. These factory workers bear little resemblance to the 1950s line workers doing rote tasks. They are more like Silicon Valley engineers or lab technicians. These are high-skill jobs — and not nearly as plentiful as the factory jobs of the past. ...

Related: Bloomberg - Factory Jobs Are Gone. Get Over It

... In 1953 manufacturing accounted for 28 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 1980 that had dropped to 20 percent, and it reached 12 percent in 2012. Over that time, U.S. GDP increased from $2.6 trillion to $15.5 trillion, which means that absolute manufacturing output more than tripled in 60 years. Those goods were produced by fewer people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employees in manufacturing was 16 million in 1953 (about a third of total nonfarm employment), 19 million in 1980 (about a fifth of nonfarm employment), and 12 million in 2012 (about a tenth of nonfarm employment).

Service industries—hotels, hospitals, media, and accounting—have taken up the slack. Even much of the value generated by U.S. manufacturing involves service work—about a third of the total. More than half of all people still employed in the U.S. manufacturing sector work in such services as management, technical support, and sales. ...

 20. PBS: Paul Soloman on Man vs the Machine: Will Human Workers Become Obsolete?

 21. Huff Post: The End of Capitalism

Interesting thoughts. I don't know if he has it just right, but I do think he is correct that we may be on the verge of something as transformative to capitalism as industrialization was to agricultural societies:

... The location of creation has switched. Under industrial capitalism, machines operating centrally created riches. James Watt perfected his steam engine, but then the machines took on a life of their own - the machines themselves, and machine-like corporations built around them, churned out money. People danced around the edges, enlarging and improving the machines, putting them together in large mills or mines to turbo-charge productivity, adapting their pace of work to that of the machines. The machines and the capitalists were in charge.

Now it is not machines or their owners, but creative individuals who are center-stage. People not only invent new technology - they are the new technology. As sociologist Manuel Castells says, "For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force ... Computers, communication systems, and genetic decoding and programming are all amplifiers and extensions of the human mind."
In the West, knowledge has become personalized. Open innovation requires it. The effect of open innovation is to transfer initiative and wealth from established corporations to new ones, and from shareholders to individuals. From thought to action, individuals are at the heart of creation, including wealth creation. Every element of the unique human personality takes part in creation - intellect, imagination, emotion, calculation, empathy, and the ability to evoke enthusiasm from other seriously talented people. Each person does it their way. Steve Jobs may not have been the nicest person in Silicon Valley, but he got amazingly talented people to distort reality and create previously unimaginable products. The individual is everything.

In all kinds of ways, therefore, we are moving away from capitalism, from an economy centered on capital and large, established, hierarchical corporations. But we are not moving from private hierarchy to public hierarchy, from capitalism to socialism or communism. Free enterprise is alive and well - arguably too alive and well. The new system is even more market-oriented than capitalism, and much more decentralized. It is as decentralized as any system can possibly be, because it is decentralized to individuals, and above all to a tiny minority of new superstar individuals. Welcome to the personalized economy. ...

22. Carpe Diem: Cash for kidneys will solve the organ shortage, save money spent on dialysis, and then we’ll wonder why it took so long

(Not necessarily agreeing here. Just reporting.)

Economists Gary Becker and Julio Elias make the case in today’s WSJ that a market for organs and donor compensation of about $15,000 would eliminate the growing kidney shortage.  As the chart above shows, the kidney waiting list has nearly doubled from 50,000 in 2001 to almost 99,000 today, while the number of annual kidney transplant operations has increased only slightly from 14,279 in 2001 to fewer than 17,000 in 2013. Over the last eight years, kidney transplants have remained stuck at slightly below 17,000 per year, while the kidney waiting list has swelled by almost 30,000.  Therefore, there an additional 30,000 patients today (99,000) than in 2006 (69,600) competing for the same number of transplants. And that’s why, as Becker and Elias point out, the average waiting time for a kidney has increased to 4.5 years from 2.9 years a decade ago. The authors argue that “Paying donors for their organs would finally eliminate the supply-demand gap.”

Isn’t donor compensation immoral? No, according to Becker and Elias (emphasis added: ...

Demography Links

1. New York Times: Why Are Americans Staying Put?

... “This decline in migration has been going on for a long time now, through all sorts of ups and downs in the housing market,” said Greg Kaplan of Princeton University, who, along with Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has studied the issue in depth. But even with the pressure of high housing costs in many areas, Americans are moving less, Kaplan said. “That might explain why people are moving from San Francisco to, I don’t know, Houston,” he said. “But you’ve seen a decline in migration from Texas to California as well as California to Texas.”

This is not a short-term supply-and-demand issue or a side effect of a slow-growth economy or a shift in demographics. The change is deeper. Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl have won applause from other economists for developing a novel theory to explain this creeping inertia: labor markets in the United States have simply become more homogeneous. Earnings have become more similar across the country, meaning there is less incentive to move from one place to another in search of a raise. The country has also become less diverse, work-wise. Pick any two cities, and chances are they offer a more similar mix of jobs than they did 20 or 50 years ago. We have become less a nation of Pittsburghs and more a nation of Provos. ...

... Even so, many economists believe that if Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl’s narrative is right, there is reason to suspect that a less-mobile populace might not mean a less-dynamic economy. Workers haven’t stopped moving because housing prices or other financial or social concerns are holding them back. They’ve stopped moving because they just don’t see the need to. “Whether it’s a good thing depends on why,” Kolko said. “If your job prospects don’t depend on having to move someplace else, the decline in mobility might be a good thing.”

2. The Atlantic: Stuck: Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States

... "Americans are moving far less often than in the past, and when they do migrate it is typically no longer from places with low wages to places with higher wages," Tim Noah wrote in Washington Monthly. "Rather, it’s the reverse." Why America lost her wanderlust is not entirely clear—perhaps dual-earner households make long moves less likely; perhaps the Great Recession pinned underwater homeowners on their plots—but those still wandering a ren't going to the right cities. ...

... Americans aren't simply moving to the states with the lowest unemployment (Oregon, Tennessee, and North Carolina all have jobless rates above the national average). More importantly, we aren't moving to states with the best records for low-income families getting ahead. In fact, we're often fleeing the best places for a upwardly mobile middle class. ...

... This doesn't make much sense if you envision American families rushing to the most promising metros. It does make sense if you see American families rushing to the most affordable homes. ...

3. Huffington Post: U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression

... The U.S. population grew by just 0.72 percent in the year ended July 1, 2013, the Census Bureau reported Monday. That’s the slowest growth rate since 1937. Population growth has hovered at super-low levels for the past few years, according to William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research organization. The trend is "troubling," Frey said, and is due largely to the weak economy. ...

4. New Geography: The Geography Of Aging: Why Millennials Are Headed To The Suburbs

One supposed trend, much celebrated in the media, is that younger people are moving back to the city, and plan to stay there for the rest of their lives. Retirees are reportedly following suit. ...

... But a close look at migration data reveals that the reality is much more complex. The millennial “flight” from suburbia has not only been vastly overexaggerated, it fails to deal with what may best be seen as differences in preferences correlated with life stages.

We can tell this because we can follow the first group of millennials who are now entering their 30s, and it turns out that they are beginning, like preceding generations, to move to the suburbs. ...

5. Business Insider: Female Mortality Rates Are One Of The Strangest And Most Disturbing Trends In The United States

Change in female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in US counties

6. Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States

Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data—remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.

7. Forbes: What Would The U.S. Be Like If We Had 124 States?

8. NPR: Overweight People In Developing World Outnumber Those In Rich Countries

... "Over the last 30 years, the number of people who are overweight and obese in the developing world has tripled," says , of the Overseas Development Institute in London.

One-third of adults globally are now overweight compared with fewer than 23 percent in 1980, the report . And the number of overweight and obese people in the developing world now far overshadows the number in rich countries. ...

9. Economist: The high rate of suicide in Asia

 10. PBS Newshour: Japanese population declined by record number in 2013

The Japanese population, which has been shrinking for the last couple of years, declined by a record 244,000 people in 2013, according to health ministry estimates.

If the current trend persists, the BBC reports the country will lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. ...

 11. Real Clear World: Easing China's One-Child Policy Won't Stop Demographic Decline

In an attempt to mitigate a near-certain demographic future of rapid aging, shrinking labor force and critical gender imbalance, the Chinese government has adjusted its one-child policy. The decision demonstrates that, irrespective of a nation's politico-economic system, governments cannot avoid demography's juggernaut consequences. This mid-course correction in population policy will have marginal effect as China is aging at a much faster pace than occurred in other countries. This, along with a shrinking workforce and critical gender imbalance, will increasingly tax the government. ...

(Related: New Geography: China Failing its Families)

 12. Business Insider: These Facebook Maps Reveal Migration Trends Around The World

... The maps use two simple data points offered up by its 1 billion users — where you live and your hometown — to draw a map of how groups of people migrate from place to place. The Facebook Science team was looking specifically for “coordinated migration,” when a significant proportion of a population from one city moves collectively to another city. This could be the result of economics, wars, natural disasters or even state policies. ...

13. Atlantic Cities: Our Favorite Maps of 2013

Dustin Cable's stunning Racial Dot Map actually put every person in America (308,745,538 of us) on a map as individual dots of different colors.

14. Business Insider: Where Drivers Drive On The Left And Where They Drive On The Right

15. Top Public Health Risks

 

5 Technologies Seniors Use More Than Millennials

Demography Links

1. A look at global population trends in the Christian Science Monitor.

"Too many people is a big problem, but too few is a concern as well." "The story of the 21st century has been one of falling birthrates, rising standards of living, and a revolution in food production. But the global picture is uneven: As populations decline in wealthier nations, in other countries – particularly in Africa, says a new report – they are rising at rates that may mire their people in poverty."

2. The end of global population growth may be almost here — and a lot sooner than the UN thinks

3. 232 Million People Left Their Countries for New Ones—Where Did They Go?

4. World Immigration Called 'Win-Win' For Rich Nations, And Poor

The number of people who leave their countries to work abroad is soaring, according to the United Nations. More than 200 million people now live outside their country of origin, up from 150 million a decade ago.

5. Two interesting articles about Japan and fertility: Want To See A 'Demographic Death Spiral?' Look At Japan, Not Russia and Almost Half Of Young Japanese Women Are Not Interested In Sex. From the second story:

"... Even though casual sex is becoming more common in Japan, a 2011 survey found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of relationship — a rise of 10% from five years earlier, according to Haworth.

One of the reasons for the decline in dating and sex among young Japanese adults seems to stem from the fact that men and women have different long-term values — while men have become less career-driven, women are valuing their careers more than romantic relationships, and don't want to give up their fulfilling (and time-intensive) jobs. ..."

6. Mapping 22 Different Latino Populations Across the U.S.A.

Where do America's Latino and Hispanic populations live? Let's start with where they're not living: in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and a whopping chunk of the Midwest that probably hears a sí as often as the cry of an Amazonian toucan. ...

 7. U.S. Women Are Dying Younger Than Their Mothers, and No One Knows Why

... In March, a study published by the University of Wisconsin researchers David Kindig and Erika Cheng found that in nearly half of U.S. counties, female mortality rates actually increased between 1992 and 2006, compared to just 3 percent of counties that saw male mortality increase over the same period. ...

8. Several articles about the most popular baby names in recent days. For example, Here's The Most Popular Baby Name In Each State. I especially liked these two gifs: America's Most Popular Boys' Names Since 1960, in 1 Spectacular GIF and A Wondrous GIF Shows the Most Popular Baby Names for Girls Since 1960.

9. Census: Americans are moving again

Those on the move are once again setting their sights on their favorite Sun Belt places, like Florida, Arizona and Nevada, a demographer says.

10. U.S. obesity rate levels off, but still an epidemic

"More than a third of adults are obese, which is roughly 35 pounds over a healthy weight."

11. Where Are The Boomers Headed? Not Back To The City

... Indeed, our number-crunching shows that rather than flocking into cities, there were roughly a million fewer boomers in 2010 within a five-mile radius of the centers of the nation’s 51 largest metro areas compared to a decade earlier. If boomers change residences, they tend to move further from the core, and particularly to less dense places outside metropolitan areas. Looking at the 51 metropolitan areas with more than a million residents, areas within five miles of the center lost 17% of their boomers over the past decade, while the balance of the metropolitan areas, predominately suburbs, only lost 2%. In contrast places outside the 51 metro areas actually gained boomers. ...

 12. The Myers Briggs States of America

Sunbelt, Rustbelt, Energy Belt – geographers, economists and urbanists have long endeavored to map the economic, political and cultural structures of America's regions. But to what extent do these places have their own distinctive personalities?

We all have our handy stereotypes for regional personalities, of course. Stolid Midwesterners, indolent but mercurial Southerners, and nervous, fast-talking New Yorkers make repeat appearances in pop culture. But can we identify the actual psychology, the deep personality traits that define regional distinctiveness?

Those questions are at the center of a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ...

13. The Difference Between Democratic Congressional Districts And Republican Ones In 1 Chart. In short, as population density increases, so does a preference for Democrats.

Government and the Boomer Apocalypse

I’m fascinated with a Hardball ad MSNBC is running. It features Chris Matthews, showing clips from throughout his life. It closes with this remark:

“… And you can expect me to fight for the causes that stirred me in my twenties, when passions rose, when minds were set, and life mission accepted. And this is Hardball.”

Matthews is a leading-edge boomer, and I am a trailing-edge Boomer. We were raised to believe our generation was special. We had a destiny. We were going to change the world. The problem is that Boomers never agreed on what that change would look like. We’ve been divided about major issues through each stage in the life cycle. Now, our mortality is becoming more apparent with all of us older than fifty. Yet the “accepted mission” is unfulfilled.

The Huffington Post has a good piece, 15 Reasons Why American Politics Has Become An Apocalyptic Mess. A 16^th reason is that each controversial policy development, whether a win for the left or right, is apocalyptic for half the Boomer generation. Scorched earth politics is the order of the day. With hubris, winners revel in their victory over the forces of evil while losers spontaneously break out into a rendition of Amazing Grace (often associated with funerals in our culture), having done the equivalent of following General Pickett into a glorious massacre. The existential stakes are high … and these people control the levers of power!

William Srauss and Neil Howe wrote several books about generations in the 1990s. Critics say they attribute too much to generations. They may be right. It is undoubtedly true that many who use generational analysis over-interpret, treating it like a generational horoscope. Strauss and Howe describe eras more as the turning of four seasons over roughly eighty years. The generation born during each season takes on qualities similar to those born in similar previous seasons. They show (I think persuasively) that our era and our generation of leaders is similar to the 1930s during the Depression and WW II, to the 1850s before the Civil War, and the 1770s before the American Revolution. Strauss and Howe make the point that crises happen in every generation, but crises that may not have been so destructive at another time become perilous because of the existential angst of the leaders.

The issue isn’t that all Boomers behave irresponsibly or that all irresponsible behavior comes from Boomers. The issue is the ethos we Boomers create. Those older generations still with us tend more toward an ethos of peacemaking, while those younger than the Boomers tend more toward pragmatism. The challenge for society is not to be sucked into the dark side of either Boomer hubris or despair. While Boomers often bring some important idealistic vision to the table, I’m counting on you folks from other generations to save us from ourselves. ;-)

(Here is the Matthews Ad)

 

Saturday Links

 1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:

2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family

A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.

3. The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability
of Family Caregivers

4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force

Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.

5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry

6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews

7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better

Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business.  Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.

That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.

This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers.  While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them.  You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity.  To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...

8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?

...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not.  But why would this be?  An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity).   Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated?   Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable?  I can't see how.   What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother?  Would that matter?  And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?

The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise.  The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs.  Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion.  Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...

9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas

1. God designed creation to support life, especially human life. ...
2. Private property engenders good stewardship. ...
3. Private ownership supports order in society. ...
4. Private property helps maintain peace in communities. ...
5. Private property benefits the community. ...

10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution

11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs

Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.

12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?

If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.

Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.

"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."

The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...

... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...

13. This Map Shows Which Countries Are Going To Make The World Cup, According To Nate Silver's Prediction Model

 

Learn About Tableau

14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online

15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?

Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...

Saturday Links

1. A College Kid, A Single Mom, And The Problem With The Poverty Line

Rico Saccoccio is a junior at Fordham University in the Bronx. He's from a middle-class family in Connecticut and he spent the summer living at home with his parents, who cover about $15,000 a year in his college costs. ...

...There's broad agreement that the way the U.S. measures poverty has some fundamental flaws — a topic that's likely to come up next month, when the new poverty numbers are released. Here are three key problems, as explained to me by Christopher Wimer, a researcher at Columbia.

1. It doesn't account for geographic differences. The poverty line is the same, no matter where you live — whether it's in New York City or rural South Dakota.

2. It's based on a 50-year-old formula that assumes Americans spend about a third of their income on food. But, after adjusting for inflation, the price of food has fallen significantly in the past 50 years. Today, people spend only about a sixth of their income on food. But they spend a bigger chunk of their income on other items, like child care and medical expenses.

3. It doesn't consider the value of of government benefits, such as food stamps and tax credits. ...

2. There are better anti-poverty tools than the minimum wage

... But raising the minimum wage may not be a policy idea deserving of the passion it generates. It’s not a well-targeted, poverty-fighting weapon. Only 3% of workers age 25 and over earn the minimum wage or less. About half of all minimum wage (or less) workers are age 24 or younger, many of whom presumably live at home with their parents. The 2010 study “Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor?” by researchers Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser found that a federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour — higher than the $9 that President Obama has proposed — would raise incomes of only 11% of workers who live in poor households.

In a 2012 study, Sabia and Robert Nielsen found ”no statistically significant evidence that a higher minimum wage has helped reduce financial, housing, health, or food insecurity among the poor.” Why? You have to earn a wage to benefit and 55% of poor, less-educated individuals between ages 16 and 64 don’t work. Indeed, nearly 90% of the wage earners who benefited from the 40% increase in the federal minimum wage between 2007 and 2009 were not poor. They lived in households with an income two or three times the poverty level. ...

3. Debunking Myths About Who Pays No Federal Income Tax

4. A Brief History of How Living Alone Came to Seem Totally Normal

5. Baby boomers may have no one to care for them in old age

Baby boomers may have no one to care for them in their old age.

Shifting demographics mean that aging boomers will have fewer friends and family members to take care of them as they get into their 80s, according to a new study by AARP.

In other words, even though you may be supporting your own elderly parents, the chances of someone being there for you are numerically diminished.

The ratio of potential caregivers to boomers needing care will sink from 7.2 to 1 in 2010 to 2.9 to 1 by 2050, according to the study. ...

6. World population map at Gizmodo.

7. How Our Ancestors Used to Sleep Twice a Night and Highlighting the Problem of Present Shock

8 hour sleeping is a modern invention.

Imagine you are a denizen of the 18th century. It’s just past 8:30 P.M., you’ve got your night-cap on. You blow out your candles and fall asleep to the smell of the wax and the wick, which gently fills the air around your bed. Some hours pass. 2:30 AM. You awaken, grab your coat, and visit the neighbors because they, too, are up. Doing quiet reading, prayer, or even having sex. Well, apparently before the age of electricity, sleeping twice a night was completely ubiquitous.

Back in those times, we slept twice a night, getting up for an hour or two for recreation before heading back to bed until dawn. ...

8. So you hate GMO’s because they are untested. What about feelbetteramine from the health store?

... Most opponents of GMOs don’t seem to have a problem eagerly loading up their shopping carts with all kinds of exotic stuff from the health supplement aisle in the local supermarket. How many Whole Foods (and Whole Foods is just an example here, and probably one of the more benign ones) store assistants – many of whom are far from being trained in nutrition or pharmacology – have convinced these people that feelbetteramine is right for their gout, or for their insomnia, or for the “cognitive deficit” that they feel everyday at work? What kind of evidence of long-term safety exists for feelbetteramine that allows these GMO opponents to embrace the wondrous effects of this non FDA-approved concoction with alacrity? And proponents of health supplements are often big on anecdotal evidence; why don’t they, at the very least, admit anecdotal evidence about the benefits of GMOs (especially when the evidence is concrete, as in case of VAD) into their belief system?

To me there clearly seems to be a discrepancy between the reflexive rejection of untested GMOs by the anti-GMO crowd and their rapid embrace of the equally or more untested latest health supplement. All things being equal, as a scientist I at least know what the express purpose of Golden Rice is, compared to the hazy reports on salutary effects of feelbetteramine. So it seems to me that if I am really against GMOs because they are insufficiently tested, I need to mostly steer clear of the health supplement aisle. And did I mention that feelbetteramine can also set your love life on the path to glorious bliss?

 9. Renewed Trust In Nuclear Power

Michael Golay, a nuclear engineering professor at M.I.T., has noted that many new technologies are initially slow to receive public acceptance, such as railroads and cars, in part because of fear of the unknown.  But also, early versions sometimes have serious safety issues.  The first trains, with wood burning locomotives, showered sparks on passengers and the countryside, for instance.  As the public becomes accustomed to them and the designs improve, they become accepted as part of every day life.

This is clearly the case with nuclear power, which in the 1970s faced massive public resistance in Europe and the U.S., with huge demonstrations opposing its use and lengthy legal delays that ran construction costs skyward.  The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl clearly made the public wary in most, though not all, countries.

But it would seem that the public, over the long term, is capable of understanding and then accepting even complex systems.  Predictions of massive increases in cancer rates from nuclear power failed to come true, and Three Mile Island became a tourist attraction.  Combined with rising concerns about global warming and better reactor designs, expectations of a ‘nuclear revival’ became prominent in the U.S. ...

10. The Five Best Tricks To Remember Names

 

Saturday Links

1. Phillip Swagel with a good piece on Inequality and Opportunity

... I am not convinced, however, that the president's proposals are well matched to the problem he describes. Indeed, Mr. Obama is better at describing the outcomes he seeks than at putting forward a coherent set of policies to reach those outcomes. But I think I see what he has in mind.

Mr. Obama is looking at two horizons. The main determinant of inequality is what the Harvard economics professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz call a "race between technological change and educational attainment." Technology has increased the demand for skilled workers but educational attainment has not kept up, leading to rising payoffs for those at the top. Widening inequality reflects the fact that too many Americans do not have the skills needed for today's economy. But changing this takes time. So while he proposes universal preschool to benefit the future work force and new training programs delivered through community colleges for existing workers, Mr. Obama seeks to foster a stronger economy here and now, to drive higher earnings for people at all income levels rather than just those at the top. ...

2. Shared Justice: Beyond Purely Economic Solutions to Poverty

Christians must agree on a holistic definition of poverty that includes relational and spiritual elements. ...

... But is the problem of poverty really that simple, a lack of opportunity given to those in the lowest economic class? It depends on how you define the terms "poverty" and "opportunity," as well as the terms "justice" and "charity"—all of which require multi-dimensional definitions if we hope to build a constructive conversation around the problem of poverty. Throughout the next two months at Shared Justice, we'll be fostering that conversation; to do so, though, we first must return to the basics and refine the questions. In other words, the question is: What are the right definitions?

But is the problem of poverty really that simple, a lack of opportunity given to those in the lowest economic class? It depends on how you define the terms "poverty" and "opportunity," as well as the terms "justice" and "charity"—all of which require multi-dimensional definitions if we hope to build a constructive conversation around the problem of poverty. Throughout the next two months at Shared Justice, we'll be fostering that conversation; to do so, though, we first must return to the basics and refine the questions. In other words, the question is: What are the right definitions? ...

... Broken relationships lie at the root of all of these things, so solving poverty demands that we meet more than just material needs—and that isn't easy. Generally Christians today have engaged in one-way giving and service amounting to little more than charity in the end, which is only part of our calling. And the result? Christians and the church have been relatively ineffective at providing lasting opportunities for the poor to overcome their situations. ...

3. Charitable Giving: Baby Boomers Donate More, Study Shows

4. Economist: Rewriting history - "A new measure for GDP adds billions to America's economy"

5. Why the Church and Charity Aren't Enough - Derek Penwell

...My friend argues that taking care of the poor is the church's responsibility -- that people who work hard shouldn't have to give so much of what they earn back to the government in taxes. Government is notoriously inefficient and sloppy.

So, I tell him that all of that might be true, but to people on the outside looking in, to folks who don't share his strong faith in the church's ability to get it right either, such a theology of social organization looks suspiciously like a dodge -- a flimsy attempt to baptize selfishness. To them it sounds like "I got mine … through a paradoxical admixture of my hard work and God's blessing, which means God wants me to have all this stuff; and conversely, it means God doesn't want poor people to have any stuff, let alone my stuff."...

6. Why China's 'Dominance' of Manufacturing Is Misleading

Gaudy statistics aside, the country has struggled to do what it needs to do -- move up the value chain.

On Monday, The Atlantic wrote a story based on an International Business Times infographic that portrayed China's enduring prominence in manufacturing. Remember, though; prominence is not the same as success. (Just consider this sentence: "Alex Rodriguez continues to be a very prominent baseball player.") China will play a major role in global manufacturing for years -- and probably decades -- to come. But the country's role is not a healthy one, and the weaknesses in Chinese manufacturing outshine the huge numbers displayed in the graph. ...

 

7. The Average American Car Is Older Than Ever Before

 

"The average age of the 247 million light vehicles on American roads today is 11.4 years, an all-time high, according to a new study from Polk. ..."

 

8. Redistributing Wealth Is the Wrong Way to Fix a Rigged Game

 

Elites shouldn't be forced to share ill-gotten gains -- they should be prevented from ever getting them.

 

9. How should the US deliver food aid?

 

Food shipped from America has saved the lives of millions of people since the Food for Peace programme was set up in 1954, but the strict rules demanding almost all of the food has to be sourced in the US and sent on American ships are coming under increasing attack.

10. Many Americans have no friends of another race: poll

About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll.

 

Saturday Links

1. Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity.

2. Blacks, Hispanics more optimistic than whites

... After years of economic attitudes among whites, blacks and Hispanics following similar patterns, whites' confidence in their economic future has plummeted in the last decade, according to the analysis. Blacks and Hispanics, meanwhile, have sustained high levels of optimism despite being hit hard in the recent recession. ...

... The AP-NORC analysis of data from the General Social Survey, a long-running biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found just 46 percent of whites say their family has a good chance of improving their living standard given the way things are in America, the lowest level in surveys conducted since 1987. In contrast, 71 percent of blacks and 73 percent of Hispanics express optimism of an improved life - the biggest gap with whites since the survey began asking. ...

3. The Book of Mormon: Why the world’s most capitalist religion breeds so many entrepreneurs

... The Mormon religion, however, stresses more than just self-reliance. Its emphasis on hard work, staying focused, and giving back to the Church also stirs entrepreneurial inclinations. The almost-mandatory missions carried out by its young men and women before they start their careers forge an ability to withstand rejection and disappointment while also fostering communication skills that help not only with sales jobs but also in starting companies. All the while, an unrelenting focus on the family means that Mormons are incentivized to “follow the rules” and earn money to feed many mouths, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

And so the US is riven with examples of what appears to be a disproportionately high number of business and entrepreneurial success stories to emerge from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members account for just 1.7 percent of the US population. ...

4. A Record Number Of Young Adults Are Still Hunkered Down With Mom And Dad

... In 2012, 21.6 million young adults aged 18-31 lived at home with their parents, up from 18.5 million just before the recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. 

"This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009," the report says. ...

5. U.S. Marriage Rates Keep Declining

Marriage rates in America are at an all-time low. And the median age at which women say "I do" is the highest it's been in a century.

Charles Blow had these observations about Marriage and Minorities.

6. The Long-Term Effects Of Poverty Linger Even After People Become Wealthy

"Scientists find [people who grew up poor] are more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age."

7. The other killer. Hepatitis kills more people than HIV in most countries.

8. India’s Garment Industry Gets Respun

As cost increases in China and concerns over labor conditions in Bangladesh push manufacturing firms away, India is gearing up its own garment industry to try to capitalize on the opportunity and boost its faltering economy. India has so far failed to fully take advantage of its huge potential labor force living out in the countryside. This may soon change, with companies like Aravind Mills planning to open dormitories for workers. Additionally, the Indian government, taking a page from China’s development model, has plans to create textile parks, with space designated for worker housing. ...

9. The Missouri Table: A Response to Ethical Foodies From a ‘Factory Farmer’

... One caller to a radio show I appeared on recently desribed the people who patronize fast food restaurants as "sheeple." That kind of derision leads me to believe that the caller will only feel good about himself if he believes I eat hamburgers several times a month at a place with cheesy uniforms and kid’s meals. I’m happy to oblige, but it is hard for me to take him seriously. He’s not as interested in making the world better as he is in feeling superior to people who can’t afford to eat the diet he believes necessary to living an ethical and sustainable life. He’s not nearly as concerned about the future of the planet as he is at being noticed, approvingly, by the kind of people who worry about the proper way to boil lentils, raise a few heritage pigs in their backyard, and are always available to be interviewed by NPR and the New York Review of Books. ...

A little harsh but a lot true.

 10. The Slower Rise in Health Care Costs

The rate at which health care costs are rising had slowed down in recent years, and perhaps not unexpectedly, Obama's economic advisers have sought to draw the link that "As ACA Implementation Continues, Consumer Health Care Cost Growth Has Slowed." But an array of evidence suggests that something beyond that legislation--which after all, is mostly not yet implemented--is the cause.

1) The slowdown in the rise of health care spending was already being noted in newspaper articles back in early 2012. ...

2) The slowdown in rising health care costs since the recession is international, as a press release with the OECD Health Report 2013 explains. ...

3) There's some reason to be dubious as to whether the slower rate of growth in health care spending will persist. ...

11. ‘Saudi America’ was the world’s No. 1 petroleum producer in April for the 6th straight month

12. Efficiency Drove U.S. Emissions Decline, Not Natural Gas, Study Says

Aggressive energy efficiency efforts by households, companies and motorists led to the decline in carbon dioxide emissions from energy use in the United States, according to a recent report. The controversial finding contradicts recent studies that say the power sector's shift away from coal to cheap natural gas caused the bulk of reductions.

U.S. emissions last year fell by 205 million metric tons, or 4 percent, from 2011 levels. CO2 Scorecard Group, a small environmental research organization, says that nearly half the decline came from energy-saving measures such as retrofits and smarter appliances in homes and offices, as well as from Americans driving fewer miles, and using more fuel-efficient vehicles. 

Natural gas is responsible for only about one-quarter of last year's emissions drop, CO2 Scorecard Group asserts....

As the article notes, other reputable research disagrees, attributing most of the drop to shale.

13. Millennials and Leaving Church: Really?

... Before you either quote the reports or the responses to the reports, read Brad Wright’s book: Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Here are some highlights from Wright’s 3d chp, one asking if we (think we) are losing our youth.

Josh McDowell: “It is clear that we have all but lost our young people to a godless culture.” Josh’s statement is typical.

It’s also not in tune with good social-scientific data. For instance, there was a widely circulating rumor (I heard it) that said 4% of our evangelical youth will be evangelicals when they get older. Wright chased the number into bad stats. Here are some better ones:

1. Young adults are less religious, but what does this mean?
2. 12% in the 70s and 80s were unaffiliated; now 25% are. But this is the same number as with other age groups.
3. Currently, 22% of young adults are evangelicals; that’s up from 21% in the 70s but down from 25% in the 90s.
4. Negatively, unaffiliated has increased for young adults.
5. Positively, the number who are affiliated with churches has remained the same.
6. Those affiliated with Evangelicals, Black Prots, and RCC are the same as in the 70s. (Mainliners are down.)
7. No sign of cataclysmic or big changes....

 

Younger Americans’ Library Habits and Expectations

Pew Internet: Younger Americans’ Library Habits and Expectations

Younger Americans—those ages 16-29—exhibit a fascinating mix of habits and preferences when it comes to reading, libraries, and technology. Almost all Americans under age 30 are online, and they are more likely than older patrons to use libraries’ computer and internet connections; however, they are also still closely bound to print, as three-quarters (75%) of younger Americans say they have read at least one book in print in the past year, compared with 64% of adults ages 30 and older. ...

A snapshot of younger Americans’ reading and library habits

Reading habits

Some 82% of Americans ages 16-29 read at least one book in any format in the previous 12 months. Over the past year, these younger readers consumed a mean (average) of 13 books—a median (midpoint) of 6 books.

• 75% of Americans ages 16-29 read at least one book in print in the past year
• 25% read at least one e-book
• 14% listened to at least one audiobook

Library use

As of November 2012:

• 65% of Americans ages 16-29 have a library card.
• 86% of those under age 30 have visited a library or bookmobile in person; over half (58%) have done so in the past year.
• 48% of those under age 30 have visited a library website; 28% have done so in the past year.
• 18% of those under age 30 have visited library websites or otherwise accessed library services by mobile device in the past 12 months.

Among recent library users under age thirty (that is, Americans ages 16-29 who have visited a library, library website, or library’s mobile services in the past year), 22% say their overall library use has increased over the past five years. Another 47% said it had stayed about the same, and 30% said it had decreased over that time period.

Saturday Links

1. Climate change: A cooling consensus

... Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus. ...

2. The 40 Biggest Economies In The World

3. How the world's population has changed

4. Americans are giving less money to God

Americans donated $316 billion to charitable causes in 2012, a 3.5% increase from 2011, a new report by the Giving USA Foundation found. But while charitable donations to education increased 7% to $41 billion, religious donations dropped slightly (by 0.2%) to $101.54 billion. "Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world, despite discretionary income percentages nearing all-time lows," says Eileen Heisman, CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust. But donors are writing the checks to different recipients.

5. I'm not endorsing this analysis, but here is The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.

6. Gil Press says The 'End Of Innovation' Crowd Doesn't Get IT

In one camp are economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that tell us that we have reached "a technological plateau." We are experiencing today the waning of the economic impact of the technological revolutions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The IT revolution, they argue, is different from earlier technological revolutions in its more limited impact on productivity growth and standards of living.

In the other camp are economists such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who recently told the graduating class at Bard College:"…innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think, is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction, just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation."

7. How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Capitalism From Competing To Sharing

Can't get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who'd be interested in your product in the first place.

It's amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.

8. U.S. for first time in 50+ years a net gasoline exporter

9. U.S. Sustains Support For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Despite the political fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to commercializing small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies.

10. Houses that flip and fold into place

Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there's less waste -- materials can be precision measured and cut -- plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks -- avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney -- founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: "No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it's more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die."

Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company's factory in Vallejo, Calif.

11. 71% Of Millennials Want Their Co-Workers To Be A 'Second Family'

12. Demographic Changes Impact Religious Institutions

13. A fascinating piece on Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The 'Guys Are Fragile' Thesis

14. Scientists discover why leprosy disappeared from Europe

The material they found was "a mixture of human DNA, microorganisms and contaminating DNA from other bones and surrounding soil," said Cole, but they were able to fully reconstruct a 600-year-old strain of leprosy and map its genome, only to find that it is essentially identical to living leprosy infecting people in the developing world today.

Cole told NPR, "If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us."

The scientists believe that a certain gene that makes people highly resistant to leprosy spread through the population of Europe, gradually conveying a kind of mass immunity.

15. World's last telegram to be sent next month

16. Top 10 People with Only One Known Photograph

17. Psychologist Analyzes Superheroes

18. Joel Willitts on "Storied Typology" – A possibly more biblical way of thinking about the relationship between the OT & NT

Admittedly, I'm just beginning to work this out, but if we think of Bible as Story and we read the earlier bits as indispensible building blocks in the narrative development toward its resolution than there's no need to denigrate the earlier in view of the later bits of the story. Each part has its place in the story bringing it to its final act, although even this analogy must be carefully delimited. Because "final" in this sense does not mean "The End, but a new stage of the story. So because of the earlier blocks of the story, later scenes and characters become "narratological necessities" (to quote my good friend Daniel Kirk). Furthermore, if there is something of an "incompleteness" to the earlier parts of the story, it is incomplete only as earlier scenes are incomplete without subsequent ones. It is correct then to see the Bible's story as progressive. In Stephen Wellum's words, "it is a word-act revelation that is progressively given" (Kingdom Through Covenant, 90). Instead of using the label "progressive revelation" it may be more useful in stressing the storied nature of the development to call it "storied revelation"- Scripture is a story that unfolds. All of this, of course assumes that God has generated His Story and that story is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian canon.

Saturday Links

1. More deaths than births among whites

Last year, more people who are white and not Hispanic died than were born, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. That group is still the USA’s largest but its share of the total has been shrinking for years.

2. Human Population Growth Creeps Back Up

Earth's human population is expected to coast upward to 9.6 billion by 2050 and 10.9 billion by 2100, up from 7.2 billion people alive today, a United Nations agency has projected.

The U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs yesterday released revised numbers for the coming century, raising median estimates for population growth in 2050 and 2100. The agency's prior best guess had humanity at 9.3 billion in 2050 and 10.1 billion in 2100. ...

3. New homes still getting bigger

At 2,306 square feet, the typical new home is about 50% larger than its 1973 counterpart while the typical family is 10% smaller and the typical household 15% smaller. The Census Bureau defines a family as two or more people living in the same home who are related by birth, marriage or adoption. A household consists of anyone living in a home regardless of their relationship.

4. American Suburbia Is Shrinking For The First Time Ever

The population of rural and small-town America contracted over the past two years for the first time on record as young people left to search out work in the cities and birth rates fell, according to official data.

An analysis of US Census Bureau data by the Department of Agriculture found that although population growth in America’s rural heartland has risen and fallen for decades with changes in the US economy, the pace of decline accelerated in the years 2010-2012. And for the first time, the so-called “natural increase” in population – total births minus deaths – was insufficient to offset the loss from those migrating away.

5. Business Insider says Online Courses Have Reached A Turning Point That Should Scare Colleges but Mashable says Millennials Prefer Traditional Classrooms Over Online Ones.

6. NYT: Data Reveal a Rise in College Degrees Among Americans

7. Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

8. The Wedding Industry’s Pricey Little Secret

In 2012, when the average wedding cost was $27,427, the median was $18,086. In 2011, when the average was $27,021, the median was $16,886. In Manhattan, where the widely reported average is $76,687, the median is $55,104. And in Alaska, where the average is $15,504, the median is a mere $8,440.

 And speaking of weddings, here is an excellent piece on the economics of wedding dresses.

9. Why Men Still Are Still Scared To Take Paternity Leave

But even when offered paternity leave, studies show most men won’t take it. A 2012 study of tenured track college professors found that only 12% of fathers took paid parental leave when it was offered compared with 69% of mothers. When new dads in the study did take paternity leave, many were still involved in projects at the office.

10. Dads, Feel Your Babies Kicking With Huggies Pregnancy Belt

11. Online Petitions Combat Corruption Abroad

According to Change.org, 44% of international petitions among the 100 largest petitions on the site target government corruption. In stark contrast, none of the petitions among the 100 largest campaigns that originated in the U.S. focus on corruption.

12. Wanting Expensive Things Makes Us Happier Than Actually Buying Them

The evidence is unequivocal: Money makes you happy. You just have to know what to do with it.

So what should you do with it?

Stop buying so much stuff, renowned psychologist Daniel Gilbert told me in an interview a few years ago, and try to spend more money on experiences.

13. Nuclear power seemed to be back in the news this week. New Yorker says Time to Go Nuclear, New Geography says No Solar Way Around It: Why Nuclear Is Essential to Combating Climate Change, and The Energy Collective had a great piece The Bigger Picture: Nuclear Energy vs. Fossil Fuels.

14. Nicaragua Congress approves ocean-to-ocean canal plan

15. China's Plan To Build The World's Tallest Skyscraper In 90 Days Is 'Revolutionary'

16. Singapore's Vegetable Towers

With more than 5 million people crammed into 274 square miles, commercial land values in Singapore are among the highest in the world. Therefore, the island nation needs to get creative when it comes to growing food in a limited space.

17. US breweries have exploded, from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,400 today, a 2,600% increase

18. The 'Star Trek' Medical Scanner Is About To Become A Reality

The small device is similar to the medical tricorder scanners featured in Star Trek, and is used by simply placing it against your forehead. 

A few seconds later you can see your blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, respiratory rate, and body temperature.

The Scout then records and stores the information on your smartphone, allowing you to track your vitals or share them with a doctor.

19. The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

While not strong, the pace has not been any weaker than the pace for wages in the fixed-weighted employment cost index—the ECI. That pattern disproves the widespread impression that mainly “bad” below-average-wage jobs are being created. Average hourly earnings would be declining relative to wages in the ECI if job growth were disproportionately weighted toward below-average-wage jobs.

20. A Christian Walmart for the poor? Willow Creek's new care center

Consider the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, one of the bigger "brands" in the non-denom world, which just built a new "care center" where those in need can come and "shop" for food, children's clothing, even eyeglasses. It's 60,000 square feet are laid out, according to the Chicago Tribune, "less like a thrift shop or food pantry, and more like an upscale mall, complete with cheery colors, welcoming seating areas and designer lighting," according to the Chicago Tribune. Clients pay something if they are able--$5 to visit the children's "boutique," for example, or a $20 copay for an eye exam.

Consider the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, one of the bigger "brands" in the non-denom world, which just built a new "care center" where those in need can come and "shop" for food, children's clothing, even eyeglasses. It's 60,000 square feet are laid out, according to the Chicago Tribune, "less like a thrift shop or food pantry, and more like an upscale mall, complete with cheery colors, welcoming seating areas and designer lighting," according to the Chicago Tribune. Clients pay something if they are able--$5 to visit the children's "boutique," for example, or a $20 copay for an eye exam. - See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201306/christian-walmart-poor-willow-creeks-new-care-center-27430#sthash.OhuyPOdG.dpuf

A Christian Walmart for the poor? Willow Creek's new care center - See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/blog/201306/christian-walmart-poor-willow-creeks-new-care-center-27430#sthash.OhuyPOdG.dpuf

The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

The Economy Is Not 'Only Creating Bad Jobs'

Saturday Links

1. Loved this one: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other. Here is one example.

2. In print and on stage, the Bible makes surprise comeback in secular Norway

3. Japan enters the African aid game: Japan $1 billion aid earmarked for northern Africa

4. The Economist had a great editorial: Towards the end of poverty

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again.

5. Global Wealth Grew 7.8% In 2012, Driven By Developing Economies

BCG found that global private financial wealth grew at the impressive clip of 7.8% in 2012, besting the 7.3% and 3.6% expansion logged in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

And which countries are driving global growth? Tyler Cowen reports that China and India for half of the growth. He also lists these nations as the fastest growing:

South Sudan	32.1
Libya	20.2
Sierra Leone	17.1
Mongolia	14.0
Paraguay	11.0
Timor-Leste	10.0
Iraq	9.0
Panama	9.0
The Gambia	8.9
Mozambique	8.4

source: IMF

6. 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is. Here is an example:

7. Toward a Self Employed Nation?

The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade. Proprietors are self employed business owners who use Internal Revenue Service Schedule C to file their federal income tax. Wage and salary workers are all employees of any establishment (private or government), from executives to non-supervisory workers.

From 2000 to 2011, the number of non-farm proprietors grew by 10.7 million. Total wage and salary employment grew by only 105,000 between 2000 and 2011. Government employment, including federal, state and local, grew 1.36 million, while private employment declined by 1.26 million (Figure 1).

8. This looks like an interesting read: Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. Christian Century writes:

For her award-winning book Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty, Susan Crawford Sullivan interviewed a diverse group of women who were living in poverty. She asked them about the challenges of parenting, working and surviving on little income. She discovered that many drew on strong religious beliefs as they struggled with everyday problems. Sullivan teaches sociology at the College of the Holy Cross.

 9. Business Insider reports that Millions Of Seniors Are Moving Back To Big Cities

10. Forbes explores How To Use Pinterest For Small Business

11. Atlantic explores Why the Boomers Are the Most Hated Generation. (I think part of it might be that we are obnoxious.)

12. RJS at Jesus Creed with another great post about the historicity of Adam and Eve: Jesus on Adam and Eve (RJS)

... There are ways to reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data. I have posted on the question of Adam many times. See for example the last part of Evolution, Entropy, and Human Beings 2 or other posts on the question of Adam listed about 3/4 of the way down the Science and Faith index. Reconciling a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data requires something of a stretch, but is not impossible if one feels that the theological teaching of the sweep of scripture requires Adam, Eve, and the Fall.

There are also ways to understand the sweep of scripture and the fallen nature of mankind without reference to a historical Adam and Eve. These do not necessarily diminish the inspiration and authority of scripture as witness to the work of God in the world.

This shouldn’t be a make or break issue. Rather, it is an issue where we need to spend more time and thought.

The Triumph of Suburbia

New Geography: The Triumph of Suburbia

A lengthy piece. This analysis was particularly interesting:

... Ultimately the question of growth revolves around the preferences of consumers. Despite predictions that the rise of singles, an aging population and the changing preferences of millennials will create a glut of 22 million unwanted large-lot homes by 2025, it seems more likely that three critical groups will fuel demand for more suburban housing.

Between 2000 and 2011, there has been a net increase of 9.3 million in the foreign born population, largely from Asia and Latin America, with these newcomers accounting for about two out of every five new residents of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. And these immigrants show a growing preference for more “suburbanized” cities such as Nashville, Charlotte, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. An analysis of census data shows only New York—with nearly four times the population—drew (barely) more foreign-born arrivals over the past decade than sprawling Houston. Overwhelmingly suburban Riverside–San Bernardino expanded its immigrant population by nearly three times as many people as the much larger and denser Los Angeles–Orange County metropolitan area.

Clearly, immigrants aren’t looking for the density and crowding of Mexico City, Seoul, Shanghai, or Mumbai. Since 2000, about two-thirds of Hispanic household growth was in detached housing. The share of Asian arrivals in detached housing is up 20 percent over the same span. Nearly half of all Hispanics and Asians now live in single-family homes, even in traditionally urban places like New York City, according to the census’s American Community Survey.

Nowhere are these changes more marked than among Asians, who now make up the nation’s largest wave of new immigrants. Over the last decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by about 2.8 million, or 53 percent, while that of core cities grew by 770,000, or 28 percent.

Aging boomers, too, continue to show a preference for space, despite the persistent urban legend that they will migrate back to the core city. Again, the numbers tell a very different story.

A National Association of Realtors survey last year of buyers over 65 found that the vast majority looked for suburban homes. Of the remaining seniors, only one in 10 looked for a place in the city—less than the share that wanted a rural home. When demographer Wendell Cox examined the cohort that was 54 to 65 in 2000 to see where they were a decade later, the share that lived in the suburbs was stable, while many had left the city—the real growth was people moving to the countryside. Within metropolitan areas, more than 99 percent of the increase in population among people aged 65 and over between 2000 and 2010 was in low-density counties with less than 2,500 people per square mile.

With the over-65 population expected to double by 2050, making it by far America’s fastest-growing age group, they appear poised to be a significant source of demand for suburban housing.

But arguably the most critical element to future housing demand is the rising millennial generation. It has been widely asserted by retro-urbanists that young people prefer urban living. Urban theorists such as Peter Katz have maintained that millennials (the generation born after 1983) have little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” 

To bolster their assertions, retro-urbanist point to stated-preference research showing that more than three quarters of millennials say they “want to live in urban cores.” But looking at where millenials actually live now—and where they see themselves living in the future—shows a very different story. In the nation's major metropolitan areas, only 8 percent of residents aged 20 to 24 (the only millennial adult age group for which census data is available) live in the highest-density counties—and that share has declined from a decade earlier. What’s more, 43 percent of millenials describe the suburbs as their “ideal place to live”—a greater share than their older peers—and 82 percent of adult millenials say it’s “important” to them to have an opportunity to own their home.

And, of course, as people get older and take on commitments and start families, they tend to look for more settled, and less dense, environments. A 2009 Pew study found that 45 percent of Americans 18 to 34 would like to live in New York City, compared with just 14 percent of those over 35. As about 7 million more millenials—a group the Pew surveys show desire children and place a premium on being good parents—hit their 30s by 2020, expect their remaining attachment to the city to wane.

This family connection has always eluded the retro-urbanists. “Suburbs,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, “must be difficult places to raise children.” Yet suburbs have served for three generation now as the nation’s nurseries. Jacobs’s treatment of the old core city—particularly her Greenwich Village in the early 1960s—lovingly portrayed these places as they once were, characterized by class, age, and some ethnic diversity along with strong parental networks, often based on ethnic solidarity.

To say the least, this is not what characterizes Greenwich Village or in Manhattan today. In fact, many of the most vibrant, and high-priced urban cores—including Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle—have remarkably few children living there. Certainly, the the 300-square-foot “micro-units” now all the rage among the retro-urbanist set seem unlikely to attract more families, or even married couples. ...

Saturday Links

1. What a horrific week for Boston and west Texas people. Our prayers are with the many people who have been so deeply traumatized and injured in these events. Regarding how we respond to such events in public discourse, I thought this article from Slate was especially good. Be Meaningful or Be Quiet

"... We need more restraint and less wild guessing. Free-flowing debate in the search for meaning is a part of these moments and a part of the human condition, but what I'm talking about is using tragedy for evidence shopping. That people reach immediately for their pet political theory at moments like this highlights what's wrong with a lot of political debate. But perhaps this moment also offers a useful sorting technique. If you can't shut up now, when either reason, decency, or good taste requires it, you disqualify yourself from the conversation in calmer times. ...

... Political debate about facts is fine. When the White House puts out a picture of the president in the situation room, it's fine to point out that it's propaganda they never put out on Benghazi. But a person who uses tragedy as new evidence in an existing political fight is probably incapable of keeping this window open. They can't pause to honor the solemnity of a moment of tragedy or wait until the facts come in, which means that the facts never really mattered much to them at all. These partisans are ever on alert to advance their relentless claim—whatever it is. Michael Moore immediately fingered Tea Party types after the bombing. In the hours after attack, when authorities questioned a man of Saudi dissent (who was later released), Rep. Steve King tied it to the comprehensive immigration reform he opposes. Nate Bell, an Arkansas state lawmaker, tweeted, "I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A" There was lots of this from partisans on both sides on Twitter. ..."

2. Are We Losing the Young? Evangelicals by Age Since 1972

3. David Murrow asks Are sermons becoming obsolete?

... So, what does this mean for the church? Is the lecture style sermon going the way of the dinosaur?

Yes and no. There will always be live sermons. But will anyone be listening?

Just as universities are re-thinking the lecture, it might be time for churches to re-think the sermon. Thom and Joani Schultz polled churchgoers and found that just 12 percent could recall the topic of the last sermon they heard. Only five percent of men credited sermons as their primary source of knowledge about God.

So if sermons are becoming obsolete, what will take their place?

Discipleship. Our generation may be drowning in ideas, but we're starving for real human contact.

The problem is, our churches are structured to deliver sermons and music. If there's any energy left, we disciple people. ...

4. First, there was this article about Self-Employment An Escape From Long-Term Joblessness For Some Older Workers. It may work for some who are out of jobs, but Hiranya Fernando warns Why You Shouldn't Quit Your Day Job To Pursue Your Dream. 

To be sure these are inspiring stories. They make us hope and dream. And I support anyone who is dissatisfied with desk jobs and corporate gigs and is now thinking of other options. But my advice is to take the time to understand your specific situation before you do anything purely because "it feels right" or because "it's a childhood dream."

And don't do it because everyone else is. Don't do it because the neighbor's second cousin and Aunt Maggie's daughter are doing it, and it sounds so easy. Even people who are relatively happy in their jobs think something is wrong with them because everywhere they go they are bombarded with "How I quit my day job and started a million-dollar leaf-raking business."

5. Walter Russell Mead Warns There's No Comeback for the PhD

Drezner says that there are really only two reasons why you might get a Ph.D. One, you're crazy; or two, you're crazy about the subject you will be studying. But even the latter is becoming a kind of luxury for those lucky few who can afford to spend several years on a degree without any guarantee of future employment. All others should heed Drezner's advice before surrendering the money, years, blood, and tears it takes to earn the right to be called "Doctor."

6. I suspect the J C Penny fiasco is going to become an important case study for business schools: Sometimes, We Want Prices to Fool Us

7. Max Baucus warns about Obamacare: Obamacare Architect Warns "Huge Train-Wreck" Ahead

8. Eric Wemple quotes Mark Lamont Hill in Gosnell case: HuffPost host says left 'made a decision' to not cover trial

"For what it's worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it'll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there's a direct connection between the media's failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it's a bad idea, I think it's dangerous, but I think that's the way it is."

9. Mother Jones has a great piece on the social psychology of our political leanings: How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL

10. Atlantic Cities says The More Diverse a Metro Is, the More Segregated It's Likely to Be

11. Christian Science Monitor: Babies are conscious? Science confirms what moms know.

Babies are aware of what's going on, not just reflexively reacting to it, scientists concluded after a series of experiments on babies as young as 5 months.

12. Are e-readers hurting our reading comprehension?

13. The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself. See the Economist video about driverless cars.

Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually. The cars' software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into the road, because a child may be chasing it. Google's self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive; and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology.

14. University of Illinois: Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics

 With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now," King said. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny."

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

15. What was old is new again: The Beat Goes On: How Vinyl Records Are Making A Comeback

"Vinyl manufacturing plants are bursting at the seams," said Kurtz. "We took a nascent industry – vinyl – breathed life into it and now we can't even handle the amount of business we are creating."

Saturday Links

1. Atlantic: Could Earth's Population Peak in 2050?

"For the past two decades, demographers have generally agreed that global population growth will continue to inch steadily higher in the coming century, raising concerns about everything from pollution to housing to the world's water supply.

But a new study out of Spain suggests those estimates may be way off—we're talking several billion people off—and that the earth's population could instead peak as soon as 2050. Applying a mathematical model to global population trends, these researchers believe that there will be fewer people living on earth in 2100 than there are today. ..."

Since I started studying demography thirty years ago, low fertility estimates seem the closest to actual outcomes. People seem to be moving to lower fertility rates faster than most expected.

2. Speaking of world population, Chatham House writes about The End of Youth

"Advances in medicine and health care mean that people all over the globe are living longer, much longer. At the same time mothers in most countries are having fewer babies. The combination is a demographic timebomb. Sarah Harper looks at the challenges that lie ahead and the changes needed to cope with a grey new world."

3. Pew has published an interesting report on Demographics of Asian Americans

4. Forbes on Why China Is Finally Abandoning Its One Child Policy

"The policy was originally justified as necessary because of excess population and to promote economic development. Much has been written and can be found on the Internet about this policy and the current and long-term effects it is having and will have on China. The reluctance by China's central government to abandon the one child policy is not out of a failure to recognize its shortcomings. Rather, it is because the policy has been highly successful in achieving a principal objective, a unification of the public in support of an unelected, autocratic central government."

5. World Bank Aims To Eliminate Extreme Poverty By 2030

To reach that goal, Kim said the world need to reduce the number of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 per day to 3 percent globally by 2030, and raise the per capita incomes of the bottom 40 percent of every developing country.

The 3 percent level is a new target for the World Bank, which estimated in 2010 that 21 percent of the global population, or 1.2 billion people, lived extreme poverty.

Some World Bank estimates have put the 3 percent target at about 600 million people living below the poverty line by 2030.

6. Susan Brown writes about A 'gray divorce' boom

Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group.

7. Science reports on the prospects of One Drug to Shrink All Tumors.

8.  The Genetic Literacy Project on Monsanto Protection Act? Separating the facts from the fury

9. Dean Kalahar says Economics Is Easy, And Can Be Learned In 5 Minutes

10. Rebecca Schuman on why you shouldn't pursue that Ph.D.: Thesis Hatement

11. Facebook 'Dislike' Button Not A Good Idea, Says Product Engineer Bob Baldwin In Reddit AMA

12. Finally, we have an answer to one of the most important questions of our generation: How Many Spaces After a Period? Ending the Debate.

13. ABP News with some interesting data on the future of Mega Churches: Small is big for Millennials

14. Goal Control 4D. How referees will be automatically informed of goals in World Cup 2014.

15. For those of you who have deficiencies in your cultural education about all things Whovian, here is a primer for you: 'Doctor Who' Explained in 25 GIFs

Saturday Links

Have a wonderful Easter weekend!

1. Rewriting the story of polarized debate: He got Tea Party and Occupy to talk

Nabil Laoudji's Mantle Project puts citizens on stage to tell stories of the experiences that led them to their positions on tough issues. That's how he got members of the Tea Party and Occupy movement to speak on the same stage in a civil – and entertaining – exchange.

2. Next Reformation presents Barna's six reasons young Christians leave the church.

3. Forbes: The Happiest And Unhappiest Jobs In America

4. Mozambique: From Marxism to market

British journalist Paul Fauvet came to Mozambique in 1980 just as the country was plunged into a civil war. He has witnessed every key event since. Here he describes the transformation of his adopted country from revolutionary Marxist state to embracing the market and the exploitation of its resource riches.

5. Poor Americans Are Driving The Evolution Of The Banking System

We've reported on how people in emerging markets residents are opening bank accounts and paying for things with their mobile phones, transforming business in those countries. 

But the US Federal Reserve would like you to know (pdf) that the changes aren't all in other parts of the world.

Poor people in the US are some of the most avid users of mobile banking and mobile payment systems. ...

6. One In Four Teens Plan On Relying On Mom And Dad Till Age 27

7. Gen Y Isn't The 'Entrepreneurship Generation'

We all keep hearing that Gen Y's are the "entrepreneurship generation," but new research states otherwise. I worked with Monster.com on a new study focused on multi-generational worker attitudes to uncover the state of entrepreneurship through the eyes of different generations of workers. The report found that 41% of Gen X employees (ages 30-49) and 45% of Boomers (ages 50-69) consider themselves to be more entrepreneurial, compared to only 32% of Gen Y workers (ages 18-29 years). ...

8. Work Is More Than a Means to Evangelism

As already discussed, Matthew Lee Anderson's recent Christianity Today cover story on "radical Christianity" has been making waves. This week at The High Calling, Marcus Goodyear offers a healthy critique of one of Anderson's key subjects, David Platt, aligning quite closely with Anderson's analysis about the ultimate challenges such movements face when it comes to long-term cultural cultivation.

Focusing on Platt's latest book, Follow Me, Goodyear notes that, despite Platt's admirable efforts to get Christians "off their seats," he often "emphasizes the great commission so much, it overshadows all other teachings of the Bible."...

9. I don't know if I'm convinced, but here are The 21 Principles of Persuasion from Forbes.

10. Mental Floss with a great list of 30 Things Turning 30 This Year.

11. Few People Understand The Difference Between Risk And Genuine Uncertainty

What are the odds that your new idea will succeed?  If it does, what will the return to you be?

One of the problems that we have in business (and life!) is that we often can't know the answer to questions like this in advance.  And this drives us nuts.  Consequently, a lot of people invest a great deal of effort into reducing uncertainty.  There are two problems with this approach.  The first is that we often don't understand uncertainty very well, and the second is that profitably opportunities only exist where outcomes are genuinely uncertain. ...

12. Christopher Hitchens wants to know Has militant atheism become a religion?

... In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the "neo-atheists" of today so obsessed with God's nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism? What does atheism have to offer that's worth fighting for? As one philosopher put it, being a militant atheist is like "sleeping furiously."...

13. Econbrowser has a detailed analysis of Declining U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

14. David Shukman wants to know Why such a fuss about extinction?

What is wrong with extinction? I realise this question is the conservation equivalent of a landmine - or an elephant trap. And that it is likely to ruffle a lot of fur.

But I ask because I am merely wondering whether we sometimes forget a grim reality of the story of life on Earth - that extinction has always been with us.

In fact, it has quite often been good for us. ...

15. Is Google Maps Changing Our Behavior?

... The people who used the digital navigation device demonstrated pretty good route recognition and rather poor survey knowledge. By comparison, the paper map users scored better on the survey test and almost perfect on the route test. What's happening here, Münzer and colleagues argue, is that pedestrians who use computer navigation fail to envision, encode, and memorize the cognitive maps they otherwise would have. The cost of convenience, in other words, is spatial orientation. ...

16. 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style

'Plural' Generation Presents Unique Challenges For Marketers

Online Media Daily: 'Plural' Generation Presents Unique Challenges For Marketers

"... While its portrait is still coming into focus, “Plurals” -- or those born since 1997 -- are highly optimistic, but have been profoundly impacted by recent economic uncertainties.

Also known as “Generation Z,” “Generation We” and the “iGeneration,” Plurals have witnessed a culture that celebrated excess, and has been through a recession and a fledgling recovery. As a result, this new generation is remarkably realistic about what is achievable, and feel that they must follow the path that will make them personally happy, according to Adam Rossow, head of marketing at iModerate.

“This group is fascinating for many reasons, but what’s truly impressive is their keen understanding of the world around them and the valuable lessons they have learned,” Rossow said. “Happiness and the individual freedom to pursue it are more important than financial success.” ...

... “The only world they know is a digital one -- where they can connect anytime, anywhere, and to anyone,” Forrester analyst Tracy Stokes explained. “As a result, they are highly promiscuous when it comes to media consumption.” ...

Rise of the "Nones" is Greater for Older Americans

Black, White, and Gray: Trends in the Religious Unaffiliated, the "Nones," by Age - Brad Wright

A lot has been written recently about the rise of the "Nones," people expressing no religious affiliation. Sociologist Brad Wright offers a fascinating insight by looking at the percentage of people at various stages of life who report affiliation. Young adults are not surprisingly the group with the highest percentage, but Wright offers this chart.

Wright makes this observation:

Once again, the percentage of being unaffiliated increased in each group, but relatively speaking, it's increased most among the middle-aged and the elderly. In both the percentage of the unaffiliated more than tripled, compared to the 2.5x increase in the young. There is some lagged effect, as the elderly are catching up the middle-aged in the past decade, but overall, the rise of the religious nones is something that spans all age groups. Thus it's a societal-wide change more than just an age or generational change.

This data doesn't explain the rise, but I have a theory: Church offers little for discerning significance in life.

A few random thoughts (mostly intuitive perceptions.) There is disillusionment with church life for many older adults who grew up in the Church. Young adults interested in the Church are starting up independent congregations narrowly targeted to their particular age demographic. Older Christians feel rejected. As a traditional congregation tries to become more appealing to the younger demographic, long-time congregants experience a loss of meaningful rhythms and routines for them. With those gone, worship no longer seems meaningful. Some look for other congregations, but I sense many see integrating into a new community faith community as too much work. As the number of congregations with familiar patterns dwindles and close, they slip out the door into the ether.

Dr. Eileen Lindner, Deputy General Secretary for Research and Planning of the National Council of Churches USA, gave a presentation two years ago. She points out that fifty years ago, congregations and denominations were engaged in a whole range of work that ministered to the world. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, para-church organizations emerged to do what congregations once did ... like Young Life and Habitat for Humanity. Many of the things churches once did have been replaced by nonprofit organizations that may not have an explicit connection to faith. In one sense, the Church is a victim of its own success, having encultured values of service into the broader culture. But the downside is that it frequently feels like we are all left with squabbles about internal politics. Congregations and denominations are struggling for an identity and purpose in relating to the world.

As I've written several times, conservative congregations typically respond by offering programming directed toward therapeutic healing, personal piety, or political action to stop the "barbarians at the gates." Liberal congregations also offer therapeutic healing and personal piety but frequently include political action they discern is directed toward "social justice." Much of it appears to be a "me too" response to broader movements in the culture, hoping to leach off the meaning people find in these movements rather than the Church itself generating the meaning for congregants. Religion (right and left) becomes so captive to the categories and contours of cultural politics that theological understanding is lost. And if you want to do political action, there are far more dynamic venues than the Church.

And that brings me back to my overarching theory: Church offers little for discerning significance in life. Too much of the Church is about narrow personal piety (a niche market) while trying to make ourselves relevant to the culture with "me too" strategies from the periphery of culture. Until people see how daily life connects with God's unending mission, I think the Nones tribe will continue to grow and prosper.

Why juvenile incarceration reached its lowest rate in 38 years

Christian Science Monitor: Why juvenile incarceration reached its lowest rate in 38 years

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. ...

How Green Are Millennials?

New Geography: How Green Are Millennials?

"... 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. ;-)

Saturday Links

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

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

2. Has the ideas machine broken down?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35 Amazing Graphs That Show How Your Spending Habits Change With Age

Atlantic: 35 Amazing Graphs That Show How Your Spending Habits Change With Age

Amazing graphs on what happens to spending on everything from underwear to airlines as we grow up

It's that time of year again when Americans spend like crazy for their loved ones and themselves.

But everyone's needs and wants evolve dramatically with age.

HS Dent, an economic forecasting firm, compiled Census data on spending behavior and presented them as a series of demand curves (see right). The curves measure average annual expenditure for a given product over the age of the consumer.

The charts couldn't be more plain. But with a tiny bit of imagination, the curves offer a vivid look at how spending patterns change over time.

What are some things we learned? Well, men spend less on underwear as they get old, but spending on robes spike near the end of life. As we get older we use a lot less plastic cutlery. And alcohol consumption stays pretty steady from the day we turn 21 until we turn around 70.

Here are three examples:

Did any of the 35 graphs surprise you?

 

Saturday Links

Here are the links for this week. Lots of interesting finds this week, and not nearly enough time to blog.

1. Google Fiber offers super-fast broadband to Kansas City. If all goes well, we will get connected in late spring of 2013.

2. Two Thirds of Ocean Life Remains Undiscovered. If they haven't found them, how do they know?

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?

4. What is the optimal rate of taxation according to the Laffer Curve? Goats hold the answer. Goat Economics: Why the Laffer Curve Is No Joke

5. The print media industry is rapidly morphing right before our eyes. Google Ad Revenue Now More Than U.S. Print Publications Combined [CHART]

6. Cyberspace continues to evolve. Text Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report Says

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, a lot has been 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 Bobby Jindal's article, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.

10. China continues working on technological innovations to address its water problems. Industry Special: Desalination tech helps slake nation's thirst for fresh water.

11. The world is going to the dogs. The Dog Economy Is Global—but What Is the World's True Canine Capital?

12. As manufacturing becomes more automated, requiring fewer workers, we see The Emerging Professional, Scientific, and Technical Sector.

13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more impressive. "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

14. For the true narcissist, you now can replicate your image in 3D. 3D-printing photo booth gives you a figurine instead of a bad photo

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

16. The debate about a historical Adam continues. Peter Enns with another interesting post, Who Needs a Historical Prometheus…uh, I mean Adam?

17. George Bullard asks, When is a Church a Church, and When is it a Flash Mob?

"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?"

18. This was me thirty years ago (in my dreams!)

19. Ever wonder how Cy Young award-winning pitcher R. A. Dickey manages to throw knuckleballs? Apparently, so do physicists. How a Baseball Star's Tricky Pitch Strikes Out Hitters—and Baffles Physicists

20. I loved these stat brain teasers. 5 Statistics Problems That Will Change The Way You See The World

Saturday Links

Here are the links for this week.

1. Ever thought about starting your own blog? Michael Hyatt has some advice: My Advice to Beginning Bloggers

2. Is gender inclusive language taking hold? Good News, You Guys Everyone! English Is Becoming More Inclusive

3. How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal

4. Paying for What Was Free: Lessons from the New York Times Paywall

Abstract

In a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper, visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.

5. The world is safer. But no one in Washington can talk about it.

... Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward progress in achieving greater peace and stability. There are fewer wars now than at any time in decades. The number of people killed as a result of armed violence worldwide is plunging as well — down to about 526,000 in 2011 from about 740,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. ...

... Most top Pentagon officials say the statistics showing that the world is safer are irrelevant and don't reflect the magnitude of the risks. The result is what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has dubbed a "security paradox." The world may seem safer, Dempsey says, but the potential for global catastrophe has grown as the planet has become more interconnected and potential enemies have greater access to more powerful weapons and technology. ...

6. A 51st state? Is Puerto Rico on Its Way To Becoming the 51st State? Possibly.

7. Mitt Romney joins a long list of also-rans. So how does he compare to other presidential also-rans?

8. Speaking of campaigns, Time has an interesting piece about the inner workings of the Obama data crunching team, Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win. Contrast this with the disaster that was Romney's get-out-the-vote operation. Romney's Get out the Vote Epic Fail.

9. How much difference is there in the coming-of-age experience between Baby Boomers and Millennials? Mother and daughter team Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig are interviewed about their new book: What's the Matter With Millennials?

10. McDonald's Sales Fall For First Time In Nearly A Decade

11. Interesting piece on crowdsourcing in Harvard Business Review. Let the Crowd Fix Your Product's Bugs

"The online startup Kaggle assembles a diverse group of people from around the world to work on tough problems submitted by organizations. The company runs data science competitions, where the goal is to arrive at a better prediction than the submitting organization's starting 'baseline' prediction. Results from these contests are striking in a couple ways. For one thing, improvements over the baseline are usually substantial. In one case, Allstate submitted a dataset of vehicle characteristics and asked the Kaggle community to predict which of them would have later personal liability claims filed against them. The contest lasted approximately three months, and drew in more than 100 contestants. The winning prediction was more than 270% better than the insurance company's baseline.

Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge — who, for example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates despite having no experience in health care — and so would not have been consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions. In many cases, these demonstrably capable and successful data scientists acquired their expertise in new and decidedly digital ways"

12. I can't wait to see this one!

Saturday Links

Here are this week's odds and ends that didn't make it to the blog. Enjoy the leftovers!

1. MIT Technology Review says Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change. "Using technology to cool the planet may be the only way to deal with the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, argues scientist David Keith." On a similar topic is this piece by Robert Kurlwich at NPR, Will We 'Fix' The Weather? Yes. Should We Fix The Weather? Hmmm. Kurlwich discusses the possibility that we may one day be able to control the earth's climate and wonders if that is a good thing.

2. Research indicates that Millennial Generation Becoming More Fiscally Conservative.

3. Are E-readers a transitional technology? Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf.

4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world's first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm can produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."

5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers interesting insights into Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:

"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God's New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party."

6. Annie-Marie Slaughter maintains that the "having it all" debate about work-life balance isn't just about women. Work-Life Balance as a Men's Issue, Too.

"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten minutes, I saw that the roughly 50 percent of guys in the room had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement."

7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history

8. People who know me know I tend to use sarcasm and double meaning in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help, but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had come from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online

9. Ever wonder why sign language often seems so animated? Why Great Sign Language Interpreters Are So Animated

10. Africa: sociologists cite religion as a key factor in preventing and alleviating AIDS epidemic

"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."

The First Post-Racial Generation?

Christian Science Monitor: 57 percent of Millennials oppose racial preferences for college, hiring

The poll comes a week before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of the use of race in admissions to the University of Texas at Austin.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans ages 18 to 25 are opposed to racial preferences playing a role in college admissions or hiring decisions, according to a recent poll of members of the Millennial Generation.

Only 9 percent of respondents said such programs are appropriate to make up for past discrimination, while 28 percent agreed that they are justified to increase diversity on a college campus or in the workplace, the survey found. ...

... When asked generally whether they support or oppose the use of affirmative action to help blacks or other minorities get ahead because of past discrimination, 47 percent of Millennials said they oppose it, while 38 percent supported it.

“The racial differences on this question are striking. Less than one-in-five (19 percent) white Millennials favor programs designed to help blacks and other minorities get ahead because of past discrimination, while nearly two-thirds (66 percent) are opposed,” the report says.

“By contrast, three-quarters (75 percent) of black Millennials and more than six-in-ten (63 percent) Hispanic Millennials favor such programs,” the report says.

Seems to me there is still a considerable divide.

Beloit Mindset List for the Class of 2016

Beloit: Beloit Mindset List for the Class of 2016

Some of the ones I found interesting and fun:

8. Bill Clinton is a senior statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge.

12.  For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.

14.  There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.

18.  Their folks have never gazed with pride on a new set of bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf.

20. Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.

34. Billy Graham is as familiar to them as Otto Graham was to their parents.

68. They watch television everywhere but on a television.

73. Lou Gehrig's record for most consecutive baseball games played has never stood in their lifetimes.

Top 10 Baby Names for 2011

Social Security Administration: Top 10 Baby Names for 2011

Rank	Male name	Female name
1	Jacob	Sophia
2	Mason	Isabella
3	William	Emma
4	Jayden	Olivia
5	Noah	Ava
6	Michael	Emily
7	Ethan	Abigail
8	Alexander	Madison
9	Aiden	Mia
10	Daniel	Chloe

The name "Michael" is beginning to fade slightly. As I recall, it has been in the top ten for at least a century. Still in the top ten but down sixth. How about your name?

Millennial Generation Safe at Home

NewGeography.com: Millennial Generation Safe at Home

Each emerging American generation of adolescents and young adults tends to have a distinctive relationship with its parents. For the Baby Boomers of the 1960s and 1970s, that relationship was often conflicted, even adversarial. For Generation X in the 1980s and 1990s it was frequently distant and disrespectful. By contrast, the interactions with their parents of most of today’s Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) are close, loving, and friendly. That’s a very good thing because, to a far greater extent than for the previous two or three generations, Millennials in their twenties live with their parents, and even grandparents, in multigenerational households.  To the surprise of many members of older generations, most Millennials—and their parents—believe the experience is beneficial and even enjoyable. It may even help America in the years ahead.

A Pew survey conducted last December indicated that nearly two-thirds (63%) of young adults 25-34 knew someone who had recently moved back in with their parents.   Almost three in ten (29%) said that they were currently living with their parents. That is nearly three times the percentage of those of that age who lived with their parents in 1980 (11%). Multigenerational households, once seen as a lagging trend, have been growing as a share of households since 1980, rising from 12 to 16 percent over the past three decades.

More recently, the powerful and disproportionately large impact of the Great Recession on young Americans appears to have further accelerated this trend toward multigenerational households. According to Pew, in 2011, the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds (16.3%) and 25-29 year olds (10.3%) was well above that of those 35-64 (7%). ...

... Like Millennials, the GI Generation (born 1901-1924) was of a type labeled “civic” by those who study generational change. Like the Millennial Generation, the GI Generation was raised in a protected manner by its parents and even tended to stay with their parents well into adulthood; multi-generational households according to Pew, after all, were far more common—nearly one in four in 1940—than today. This led to complaints about the generation that later became known as the Greatest Generation which sound strikingly like what is said about Millennials today. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe, the creators of generational theory, early in World War II, Army psychiatrists even fretted about “how badly Army recruits had been over-mothered in the years before the war.”

Perhaps as a result of this protected upbringing, the GI Generation also was a “stay-at-home” cohort when its members were young adults. A Pew analysis of US Census data from 1940 indicates that when this generation were all 25-34 year olds about 28% of them lived in multigenerational households, a number almost identical to that of Millennials today. As a result, members of the GI Generation married and had children later than previous or subsequent generations, just as Millennials are doing today. However, once the pressures of depression and war were behind them, the GI Generation more than caught up. It parented the Baby Boom Generation, the largest in American history before Millennials came along. Aided by favorable governmental policies such as the GI Bill and the Federal Housing Administration, it grew the American economy to unprecedented heights, and expanded the American middle class, homeownership, and enjoyed en masse the chance to escape crowded cities for more bucolic suburbs.  ...

The Gray Divorcés

Wall Street Journal: The Gray Divorcés

The divorce rate for people 50 and over has doubled in the past two decades. Why baby boomers are breaking up late in life like no generation before.

For the new generation of empty-nesters, divorce is increasingly common. Among people ages 50 and older, the divorce rate has doubled over the past two decades, according to new research by sociologists Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin of Bowling Green State University, whose paper, "The Gray Divorce Revolution," Prof. Brown will present at Ohio State University this April. The paper draws on data from the 1990 U.S. Vital Statistics Report and the 2009 American Community Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, which asked all respondents if they'd divorced in the past 12 months.

Though overall national divorce rates have declined since spiking in the 1980s, "gray divorce" has risen to its highest level on record, according to Prof. Brown. In 1990, only one in 10 people who got divorced was 50 or older; by 2009, the number was roughly one in four. More than 600,000 people ages 50 and older got divorced in 2009.

What's more, a 2004 national survey conducted by AARP found that women are the ones initiating most of these breakups. ...

... None of this is especially surprising for the "Me Generation," but today's gray divorces include a generational twist: For many boomers, it is not their first marital split. Fifty-three percent of the people over 50 now getting divorced have done so at least once before.

In fact, more "complex marital biographies," as Prof. Brown puts it, seem to be one of the driving forces behind gray divorce. Having been married previously doubles the risk of divorce for those ages 50 to 64. For those ages 65 and up, the risk factor quadruples.

For boomers who have had trouble maintaining commitments in the past, hitting the empty-nest phase seems to trigger thoughts of mortality—and of vanishing possibilities for self-fulfillment. ...

Multigenerational Households

AdWeek: Multigenerational Households

Number of children living with a grandparent increases

While the rise of single-parent households has gotten a lot of ink, another key trend has emerged in the makeup of American households—the sharp increase in the number of children who are living with a grandparent.

In 2009, 7.8 million children lived with at least one grandparent, a 64 percent increase since 1991 when 4.7 million children lived with a grandparent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Among children living with a grandparent, 76 percent also were living with at least one parent in 2009, not statistically different from the 77 percent who lived with at least one parent in 1991.

The growth is not related to recent immigrants or minority households. In 1991, 5 percent of White, 15 percent of Black and 12 percent of Hispanic children lived with at least one grandparent. By 2009, 9 percent of White, 17 percent of Black and 14 percent of Hispanic children lived with at least one grandparent, a significant change for White children but not for Black or Hispanic children.

Many children who do not live with a parent live with a grandparent. More than half of the children living with no parents were living with grandparents. ...

Will Millennials Still be Liberal When They’re Old and Gray?

NewGeography: Will Millennials Still be Liberal When They’re Old and Gray?

The Millennial Generation (born 1982-2003) is the cohort most in favor of using the federal government to promote economic stability and equality since the GI Generation of the 1930s and 1940s. The attitudes of Millennials were heavily shaped by the protected and group-oriented way in which they were reared and their experience of feeling the full brunt of the Great Recession as they emerged into adulthood.  

As a result, the biggest political story of the first half of the 21st century may well be the extent to which the largest American generation ever retains its economic liberalism and thereby shapes the direction of public policy in coming decades. If history is any guide, much of that story’s plot will be written during the next four or five years. ...

Enterprising oldies: Founding new businesses is not a monopoly of the young

The Economist: Enterprising oldies

Founding new businesses is not a monopoly of the young, even if it seems so nowadays

... It is time to do for enterprise what such ageing rockers have done for pop music: explode the myth that it is a monopoly of the young. This idea has been powerfully reinforced by the latest tech boom: Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars. But the trend is not confined to tech: Michael Reger was a founder of one of America’s most innovative energy companies, Northern Oil and Gas, aged 30.

The rise of the infant entrepreneur is producing a rash of ageism, particularly among venture capitalists. Why finance a 40-year-old (with a family and mortgage) when you can back a 20-year-old who will work around the clock for peanuts and might be the next Mr Zuckerberg? But it is not hard to think of counter-examples: Mark Pincus was 41 when he founded Zynga and Arianna Huffington was 54 when she created the Huffington Post.

Research suggests that age may in fact be an advantage for entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa of Singularity University in California studied more than 500 American high-tech and engineering companies with more than $1m in sales. He discovered that the average age of the founders of successful American technology businesses (ie, ones with real revenues) is 39. There were twice as many successful founders over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20. Dane Stangler of the Kauffman Foundation studied American firms founded in 1996-2007. He found the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity among people aged between 55 and 64—and the lowest rate among the Google generation of 20- to 34-year-olds. The Kauffman Foundation’s most recent study of start-ups discovered that people aged 55 to 64 accounted for nearly 23% of new entrepreneurs in 2010, compared with under 15% in 1996.

Experience continues to count for a great deal, in business as in other walks of life—or, to borrow a phrase from P.J. O’Rourke, age and guile can still beat “youth, innocence and a bad haircut”. ...

... This is not to say that the rise of young entrepreneurs like Mr Zuckerberg is insignificant. The barriers that once discouraged enterprise among the young are collapsing. Social networks make it easier to build contacts. Knowledge-intensive industries require relatively little capital. But the fact that barriers are collapsing for the young does not mean that they are being erected for greybeards. The point is that the creation of fast-growing businesses is now open to everybody regardless of age. ...

... The evidence that older people are if anything becoming more enterprising should help to calm two of the biggest worries that hang over the West (and indeed over an ageing China). One is that the greying of the population will inevitably produce economic sluggishness. The second is that older people will face hard times as companies shed older workers in the name of efficiency and welfare states cut back on their pensions. ...

Speaking the language of the next generation

Pew Internet: Speaking the language of the next generation

Director Lee Rainie will address the annual conference of the National Religious Broadcasters. He will focus on the media habits of Millennials and GenX and how their patterns of gathering and creating information are different in the digital age.

 

Speaking the language of the next generation

View more presentations from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Back to (a Theology of) Work We Go...

Out of Ur: Back to (a Theology of) Work We Go...

Why the church must talk about "vocation" and not just "mission" if it hopes to engage young adults.

... We’ve been told that Millennials are the “activist generation.” They want to make a difference in the world by wearing (red) products, singing U2 songs, and going to banana republics as short-term pigeonaries. So we try to engage them in our churches with missional rhetoric and projects. And at times this can be effective, until compassion fatigue sets in and securing social justice proves to require more than a text donation.

But the missional approach relies on a young adult’s spare time, extra resources, and expendable energy. It doesn’t capture a core identity issue the way family-based ministries do. When a church helps a 40-year-old mother with her struggling marriage and anxiety-driven parenting, it is applying Christian faith to the center of her life and identity. Missional ministries that try to engage a single 30-year-old don’t accomplish this because they ignore what’s at the center of his life to nibble at the margins. And what is at the center for most young adults? Vocation. ...

Amen!

Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School

New York Times: Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force. ...

... Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them. ...

... Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities. ...

... Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.” ...

... “Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down. ...

Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online

Marketing Charts: Pay TV Subscribers Canceling Service, Going Online

9% of Americans have cut their pay TV connection because they can watch all their favorite shows online, while a further 11% are considering doing so, according to a Deloitte survey released in January 2012. An additional 15% say they will most likely watch movies, TV programs, and videos from online digital sources (via download or streamed over the Internet) in the near future. The proportion considering “cutting the cord” is highest among leading millennials, defined as respondents aged 23-28, at 19%. Meanwhile, 11% of Boomers report having already canceled their paid TV service, highest among the age groups.

However, the survey also shows that Americans value cable TV and satellite TV above most other services. According to December 2011 figures from Motorola, Americans are spending 21 hours per week in front of the TV. And although only 44% of the Deloitte survey respondents report having DVR functionality, using a DVR is the second-most preferred means of watching a favorite TV show. ...

Mobility Impaired

National Review Online: Mobility Impaired

(This is a great piece, but I don't advise reading it until you've had your morning coffee. It is a bit complex to think about it, but he raises some important clarifications.)

... One way to assess the extent of mobility is to ask whether people tend to be better off than their parents were at the same age — whether they experience upward absolute mobility. Research for EMP conducted by my colleagues at the Brookings Institution Julia Isaacs, Isabel Sawhill, and Ron Haskins shows that two-thirds of 40-year-old Americans are in households with larger incomes than their parents had at the same age, even taking into account the fact that the cost of living has risen. That's pretty impressive, but it actually understates the improvement between generations. Household size declined over these decades, so incomes now are divided up among fewer family members, leaving them better off than bigger households of the past. Another EMP study shows that when incomes are adjusted for household size, four out of five adults today are better off than their parents were at the same age.

The finding of pervasive upward absolute mobility flies in the face of liberal accounts of a stagnant middle class. These accounts generally conflate disappointing growth in men's earnings with growth in household income, which has been impressive. Growth in women's earnings has also been impressive, but economic pessimists have twisted these bright spots to fit a gloomy narrative. They claim that household incomes have kept pace only because wives have been forced into work to make up for the shrinking bacon their husbands bring home. That ignores the long-term trend of women's obtaining more education in industrialized nations around the world, presumably with an intention to put it to use in the work force someday. It also ignores the evidence that married men rationally chose to reduce their work hours as their wives increased theirs (even as single men continued working the same hours), and the fact that employment grew more among the wives of better-educated men than among the wives of less-educated men. 

Nevertheless, incomes have not grown as fast in recent decades as they did in the middle of the 20th century. While the vast majority of Americans end up better off than their parents, the difference is probably not as great as the improvement of their parents over their grandparents was.

There's another way to look at intergenerational mobility — asking whether those whose parents were at the bottom or at the top relative to Americans as a whole end up in the same place in adulthood. This is the question of relative mobility. You may have a higher income than your parents did, but if that is generally true of your generation, then your rank may be no different than your parents' rank was. It may even be lower. And having less than others can figure more prominently in our assessment of our well-being than does merely having more than our parents did — as may be the case with scarce commodities, such as homes in the best school districts or slots at the best universities. ...

...  If the size of the boost that children get from greater parental income differs between countries, that could be either because parental income buys more access to the best opportunities in one country than it does in the other, or because the best opportunities are compensated more highly in one country than the other. It may be no more unusual for Americans from modest origins to become top executives than it is for similarly situated Danes, but American CEOs make a lot more money than Danish CEOs do. In this scenario, it's not that opportunities to obtain the best slots in the United States are less fairly distributed than in other countries, it's simply much more lucrative to occupy those slots here.

So, which is it? Research suggests that by the time they were in their 40s, American children born in the 1950s should have experienced the same earnings mobility as their Swedish counterparts if the economic payoff for additional schooling were not so much higher in the United States — and, more important, if that payoff had not grown so much between generations. And educational mobility in the two countries — the connection between parent and child schooling — was actually very similar for this generation. Opportunity for top slots may therefore have been as widespread in the United States as in Sweden.

However, evidence indicates that American children born since the 1950s have had lower educational mobility than children in Sweden and other Western nations. And recent research indicates that the link between parental income and educational advantages on one hand and child academic outcomes on the other is stronger in the United States than in other Western countries. So it may be that higher pay for better slots and narrower opportunities to occupy the best slots both now contribute to lower earnings mobility in the United States. Still, our country does not look particularly bad in terms of occupational mobility — the degree of similarity between the desirability of parents' and children's jobs. And in the broadest sense, that may be the best measure of opportunity for different slots. ...

... Where to look to encourage more upward relative mobility? Begin with the fact that just 16 percent of those who start at the bottom but graduate from college remain stuck at the bottom, compared with 45 percent of those who fail to get a college degree. There is a legitimate debate about whether pushing academically marginal students into college will give them the same benefits that current college graduates receive, but there are surely financially constrained students who would enroll — or who would stay enrolled — if they could afford to.

EMP research has also shown that children with divorced parents are less likely to escape the bottom than other children. Just as it is not incontestably established that sending more disadvantaged kids to college would increase upward relative mobility, it is also debatable whether reducing divorce would do so. But reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies would unquestionably reduce the number of children experiencing divorce and other disadvantages. Since it is more common among parents in the bottom than elsewhere, reducing unplanned pregnancy would lower the number of children starting out at the bottom and thereby reduce the number of children stuck there down the road. And it would improve the mobility prospects of many of the adults avoiding pregnancy.

Finally, remaining in the bottom is much more common among black families than white families. While much remains to be learned about why this is so, another EMP report starkly shows that black and white children grow up in entirely different economic worlds. Simply put, two-thirds of black children experience a level of neighborhood poverty growing up that just 6 percent of white children will ever see. That is a national tragedy. It's certainly hard to see how the kids are to blame.

Broad-based economic growth, international competitiveness, and the ideals composing the American Dream all require that policymakers heed Governor Daniels's call. Increasing upward absolute mobility — for all, but with a particular focus on those who start out at the bottom — should be the primary goal of policymakers. The first political party that commits itself to putting upward mobility first and that credibly takes on the challenge will be ascendant.

Beloit College Mindset List for Class of 2015

Associated Press: List: Web older than incoming college freshmen

Every year, Beloit College in Beloit, Wis., releases its Mindset List to give a snapshot of the world view of the incoming freshmen class. The list for the Class of 2015:

___

Most students entering college for the first time this fall — members of the Class of 2015 — were born in 1993. For these students, Andre the Giant, River Phoenix, Frank Zappa, Arthur Ashe and the Commodore 64 have always been dead.

Their classmates could include Taylor Momsen, Angus Jones, Howard Stern's daughter Ashley, and the Dilley Sextuplets.

1. There has always been an Internet ramp onto the information highway.

2. Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents.

3. States and Velcro parents have always been requiring that they wear their bike helmets.

4. The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major league sports.

5. There have always been at least two women on the Supreme Court, and women have always commanded U.S. Navy ships.

6. They "swipe" cards, not merchandise.

7. As they've grown up on websites and cellphones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy and concentration.

8. Their school's "blackboards" have always been getting smarter.

9. "Don't touch that dial!" . what dial?

10. American tax forms have always been available in Spanish. ...

Church Attendance Falling Among Less-Educated Whites: Study

Huffington Post: Church Attendance Falling Among Less-Educated Whites: Study

While overall church attendance has declined slightly in the United States in recent decades, a new study says attendance at religious services among white Americans who did not go to college has fallen more than twice as quickly as it has among more highly educated whites.

The study, released Sunday by the American Sociological Association, draws on decades of data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth to conclude that "moderately educated whites," defined as people with high school degrees, attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as whites with degrees from four-year colleges. In the last decade, however, they attended much less frequently.

“Our study suggests that the less educated are dropping out of the American religious sector similarly to the way in which they have dropped out of the American labor market,” says researcher W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

The research shares some conclusions with a recent study by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor whose findings contradicted the common myth that less-educated people are more religious. That study, released in early August, concluded that a college degree does not make a person less religious, but that more education does make people more accepting of the validity of religions other than their own. Both studies used data from the General Social Survey, which is an ongoing survey of American' attitudes and behaviors that began in 1972. ...

Perpetually Connected Millennials Prefer Personal Contacts to Make Important Life Decisions

4A's: Perpetually Connected Millennials Prefer Personal Contacts to Make Important Life Decisions

Research Shows Cohort’s Use of an Advisory Board on Critical Family, Financial and Career Decisions

A national poll conducted by Capstrat and FGI Research found that the online generation of Millennials (people between ages 22 and 30) are creating and consulting an informal advisory board of family members, spouses, friends and co-workers to make important life decisions. Overall, 73 percent of respondents prefer to obtain information through one-on-one informal conversations with their advisory boards. In total, 402 interviews were completed to understand how Millennials make decisions at key milestones, who influences those decisions and what matters most to them.

When comparing the importance of Millennial milestones, our research found that getting married is considered the most important life milestone (30 percent ranked this most important), followed by starting a career (26 percent), having children (19 percent) and buying a home (10 percent).

Additional notable research findings include

• • person-to-person first-hand accounts are the most common type of sought-after information (73 percent). Looking to online sources was only ranked higher than the advisory board when seeking information about buying a car (60 percent) or starting a career (52 percent).
  • Millennials prefer to consult members of their advisory board when seeking information about getting married. Parents (57 percent) and potential future spouses (55 percent) ranked first for sources of information about getting married.
  • When making decisions about having children, spouses (63 percent) and parents (50 percent) were ranked as top sources of information.

“There are many stereotypes about Millennials—that they’re a digital generation with unrealistic expectations who are ill-prepared for the real world,” says Karen Albritton, President of Capstrat. “But this research has proven that this generation is thinking and planning ahead for their major life decisions. And the way Millennials make their decisions have important implications for companies that communicate with, market to or even employ members of this generation.”

Visit additional research materials at http://www.capstrat.com/insights/millennials/.

To learn more, please contact Karen Albritton with Capstrat at 919-882-1958 or [email protected].

Rancor Out of Control: Welcome to the Fourth Turning?

(I originally posted this in March of 2010. But considering events in D.C. and around the nation, I thought I would reprise it.)

Are we in the middle of a "Fourth Turning," as William Strauss and Neil Howe described? I know some of my readers roll their eyes at this stuff about generations, but a couple of years ago, I did an eleven-part series (Index) on Strauss and Howe's work, focusing primarily on their books Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy written in the 1990s. S&H don't believe that history repeats itself, but it rhymes. They see a four-part rhythm to events tied to recurring cycles of archetype

generations. They believe we have entered a fourth turning in the past decade and that the fourth turning will play out through the rest of this decade. Characteristic of the fourth turning is a rancorous civil strife leading to a climactic set of events that sets in motion the consensus for the next several decades.

Two years ago, I wrote a post, "McCain vs Obama. A "Fourth Turning" Phenomenon?" I thought I would reprise a portion of it here:

At the core of S&H's thesis is the idea that there is a repeating cycle of four generational archetypes. Each generation comprises people born within approximately twenty years, give or take a few years. The types are the Hero, the Artist, the Prophet, and the Nomad, which repeat in that order. Every twenty years, one archetype dies off while society is giving birth to the successor version of the dying archetype. This is not to say that everyone in a given generation exhibits the characteristic of the archetype, but in the aggregate, and in terms of the type of leadership that emerges, the archetype gives each generation a distinctive feel.

About every twenty years, there is an alignment where each generation is located overwhelmingly within a particular part of the lifecycle: childhood, young adult, mature adult, and elderhood. This alignment signals a shift in the culture from one turning or "mood" into the next. There are four turnings that follow in succession: 1. High, 2. Awakening, 3. Unraveling, and 4. Crisis. (They can also be likened to spring, summer, fall, and winter.) The high comes after resolving a great crisis and is characterized by a civic spirit and general optimism. The Awakening is a period of spiritual awakening and turning inward to address issues suppressed in the previous Crisis and High periods. The Unraveling is an increasingly inward-focused era where societal institutions fray and fall apart. Escalating rancor and coarseness become part of life. The Crisis usually features escalating societal division that finally gets resolved while addressing some major social crisis like a war or economic collapse. The resolution gives way to a new High, and the cycle starts again. A complete cycle is called a saeculum. S&H would suggest we are in the first 5-10 years of a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era.

The four generations driving events in this Crisis era are categorized as follows:

• Silent Generation (Artist). Born 1925-1942
• Baby Boom Generation (Prophet). Born 1943-1960
• Thirteenth Generation or Gen X (Nomad). Born 1961-1981
• Millennial (Hero). Born 1982-2000?

The Prophet Generation, in this case, Boomers, is the wild card in the Crisis era. Boomers were brought up to question things, were told they could accomplish anything, and were filled with visions of making a new and better world by their parents, who had just endured a tremendous crisis. They had a destiny to fulfill.

In youth, Boomers began challenging tradition with idealistic visions that ranged from the noble to the utterly narcissistic. As they moved into adulthood, they became increasingly inward-focused while still bending the world toward meeting their perceived needs. In the Crisis era, a prophet generation enters a stage of life where they begin to confront their own mortality. The kids are grown, and there is an acute awareness that all those idealistic visions from their youth have not been realized. Suddenly the clock is running out. Urgent action is needed to fulfill the idealism they once felt in their youth.

Yet there is one problem: there are polar versions of what the new vision should look like within the generation. For instance, polls on controversial issues like the Vietnam War show that Boomers register the highest percentage of people who intensely feel the war was wrong. But Boomers also register the highest percentage of people who intensely feel the war was right. This dynamic leads to a combative, winner-takes-all, take no prisoners mindset in the public square.

Meanwhile, the Boomers are sandwiched between two very different generations. The Silent Generation (Artist) grew up in awe of the sacrifices and accomplishments of the G.I generation (Hero) that preceded them. But they often found themselves uneasy with the self-confident, often cold, and mechanistic feel of the G.I. generation. They value the more humanistic and idealistic elements of the Boomers, but they are often disturbed by the Boomer's disregard for what those before them have contributed and are particularly put off by the Boomers' rancorous way of addressing problems. The Silent generation is the generation of consensus, bi-partisanship, and fair process.

Meanwhile, the Gen X generation (Nomads) have grown up in a time of decaying institutions and child neglect. Divorce increased while they were children, and adults went somewhere to "find themselves." As the Fourth Turing unfolds. Gen Xers are evermore focused on what kind of world their children will inherit. They want them to have a better and more wholesome world than they grew up with. Societal institutions are not seen as allies; all of their energy is consumed with trying to make life work at the most elemental levels. They grow increasingly impatient with the grandiose idealism of Boomers and their antics, pushing things ever closer to the brink of chaos.

Finally, the Millennial generation (Hero) emerges on the scene. Boomers see this new generation as the folks who will partner with them in their idealistic visions, whichever variety of visions that may be.

What S&H suggest is that in the Fourth Turning, idealism is needed to surmount the Crisis problems. The Prophet generation often plays an important role in this respect, but they are ever at the brink of spiraling out of control. The Artist generation and the Nomad generation act as a brake on the Prophets' excesses.

So far in American history, the Artists and the Nomads have been successful every time but one. That was in the 1860s. Idealistic Prophet abolitionists and Prophet Southerners succeeded in leading others into their idealistic crusades that resulted in the American Civil War. At the beginning of the war, about 90% of Congress was of the Prophet generation. In 1865 it was still 73%. In the two elections after the war, the Prophet generation dropped to 44%. S&H points out that this is the only time in American history where the stats show an entire generation being voted out of office in such short order.

From Bush being a Nazi who secretly conspired to bring down the World Trade Center to Obama being a socialist who wants to kill babies, does this feel familiar? What do you think?

Motorcycle Deaths by Age

Carpe Diem: Chart of the Day: Motorcycle Deaths by Age

Kids Moving Out Are a Boon to the Economy

BusinessWeek: Kids Moving Out Are a Boon to the Economy

As employment picks up, more young people are setting up house. That's lifting consumer spending.

... About 20 million adult children in the U.S. live with their parents, and most are eager to move, says Peter Francese, a demographic analyst for advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. "Most guys who live at home beyond some young age walk around with a great big 'L' [for "loser"] on their forehead," Francese says. "As more young people feel they will be able to keep a job, bingo, they're gone."

This year, nearly 1 million new households will be created, UBS Securities (UBS) predicts, up from the 357,000 in the year ended March 2010, the lowest number for a 12-month period on record since the Census Bureau started tracking household starts in 1960. New households will help increase housing starts to about 648,000 this year and to nearly 900,000 in 2012, vs. 586,800 last year, estimates researcher Metrostudy. U.S. household formation in the three years ended March 2010 was roughly 40 percent of the long-term average, or about 500,000 annually, according to Census data. "Household-formation rates are already tipping back upward" as job gains allow some people "to spread out," says Brad Hunter, Metrostudy's chief economist. "The demographic component of housing demand is strong; it's just the economic and psychological components that are holding things back."

When people move into a new home, they tend to spend. A typical new renter spends $600 to $1,900 on furniture, appliances, and other stuff related to setting up housekeeping in the first six months, says C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America's Research Group in Charleston, S.C. ...

... Another demographic shift should play a role as well: more divorces, which also create new households. The number of divorces dropped to 6.8 per 1,000 people in 2009 from 7.4 in 2006, prior to the recession, government figures show. A survey this year by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found that 38 percent of people considering a divorce or separation put aside those plans because of the recession. St. Louis-based divorce-law specialist Cordell & Cordell says its customer count rose by about 20 percent in the first quarter. "We see things moving in a positive direction, from our perspective," says principal partner Joseph E. Cordell.