Kruse Kronicle

The Mid-Term Election and Voting as a Christian

Mid-Term elections are next month. This month we reflect on voting with Christian integrity

 

Student Loan Forgiveness and Thinking Christianly

This month Allan Bevere and I discuss student loan forgiveness, reflecting not just on the merits of proposed loan cancellations but also on how we use (and abuse) scripture to justify policy ideas. 

Christian Nationalism - Christ AND Caesar?

Here is the August dialog between Allan Bevere and me about Christian nationalism and its implications. 

Calmly Considered: The Demise of Democracy and the Rise of Authoritarianism

In this month's installment, Allan Bevere and I reflect on the rise of authoritarianism in recent years. 

"Democracy is receding in the world and authoritarianism is on the rise. Why is this? What is authoritarianism and what are the circumstances that lead people to trust their futures to authoritarians? How do we recognize authoritarian figures? Is character necessary for good?"

Calmly Considered: Immigration-- The Biblical Witness and Current Challenges

Immigration is a complex topic. Unfortunately, our public discourse produces much more heat than light on the topic. Allan Bevere and I recently had a conversation that only skims the topic, but maybe it will provide some food for thought and encourage helpful conversation. 

Calmly Considered: Socialism vs. Capitalism-- Getting Beyond the Memes

"In this month's episode of "Calmly Considered" Michael Kruse and I discuss the complex realities of socialism and capitalism that are so often distorted by simplistic social media memes, caricatures, and politicians seeking re-election."

Thanks to Allan Bevere for hosting another fun discussion. Below the video are three articles related to our discussion you may find useful.

"Capitalism vs. Socialism is the Wrong Way to Frame Today's Economic Debate" https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/capitalism/streeter-reeves-capitalism-vs-socialism.html

 

"Capitalism vs. Socialism: What's the Difference?" https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-are-differences-between-capitalism-and-socialism.asp

 

"Capitalism with Scandinavian Characteristics" https://www.startribune.com/capitalism-with-scandinavian-characteristics/505916412/

New Voting Laws and Critical Race Theory

New voting laws around the country are not a response to voter fraud. How do we know? Because there is no credible evidence of consequential voter fraud anywhere in the country.

The new voting laws are in response to voter turnout, especially turnout of the "wrong kind" of voters. The laws do not mention ethnicities in their explicit language, but the voting barriers are made more significant for minorities. This brings us to Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory looks at how racism has, directly and indirectly, influenced the legal system to perpetuate racial disparity – like maybe rigging the voting system in favor of white people without saying so. And now you know why one political party, which I used to loosely call home, is so animated in its opposition to Critical Race Theory.  

Confederate Monuments Are A Rewrite of History, Not A Remembrance

Confederate monuments were the product of a campaign to rewrite history, not to preserve it.

There were few Confederate monuments in the thirty years after the Civil War ended in 1865. Placement of monuments came in two waves, the first much larger than the second. One wave began at the turn of the last century and the other began about 1956 (See chart).

Source: There are certain moments in US history when Confederate monuments go up

First Wave

The first sustained wave of monument placement began in the late 1890s, peaking in 1911, and then tapering off to lower rate of placement in the 1920s and early 1930s. Why this spike?

By the 1890s, Confederate veterans were dying off and Southern elites feared younger generations would lose the “right” perspective on the history of the Civil War. The “Lost Cause” movement began to take root in the South as a response. The mission was to recast the Confederacy as a heroic and just attempt a preserve Southern way of life while minimizing the experience and impact of slavery.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy was birthed in 1894. Organized by daughters and granddaughters of the Southern elite, they set out to promote the Lost Cause narrative through textbook writing, children’s programs, and the erection of monuments promoting the Lost Cause. Their financial and political clout gave them considerable influence, especially in the formerly Confederate states.

In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down its Plessy vs Ferguson ruling, institutionalizing the Separate but Equal doctrine. By 1914, Less than twenty years later, all Southern states and most Northern cities had enacted laws segregating people.

1925 Klan march in Washington DC

From 1902 to 1907, Tom Dixon wrote a popular trilogy of novels from 1902-1907, targeting the “unfair” treatment of the South in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fifty years earlier. The middle novel, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” was the inspiration for D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, glorifying the Klan and employing deeply racists troupes. It was the first true blockbuster movie. Not coincidentally, 1915 was the birth of the Second Ku Klux Klan. By 1922, the Klan had a million members, possibly as many as five million by 1925, and millions more in sympathy. Lynching was prevalent all through this period as were race massacres like the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa massacre of 1921.

Second Wave

The United Daughters of the Confederacy began to lose steam in the 1920s and from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s monument erection mostly subsided. But another smaller spike in from about 1956-1965. What happened here?

In 1954, in Brown vs the Board of Education, the Supreme Court overruled Plessy vs Ferguson, effectively delegitimizing segregation. The Civil Rights Movement came into its own at the time. Up went more monuments to persevere the ethos of the Lost Cause and white supremacy, dropping off after 1965 and the passage of civil rights legislation. The financial and political clout to promote these efforts was not as powerful by this date.

Conclusion

The great majority of Confederate monuments were never a product of some high-minded project to help us holistically remember the past. They were the product of concerted effort to rewrite the past with the Lost Cause narrative. They were integral to waves of white supremacy that swept America, attempting to whitewash the past and intimidate people of color. They have no business standing in places of honor in our public spaces. Their removal aids in the remembrance of history, not its neglect.

For a short history of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their role in promoting the Lost Cause and Confederate monument placement, view this video.

Billionaires do NOT pay an overall tax rate lower than the bottom 50%.

Two months ago, the New York Times uncritically ran an article claiming billionaires pay lower tax rates than the bottom half of American earners. (I see this and related pieces circulated by my progressive friends.) The unsubstantiated and yet to be reviewed data came from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, a tease to promote their soon to be released book. Their claim is contrary to other economic entities that monitor and study taxation. Once the book was released, the methodology became public. The methodology conflicts with the methodology they used themselves just a couple of years ago in peer-reviewed research.

I am not a tax expert but I have tried to follow the discussion. Econofact gives one of the best brief summaries on the claim. (Are Taxes (And Also Spending) Progressive?) A couple of observations:

“In their book, Saez and Zucman reach conclusions that are at odds with a variety of previous studies. … What explains the difference? Relative to previous estimates, the current choices and assumptions made by Saez and Zucman generate higher estimates of income among high-income households, and of taxes on low-income households.”

“Considering only positive tax payments gives an incomplete picture of the tax system. Some taxes are “refundable” and actually offer credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). These credits can create negative tax liability for households. For example, if a household pays $1000 in a given year but receives $1,500 in an earned income tax credit, on balance, they have paid negative taxes. Conventional analyses count programs such as the EITC and the CTC as negative taxes, but Saez and Zucman exclude these credits from their analysis, making the tax system look more regressive than other studies show.”

Taking this a step further, assume you have an income of $10,000 and tax credits that net you $5,000. You have $15,000 to spend. Assume the local sales tax is 10%. You pay $1,500 in local sales taxes. But these economists don’t count the credits. So the tax rate is effectively 15% because the denominator by which you divide $1,500 is $10,000, not $15,000. It artificially inflates the tax burden even more. They do other "unique" things like count health insurance premiums as taxes. 

On a further note, these two economists are key economic advisors to the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign and this book was written and released to give support to her political objectives, not as scholarly analysis.

I am not defending billionaires or the present tax system. A factual claim was made concerning billionaires and taxes. Is it true? Outside of these two economists, writing with a clearly partisan objective and using unorthodox methods, there is no support for the claim. A disdain for billionaires and passion about inequality does not make the claim true.

Socialism Is A Freighted Word According To David Bentley Hart. So Why Is He Defending It?

Theologian David Bentley Hart just wrote an op ed Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’. The byline says “Only in America is the word freighted with so much perceived menace.” As he frames it, socialism is simply about creating a more equitable economy, not about recreating the Soviet Union or Venezuela. This is what people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are promoting.

What Hart is describing is social democracy, not socialism. Democratic socialism is the systematic transformation of capitalism (private ownership and market exchange) into socialism (state ownership and control of the economy), while social democrats embrace capitalism, looking for ways to make it more equitable. Social democrats and democratic socialists may dovetail on some incremental policies but they have divergent missions.

Let’s assume Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others want a more equitable market system of government. Let’s go further and agree to Hart’s questionable protest that this is all socialism means. Hart acknowledges that “socialism” is a freighted word. Why are they using a freighted word to describe their position? People promote similar policies all over the world without using this language and have done it for generations in the United States. They choose the word precisely because it is inflammatory. They are populist demagogues.

Trump and the Freedom Caucus go out of their way to frame things in a way that maximizes enemy outrage while communicating to the base that they are the reasonable ones at war with the crazies. That is why Sanders, AOC, and Hart say “socialism.” In their communication strategy, the hyperbolic Fox News response to “socialism” is not a bug. It is the objective. It maximizes the ire of their enemies and stokes the commitment of their base. As with Trump, the specific policy prescriptions are not serious, but serve to antagonize enemies and keep a base, giving them power from which to accomplish other agendas.

Hart is wrong about Europe. While there are cadres of democratic socialists throughout Europe, there are no democratic socialist governments. There are a great many social democracies. “Socialism” is not a widely embraced term. Sweden experimented with democratic socialism from the 1970s to the 1990s before returning to their present social democratic capitalism. Furthermore, Scandinavian countries are among the most free-market countries in the world. Their generous social safety net is oriented around capitalist self-interest, not a sense of altruism. They designed their nets to maximize the productivity of people in their capitalist economy. This is not Democratic Socialism.

The Democratic Socialists of America, to which Sanders and OAC give allegiance, has as their stated aim, not the creation of a more equitable capitalism, but the incremental and systematic replacement of capitalism with socialism. So, while I have no doubt the Fox family goes to hyperbolic lengths to stoke fears, their base criticism is legitimate. This is the left’s Tea Party/Freedom Caucus moment. The answer to our problems is a winsome person who can mobilize a sizeable majority to embrace prudent solutions, not another populist fringe to counter the right’s populist fringe. Unfortunately, all I read of Hart is an audition to be a Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell, Jr., in the Left’s version of the Freedom Caucus.

(If you want to be more informed about comparative economic systems I would recommend this excellent piece by economist Timothy Taylor, Capitalism with Scandinavian characteristics. This Finnish-American offers insights on the role of the welfare system in Nordic countries, What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries.  And from Denmark's prime minister, Denmark's prime minister says Bernie Sanders is wrong to call his country socialist.)

European (Scandinavian) Capitalism is not Democratic Socialism (But is that what matters?)

Mall of Scandinavia. Wikimedia: Arild Vågen

I continue to reflect on the hype in the U.S. about "democratic socialism." I think most people who use the term are saying they want a market economy with a greater emphasis on social justice (open to varying definitions) and the promotion of basic human well-being. When pressed to give an example, they typically point to Scandinavian economies. Yet these countries do not consider themselves socialist in the least. In fact, Sweden embraced a move toward true democratic socialism from the 1970s until the mid 1990s. Standards of living dropped, debt went up, and the overall economy fared poorly. They have now embraced market economics while providing a carefully crafted welfare system. People truly committed to democratic socialism, while appreciating some features of Scandinavian economies, find them an unsuitable compromise. These countries might be characterized as social democracies but they are not democratic socialist. As the Democratic Socialists of America party makes clear, they seek the eventual elimination of capitalism (market exchange and private ownership) through democratic means over time. These Scandinavian economies are at best a step along a progression to an ultimate socialist end. I think it is important to be clear about our terms but I my concern runs deeper.

I just came across an excellent piece about comparative economic systems, Capitalism with Scandinavian characteristics. It is written by economist Timothy Taylor. You may know him from the Great Courses class on economics. Taylor tackles some of the issues I just raised and more. But I particularly resonate with the closing paragraph of his piece.

"It seems inaccurate to me to label the Scandinavian model of capitalism as “socialism,” but arguing over definitions of imprecise and emotionally charged terms is a waste of breath. What does bother me is when the “socialist” label becomes a substitute for actually studying the details of how different varieties of capitalism have functioned and malfunctioned, with an eye to what concrete lessons can be learned."

Bingo! My concern with the "democratic socialist" label is not a predilection toward etymology. We need to be clear about what we mean. If your vision is something akin to Nordic capitalism  (aspects of which I find very positive), using terms like "socialism" and "democratic socialism" does not advance productive discussion.

Please read Taylor's piece. Good stuff!

Democratic Socialism IS Socialism

This article, Here's the difference between a 'socialist' and a 'Democratic socialist' has been circulating as an explainer as to why “democratic socialism” is different from socialism. Democratic socialists merely believe a range of services – like health care and education – should be provided by the government. People circulate this article as evidence that people who suggest that democratic socialists want to end private property and usher in a state-run economy, are either fear-mongers or ill-informed. Did they read the article?

As the economist author notes (and as any standard dictionary will tell you) socialism at its core is state control of the economy and the virtual elimination of private property. Democratic socialism is committed to the ultimate socialist ideal but works to achieve it incrementally through democratic processes. I want to point out two quotes from the article, highlighting a key word in caps:

“In the present day, "Democratic socialist" and "socialist" are often treated as interchangeable terms, which can be confusing given Democratic socialists don't necessarily think the government should IMMEDIATELY take control of all aspects of the economy.”

“As the DSA's website states: "At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. As we are unlikely to see an IMMEDIATE end to capitalism [i.e., market exchange and private ownership] tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people."”

Immediate means not now but eventually. Democratic socialism has state control of the economy and abolition of private property as its end game. Democratic Socialists of America say so in their own words! And fully-realized socialism inescapably leads to totalitarianism, not democratic.

Despite having sympathy with the notion of a greater state role in some aspects of meeting basic needs, I will adamantly contest socialism. Market exchange is paramount to generating and sustaining human well-being. It is what has led to the “great divergence” from a world where the overwhelming majority had a subsistence existence during short difficult lives, into a world where extreme poverty is on the verge of elimination. Life expectancy has more than doubled in recent generations and indicators of well-being are improving on nearly every front. Furthermore, I’ll say that the freedom to own property, to truck and trade, to partner with others in productive enterprises, and to reap the rewards is a basic human right. Not absolute but a right nonetheless.

Advocating for a social safety net that cares for the most vulnerable is a matter of social justice. Advocating for private stewardship of property and market exchange is as well.

Carpe Datum! Paragraphs from "Galileo's Middle Finger"

Alice Dreger's "Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science," is one of the most refreshing books I have read recently. Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Nearly twenty years ago, Dreger became an activist for the rights of intersex persons. She fought to change the prevailing practice of surgically altering babies to "rectify" ambiguous genitalia, a practice that science suggested was too risky relative to the outcomes and raised a great many ethical questions. Motivated by varying convictions, surgeons were ignoring science. But before long, Dreger found herself advocating for scientists against activists on another intersex issue. The activists ignored science and attacked scientists when research potentially contradicted activists' strongly held convictions. This book is Dreger's reflections on what she learned from these experiences. I expect to publish a review of the book shortly. For now, I want to post three power sections from the book. (All emphases in the original.)

This quote comes as she is reflecting on her experience talking with researchers at the University of Missouri who had been targeted because of controversial research findings

The story I had been told about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about know what was true.

That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

In Missouri [University of Missouri, Columbia], I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that from us, to maintain – by our example, by our very existence – a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.

Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.

Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what it true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than facts. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars – hell, the plane we’re flying in now.

Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that – plays. I longed for the real world, longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong. (136-138)

This passage comes from the end of the last chapter.

I want to say to activists: If you want justice, support the search for truth. Engage in searches for the truth. If you really want meaningful progress and not just temporary self-righteousness, carpe datum. You can begin with principles, yes, but to pursue a principle effectively, you have to know if your route will lead to your destination. If you must criticize scholars whose work challenges yours, do so on the evidence, not by poisoning the land on which we all live.

To scholars I want to say more: Our fellow human beings can’t afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system. If we take seriously the importance of truth to justice and recognize the many forces now acting against the pursuit of knowledge – if we really get why our role in democracy is like no other – then we really ought to feel that we must do more to protect each other and the public from misinformation and disinformation. Doing so means taking on more responsibility to police ourselves and everybody else for accuracy and great objectivity – taking on with renewed vigor the pursuit of accurate knowledge and putting ourselves second to that pursuit.

I know that a lot of people who met me along the way in this work thought I’d end up on one side of the war between activists and scholars. The deeper I went, however, the more obvious it became that the best activists and the best scholars actually long for the same kind of world – a free one.

Here’s the one thing I now know for sure after this every long trip: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice. (261-262)

These two paragraphs are near the end of the epilogue.

The problem is an old one: People don’t really get that good intentions can’t save you from hell. So long as we believe that bad acts are committed only by evil people and that good people do only good, we will fail to see, believe, or prevent these kinds of travesties. Nowadays I feel as though 90 percent of my time talking to academics and activists is spent trying to convince them of this: The people who are against you are not necessarily evil, and your own acts are not necessarily good. That’s why we still need scholars and activists. It’s not easy to see what’s what in the heat of the moment, and we need people pushing for the truth and justice if we’re going to get both right.

But most people I run into aren’t like us humans. Most people I meet seem convinced that the goodness of their souls will keep them from committing bad acts. When they look back at history, they don’t see what we historians see – dumb tragedies. They see simple moral dramas, with predictable characters enacting easy stories of good and evil. They don’t understand that the Nazis probably didn’t think they were “Nazis.” (275-276)

Powerful food for thought.

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Don't Forget the Good Stuff

It is easy to become obsessed with challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and to see the tremendous good that is happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and momentary reversals are certain but increasingly the challenges we face are of our own making; like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing the challenges we face without losing sight of the bigger picture.

History Doesn't Repeat Itself ...

... but sometimes it rhymes.

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Polarity Management Versus Problem Solving

Question. When it comes to breathing, do you prefer inhaling or exhaling?

I have asked this question many times and it always elicits a chuckle. Clearly if you choose one over the other, you end up dead. And if your body decided that this ongoing struggle between inhaling and exhaling was a problem to solved, you would end up dead. Breathing is not a problem to be solved. It is a polarity to be managed.

Polarity management has a much wider application then biology. It applies to a wide range of features in human systems. Economist John McMillian (Stanford) wrote an insightful book called, “Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.” McMillian makes the case that the never-ending struggle in political economy has been to find the right mix of centralization and decentralization. If power becomes too centralized, then it will become oppressive and destructive. Yet, without centralized power, local tyrants emerge, injustice proliferates, and warring factions square off, sending society into chaos. In this sense, political economy is a polarity to be managed, not a problem to be solved.

Writing in the Atlantic, Eric Liu makes an important observation (emphasis mine):

"We don’t need fewer arguments today; we need less stupid ones.

The arguments in American politics today are stupid in many ways: They’re stuck in a decaying two-party institutional framework; they fail to challenge foundational assumptions about capitalism or government; they center on symbolic proxy skirmishes instead of naming the underlying change; they focus excessively on style and surface.

Americans can do better. Remember: America doesn’t just have arguments; America is an argument—between Federalist and Anti-Federalist world views, strong national government and local control, liberty and equality, individual rights and collective responsibility, color-blindness and color-consciousness, Pluribus and Unum.

The point of civic life in this country is not to avoid such tensions. Nor is it for one side to achieve “final” victory. It is for us all to wrestle perpetually with these differences, to fashion hybrid solutions that work for the times until they don’t, and then to start again.

"America is an Argument." Bingo! I think you will find the same is true in all human structures, including church and family. Part of what facilitates better discussion and arguments is appreciating that we are often wrestling more with polarities and less with virtue and vice.

Politics 2016 and Christian Mission

The Kruse Kronicle byline is, “Contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian Mission.” While politics is not the primary focus of this blog, it is impossible to escape how this presidential election is reshaping Christian Mission for substantial segments of American Christianity. In short, we are asking how ought our discipleship shape our political participation?

Before you read further, you should know that I have opposed Donald Trump since he announced back his campaign in June of 2015. My take on policy and priorities leans center right, which should make me lean toward Republicans.  While I have considerable policy disagreements with Trump, that it is not what drives my opposition. My conviction stems from being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Two days ago on Facebook, I posted a link about Independent Conservative candidate Evan McMullin. He is launching a bid to regain control of the heart and soul of conservatism. I commented, “And the battle for the center-right begins.” A Trump-backing Facebook friend asked:

“Why would anyone vote for a Mormon (non-Christian) candidate [McMullin] while citing the immaturity of Trump's (maturing) Christian faith as a reason not to vote for him?”

I used the occasion of that question to unpack my views. Some friends have encouraged me to post this response in a more accessible forum. So here it is with some light editing and a couple of additional comments.

Response

I think the question [quoted above] misunderstands the issue for Christian Never Trumpers. Having no standing to speak on behalf of them as a group, I’ll speak for myself.

My primary concern is not about who wins this election, what happens to the Supreme Court, and so on. My concern is the witness of the Church. We are called to be ambassadors for the coming reign of God, to exhibit love and compassion, to speak up about injustice. We are resident-aliens in this world, not full citizens. Highlighting the intensity of that commitment, Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that the Kingdom even takes precedence over family ties. Ties that compromise that witness are idolatry.

There are no perfect candidates unless Jesus is on the ballot. Every candidate will have shortcomings. We are not looking for perfection. A candidate need not be Christian. The question is about general moral character, not the candidate’s specific religious doctrinal beliefs. The Church stays independent, whoever is elected, lifting up that which is good and offering critique for that which is not, but first and foremost living as a community that exhibits the marks of the Kingdom.

As each of us votes, we must make a determination about which of the candidates, if any, offers sufficient merit to receive our vote. Some conservative voters see Clinton as unacceptable. Fine. Let’s take her off the table. This being the case, some feel they must vote for Trump. Fine. I think that is misguided, but let’s grant that.

The issue is not that someone might vote for Trump. The issue is the attempt by the Christian Right to characterize Trump as basically a good guy, a baby Christian, basically "one of us," who is just a little rough around the edges. Trump is not a little rough around the edges.

Have you read Art of the Deal? Have you watched his life unfold? At the core of Trump’s life is the very antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. He brags that never needs to apologize or repent about anything. [His recent apology about leaked videotapes was noteworthy for its novelty but also for NOT being an apology to the people he had wronged. It was to the voters who have the power to withhold something he wants.] He has been the apostle for win at all costs. You don’t just defeat opponents. You destroy and humiliate anyone who gets in your way. He advocated seducing the wives of rivals to humiliate them and bragged about having done so himself. He made his fortune exploiting human frailty in the area of gambling. You are unflinchingly loyal to him or you are an absolute loser. I can go on. Everything about him exudes an unstable vindictive predatory character. His “unfortunate” statements are not the product of an unpolished public figure. They are the product of a calculating, manipulative, pathological personality.

Democracy runs on the basis that there are competing views in society. When someone wins an election, the loser concedes and the winner leaves the loser standing, the loser living to fight another day. It is the understanding that no victory or loss is ever final, that keeps society moving along, even with disagreement. Trump routinely demonstrates he cannot tolerate the presence of opposition, period! Not even from beauty queens. From the beginning of the campaign to present, it has all been about what HE is going to do. By sheer force of his personality and will, and without any clear understanding of the basics of governance and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn them, he is going to fix everything. This is World Wrestling Entertainment bravado, not leadership. This grandiosity, coupled with a vindictive predatory temperament, is the recipe for authoritarianism.

Too many Christian Right Trumpers are not simply voting for the lesser of two evils. They are serving as his apologists, legitimizing his profound evils. It is an act of hypocrisy, considering all the criticism leveled at the moral failings of candidates in the past. When it is their agenda that is at stake, all concern about character goes out the window. You think Trump is the better candidate? Fine. But do not insult us with minimizing who this man is.

[As one Facebook friend posted: "You cannot support Ahab because you think he is somehow better than Jezebel and call it righteous."--Dennis Bills]

Let’s assume that by not voting for Trump, a Clinton presidency leads to some very unfriendly policies toward Christian Right people. So be it! The Church’s mission is not to win elections but to give witness to the coming Kingdom. That witness can be given through martyrdom if need be. Christ does not need the help of hateful authoritarian demagogues to achieve his purposes.

I am not that familiar with McMullin. From what I hear to date, he seems to be a principled man with admirable ethical standards, wanting to build a more civil society with aspiration and persuasion. To the degree that turns out to be true, he is a welcomed refreshing voice. I don’t care what his specific doctrines are.

Final Thoughts

In the end, I am sure I was not persuasive. For many on the Christian Right, this election is visceral. Social psychologists write about “motivated perception,” where what we see gets shaped by what we feel is at stake. For so many, legitimate or not, Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of the “other side” in the culture wars of the past forty years. The idea of letting her win, much less vote for her, is nihilistic and apocalyptic. One is forced to choose between letting loose the apocalypse or voting for a candidate who is the antithesis to all you have previously advocated as morally necessary.

The motivation to legitimize and rationalize Trump is powerful. According to survey research comparing 2011 to 2016, White Evangelical Protestants went from being the religious segment least likely to believe that someone who commits immoral acts in private life can govern ethically (2011 = 30%) to the most likely (2016 = 71%). (Source) Jeff Jacoby compares statements by leaders before 2011 with statements after in his piece How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority. When holding a moral standard means substantial loss, they embraced moral relativity, the cardinal sin of “secular-progressives” they so despise. Again, my point is not that someone will vote for Trump. My concern is that those who decide they will vote for Trump should not minimize and trivialize who the man shows himself to be.

In closing, I will say that our present circumstances in the American Church are not purely the problem of the Christian Right. Across the political spectrum, much of American Church is not formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. A great many progressive Christians have concluded that the answer to the Christian Right is the emergence of the Christian Left. They participate in the same hyperbolic “othering” that the Right has done and call it “prophetic” and “social justice advocacy.” And what we learn now is that when you have for years embraced characterizations of your opponents as wanting to kill women, equating them to holocaust deniers, and declared them to be functionally no different than the Taliban, you lose the words to name genuine authoritarianism when it appears. (See Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump) The answer is not a more progressive church. The answer is a loving community of resident-aliens, seeking the welfare of the city, seeking truth no matter the implications for our host culture’s political agendas. Right, left, or whatever, precious little of the American Church owns that vision.

Socialism. You Keep Using That Word …

Many Americans, especially progressives, are now “socialists.” The rise of Bernie Sanders has had much to do with it. Yet, when I hear them talk, I keep hearing Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to Marxian theory, Socialism is a transitional economic system between capitalism and communism. Capitalism (i.e., private property ownership and the distribution of goods and services through market exchange) will run its course and one day a classless society with no private property will evolve. The workers will hold things in common and goods will be distributed according to need.

Some Marxists believed they could accelerate this evolution through violent revolution and imposition of communist principles. We saw that tactic attempted several times in the last century. Others believed economic evolution should run its course. People could work for greater social justice within the system as they methodically brought every aspect of the economy under the control of the government, eventually ending private ownership of the means of production. From there, it would be just a few more steps to the communist utopia. This transitional system is socialism.

Socialists called themselves “social democrats,” or “democratic socialists,” advocating “social democracy.” The emphasis here is democracy. Since communism is the inevitable outcome, there is no need to short circuit the process through violent revolution. People will choose their way into communism.

During the last century, it certainly became clear that relying on markets and philanthropy alone was not an optimal strategy for a just and flourishing society. Government has assumed control of some functions to ensure the broader welfare of citizens in all of today’s capitalist societies. These functions have been “socialized.” But the broader context is still private property and market systems. “Socializing” selected functions is not a tactical progression toward communism. This is welfare capitalism.

However, a funny thing happened to socialism along the way through the last century. It was mugged by reality. It has become clear that socialism is fatally flawed. Market systems provide a real-time feedback loop of information, matching ever-changing demands with an ever-changing supply. Markets empower countless strangers to benefit each other through specialization and exchange. There is simply no way a centralized entity can manage the production of goods and services. Assuming those with the sufficient information could be trusted to have the wisdom and ethical courage to make optimal decisions, the endless churn of supply and demand makes sufficient information utterly impossible. (Other insurmountable barriers exist but that is for another day.) The “inevitable” road to communism was wrong.

Most political parties variously named “democratic socialist” or “social democrats,” have become advocates for expanding welfare capitalism. For precisely this reason, the word “socialist” has fallen out of favor in many regions. So in short, we have learned that neither pure libertarianism nor socialism is workable. We are all welfare-capitalist now: We rely primarily on private ownership and market exchange, and quibble about what societal functions might be better if socialized.

So let us look for a minute a Bernie Sanders, the “socialist” icon for hipster intellectuals. Sanders talks of making America more like Denmark –  or the Nordic economic model. Are Nordic countries socialist? Finnish-American journalist, Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life, recently noted:

The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it [Nordic economic model.] The way he’s embraced the term socialist has reinforced the American misunderstanding that universal social policies always require sacrifice for the good of others, and that such policies are anathema to the entrepreneurial, individualistic American spirit. It’s actually the other way around. For people to support a Nordic-style approach is not an act of altruism but of self-promotion. It’s also the future.

In an age when more and more people are working as entrepreneurs or on short-term projects, and when global competition is requiring all citizens to be better prepared to handle economic turbulence, every nation needs to ensure that its people have the education, health care, and other support structures they need to take risks, start businesses, and build a better future for themselves and for their country. It’s simply a matter of keeping up with the times.

In a recent address at Harvard University, Denmark’s prime minster, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, made this observation:

I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. … The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.

Are you getting that? A robust welfare system is a means to a robust market economy! And that raises another issue: markets.

Paraphrasing Partanen, progressive Americans see Nordic social policies as anathema to market capitalism. They argue that allowing corporations to rig the system in the favor of a few, allegedly an inherent feature of capitalism, is social injustice. It makes no sense. If corporations are rigging the system, then it is not truly a market! The socialist answer would be for the government to assume ownership of corporations. If you just want to end inordinate privilege for big-business, then what you are advocating is – wait for it – freer markets!

In reality, there is no such thing as "free markets." Market economies are based on the premise that absent fraud, misinformation, and externalities, people will make the best and most efficient decisions about what to consume and produce for their own needs, mediated through price information generated by supply and demand. Producers who produce well will be rewarded and those that do not will eventually fold. The reality is that there is always incomplete information and there are nearly always some externalities inherent in trade. Taxes and regulation are also necessary. But generally speaking, trade unencumbered by planners or by gamers of the system leads to higher living standards.

Big-business capitalists use political power to block competition and preserve economic power. They constrain markets. Writing 240 years ago, Adam Smith wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Free markets are the answer to powerful economic players conspiring with government to choke off competition and preserve their privileged status through subsidies, tariffs, and onerous legislation.

Socializing some aspects of society is not antithetical to market economics. We cannot deliver some social goods through markets, or at least not deliver them well. But we must have a robust market economy to generate the tax revenue to make socialized services sustainable. Denmark is the top rated country in the world on business and trade. The other Nordic countries are right behind them. This is not the Sanders model.

Sanders wants to institute protectionist policies, raise taxes on corporations (USA is already on the high side), set a minimum wage 50% higher than other developed countries, and do a host of other trade unfriendly measures. Meanwhile, taxes for all but the wealthiest will stay low (taxes in Nordic countries are high for everyone.) He wants to expand the safety net golden egg while strangling off the goose that lays it. He thrives on populist anti-market and anti-business sentiment. Curiously, Clinton is probably closer to the Nordic model, embracing an expanded and smarter welfare model, while championing (at least in the past) trade and business. Yet she dismisses Denmark as contrary to this vision. Partanen speculates Clinton knows her plans are more genuinely like Denmark than are Sanders’ but she avoids association with the Nordic model because of public misconceptions. I think that is true.

So why are so many supposedly well-educated people now calling themselves socialists? One big reason is surely economic illiteracy. Going back to at least the 1930s, conservatives warned of “socialism” with the advent of Social Security. Same with Great Society programs in the 1960s - now also with ACA and talk of single-payer healthcare. To some degree, left-leaners just decided to own the moniker. Simultaneously, enough libertarian-leaning folks falsely used free markets to rationalize away ANY government involvement in anything; so many lefties just owned this misconception of “free market.” What they want is a more robust version of welfare capitalism and less big-business domination. Economic illiteracy is my generous reading of why people call themselves socialist. But I have a less generous reading as well.

Partanen writes:

Americans are not wrong to abhor the specters of socialism and big government. In fact, as a proud Finn, I often like to remind my American friends that my countrymen in Finland fought two brutal wars against the Soviet Union to preserve Finland’s freedom and independence against socialism. No one wants to live in a society that doesn’t support individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and open markets. But the truth is that free-market capitalism and universal social policies go well together—this isn’t about big government, it’s about smart government. …

Like the Finns, countless Americans fought to keep America free from the totalitarian ideologies that emerged in the last century. They largely won. They considered it a legacy to pass to future generations of America and to the world. Rightfully so. So why would people seeking a more robust welfare state and less big-business domination call themselves socialists?

Inigo Montoya is wrong with regard to many of the new “socialists.” They know exactly what the word means! They know the emotion it stirs. The misuse is intentional. Calling yourself “socialist” is the left’s version of Trumpist politics: Stir up tribal rivalry with incendiary language. Raise a verbal middle finger to your opponents. When they call you on it, roll your eyes with incredulity that people would accuse you of advocating totalitarianism. “After all, we just want to improve the safety net end reign in corporate greed like any good social democrat.” So to my “socialist” friends who cannot fathom the origins of anger in Trump voters, part of the answer is staring at you in the mirror. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

If your sole concern is fomenting tribal political battles, then the above is mostly irrelevant to you. Calling yourself a socialist is effective for your purposes. If you care about clarifying the truth in pursuit of a greater good for humanity, then you will use language that is faithful to what is being described. Whether through illiteracy or insolence, “socialism” fails that standard. You really need to stop using that word.

 

 

Minimum Wage, Nativism, and the Illiberal Roots of Progressivism

Virginia Postrel has an interesting article at Bloomberg "Progressive and Racist. Woodrow Wilson Wasn't Alone," a book review Thomas Lenoard's Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Here are a few key quotes:

The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Later, she writes:

Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: “race suicide.” Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations. ...

... Clark’s theory is now a foundation of mainstream labor economics. In his day, however, it was highly unpopular. “A key element of resistance,” writes Leonard, “was that many progressives were reluctant to treat wages as a price,” rather than a right of citizenship and social standing. Informed by their beliefs in scientific racism, most progressives preferred wages to favor some groups over others: men over women, whites over blacks, and most prominently, native stock over immigrants.

Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the “Negro question.” They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants. MIT president Francis Amasa Walker called for “protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe," whom he described in Darwinian language as “representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”

So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as “the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation” -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration.

The first paragraph is preface for what follows. It relates why I eschew the label "progressive" despite having some sympathies for some aspects of what today's progressives espouse. In my estimation, "progressivism," then and now, contains substantial hubris - believing that through dispassionate logic, science, and a superior moral locus, we are justified in moving heaven and earth to bring about a brave new world. Institutions and practices that have emerged through time as practical ways of making the world work be damned! I believe most change should be modest reform, not revolution. It is in this sense that I would claim the term conservative. We want to conserve the good as we seek improvement. We aren't that smart and we aren't that noble, when it comes to redesigning the world.

The minimum wage piece is particularly interesting. While impacts of minimum wage increases art notoriously complex and difficult to summarize with precision, most economists agree that substantial increases in the minimum wage dampen job growth overtime. There are studies that show, just as the early progressives logically surmised, that increased minimum wages have a negative impact on the employment of minorities, particularly young black men.

I am definitely going to read this book!

Science and Political Hijacking

Wall Street Journal: Vaccines and Politicized Science

The people doing basic science should learn a well-proven truth about basic politics: Any cause taken up by politicians today by definition will be doubted or opposed by nearly half the population. When an Al Gore, John Kerry or Europe’s Green parties become spokesmen for your ideas, and are willing to accuse fellow scientists of bad faith or willful ignorance, then science has made a Faustian bargain. The price paid, inevitably, will be the institutional credibility of all scientists.

Bingo! Two groups have been central to the climate debate. There are scientists who study climate and then there is portion of society who view the modern economic order primarily as an exercise in exploitation and destruction. They are not one in the same group but there is considerable overlap.

Scientific evidence that our system is destroying the planet is an irresistible tool to this political community to advance their political narrative of the future. Science has seemed willing to partner with those who embrace this narrative as a way to address the real challenge of climate change, I suspect not in small part because many scientists already share a similar political narrative. Yet the challenge of climate change does not dictate one particular narrative. Consequently, people who do not share the political narrative do not see climate science as valid science with a problematic superimposed narrative. They come to see climate science as junk science manufactured by people with the political narrative.

Science is going to play a critical role with a host challenges in the future. We have to find a way to tap down the political hijacking.

The Law of Asymmetric Insight Versus the Law of Assymetric Insight

Arnold Kling recently posted Pete Boettke on Ideology and Economics. The economics in the article is interesting but I particularly liked this sentence:

"Keep in mind, however, the Law of Asymmetric Insight: when two people disagree, each one tends to think that he understands his opponent better than the opponent understands himself."

I suspect a measure of this is unavoidable. If I do not think my view has greater merit, and therefore other views are flawed, why would I hold my view? The trick in addressing a disagreement is dealing respectfully with others, valuing them, and maybe asking more questions while issuing fewer pontifications. I'm trying to be better a this. Sometimes I learn the Asymmetry of insight is not always in my favor.

The challenge is to avoid the Law of Assymetric Insight, which is the Law of Asymmetric Insight with an addendum:  when two people disagree, each one tends to think that he understands his opponent better than the opponent understands himself, and he is therefore justified in behaving like an ass.

In short, have convictions but don't be an ass.

How can we reduce polarization and confirmation bias?

We live in an increasingly polarized society. How do we reverse this trend? My reflection on this topic keeps taking me back to the basic question raised in the sociology of knowledge: How do we know what we think we know? During college in the late 1970s, I read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s classic The Social Construction of Reality. Their description of how we construct and reinforce reality with social interaction is one of the most important books I have ever read. It gave me a lifelong interest in the field.

If studying this field has taught me anything, coherence of ideas is not enough. I value coherence but we must be test ideas in the real world. And yet, the way I go about testing ideas will be influenced by the socially constructed reality in which I live. There is no complete escape from our psychosocial context, but we can stretch our understanding.

For these reasons, I relish the opportunity to discuss topics with people of differing perspectives. Unfortunately, many of the topics that most interest me are bristling with political implications. Civil conversation is difficult. Observations that challenge conventional understanding typically provoke derisive banter instead of substantive dialog. Dispassionate presentation of factual information with measured commentary does the same thing. No matter what I try, it is hard to keep dialog dispassionately focused on the substance. Why?

I think economist Timothy Taylor has some great insight. In his post Political Polarization and Confirmation Bias he writes:

Part of the reason American voters have become more polarized in recent decades is that both sides feel better-informed.

The share of Democrats who had “unfavorable” attitudes about the Republican Party rose from 57 percent in 1994 to 79 percent in 2014, according to a Pew Research Center survey in June called “Political Polarization in the American Public.”

Similarly, the percentage of Republicans who had unfavorable feelings about the Democratic Party climbed from 68 percent to 82 percent.

When you “feel” better informed, you tend to be more confident about your views and more dismissive of your opponent’s views. But are we truly better informed?

A common response to this increasing polarization is to call for providing more unbiased facts. But in a phenomenon that psychologists and economists call “confirmation bias,” people tend to interpret additional information as additional support for their pre-existing ideas.

One classic study of confirmation bias was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1979 by three Stanford psychologists, Charles G. Lord, Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper. In that experiment, 151 college undergraduates were surveyed about their beliefs on capital punishment. Everyone was then exposed to two studies, one favoring and one opposing the death penalty. They were also provided details of how these studies were done, along with critiques and rebuttals for each study.

The result of receiving balanced pro-and-con information was not greater intellectual humility — that is, a deeper perception that your own preferred position might have some weaknesses and the other side might have some strengths. Instead, the result was a greater polarization of beliefs. Student subjects on both sides — who had received the same packet of balanced information! — all tended to believe that the information confirmed their previous position.

A number of studies have documented the reality of confirmation bias since then. In an especially clever 2013 study, Dan M. Kahan (Yale University), Ellen Peters (Ohio State), Erica Cantrell Dawson (Cornell) and Paul Slovic (Oregon) showed that people’s ability to interpret numbers declines when a political context is added.

In this second study, the exact same numbers were used to make the case for the efficacy of a skin cream and for the efficacy of gun control. In the former case, the respondents accurately interpreted the numbers but in the latter case they could not, claiming the numbers supported pre-existing understanding when clearly they did not.

Now stop!!! What are you thinking about this very second? If you are like most of me, you are likely thinking about personal experiences where you witnessed this in others. If you are a liberal, you are likely thinking of those Fox News watching Neanderthals denying climate change. Or if you are conservative, those bleeding-heart mush-heads who think the government can provide quality healthcare. If so, then you are missing the point! The issue is how you and I engage in confirmation bias? We all do it. Yet by definition, it is hard to detect because it happens at a subconscious level.

Taylor writes:

… But what about you? One obvious test is how much your beliefs change depending on the party of a president.

For example, have your opinions on the economic dangers of large budget deficits varied, coincidentally, with whether the deficits in question occurred under President Bush (or Reagan) or under President Obama?

Is your level of outrage about presidents who push the edge of their constitutional powers aimed mostly at presidents of “the other” party? What about your level of discontent over government surveillance of phones and e-mails? Do your feelings about military actions in the Middle East vary by the party of the commander in chief?

He lists other examples. Then this:

Of course, for all of these issues and many others, there are important distinctions that can be drawn between similar policies at different times and places. But if your personal political compass somehow always rotates to point to how your pre-existing beliefs are already correct, then you might want to remember how confirmation bias tends to shade everyone’s thinking.

When it comes to political beliefs, most people live in a cocoon of semi-manufactured outrage and self-congratulatory confirmation bias. The Pew surveys offer evidence on the political segregation in neighborhoods, places of worship, sources of news — and even in who we marry.

I would add two more observations. First, we do not hold our political views in a vacuum. We tend to associate with people similar to us and to build community on shared values. Our views become part of an integrated web of factors that give us identity, a sense of community, and give coherence to the world around us. The more deeply embedded we are in a community the more deeply reinforced is the validity of our positions. Because of this, changing our position on an issue is rarely just an intellectual exercise.

A change in a position can pose a significant existential threat with substantial consequences to our relationships and sense of well-being. Keep in mind that Americans today say they are less likely to marry someone of a differing political party than they are of a different religion. What would it mean to change your political views in such a marriage? Furthermore, it is one thing to learn that I have been using the wrong skin cream. It is another to find out that as a the compassionate, justice-embracing, person I believe myself to be, that the fair-trade coffee I have been enthusiastically promoting is little more than a marketing ploy or that an abstinence program I have championed has no impact on teen pregnancy. What does that do to my personal identity? Change of views has deeply personal and emotional consequences.

Second, I came across this article as I was preparing this post, Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology. The authors write:

Accumulating evidence suggests that cognition and emotion are deeply intertwined, and a view of segregating cognition and emotion is becoming obsolete. People tend to think that their political views are purely cognitive (i.e., rational). However, our results further support the notion that emotional processes are tightly coupled to complex and high-dimensional human belief systems, and such emotional processes might play a much larger role than we currently believe, possibly outside our awareness of its influence.

This is critical. When I initiate discussions about economics or demography, I very often get an emotional response. Why? Why do I respond like this? Sometimes it is because I do not have the time or the expertise to grasp what was said. I turn to heuristics as a shortcut, making intuitive assessments about what someone said based on experience in other contexts.

At an almost unconscious level, I reason from experience that someone who talks about topic X and uses certain phrases or reasoning patterns, also holds a collection of other viewpoints. I then surmise what a person is really getting at. I put that assessment through an emotional filter based on how I feel about this type of person. If my feelings are positive, then I congratulate her on a well-reasoned argument. If my feelings are negative, then I congratulate myself for being sensible and I go to work postulating how she became so silly or malicious. In either case, actual reasoning about the subject matter is minimal. The truth is that emotion figures into all our assessments and it is probably best to be a little more humble about our own reasoning abilities and less hard on emotional responses from others.

Taylor closes his piece with this:

Being opposed to political polarization doesn’t mean backing off from your beliefs. But it does mean holding those beliefs with a dose of humility. If you can’t acknowledge that there is a sensible challenge to a large number (or most?) of your political views, even though you ultimately do not agree with that challenge, you are ill-informed.

So Taylor has offered some thoughts about polarization and confirmation bias. I have added a couple of additional wrinkles. I appreciate Taylor’s call to focus first on the log in my own eye. I need to be more self-aware of my own proclivities and I could often have more humility. What else? How can we reduce polarization and confirmation bias? What do you think?

Gossip is Good?

The Atlantic just ran an article called Have You Heard? Gossip Is Actually Good and Useful. The teaser was, "Talking behind other people's backs may not always be nice, but sometimes it can help promote cooperation and self-improvement." It is a very interesting read. You could discuss it from a number of different angles. This paragraph really caught my attention:

As the study explains, “by hearing about the misadventures of others, we may not have to endure costs to ourselves,” by making the same mistake. And because negative stories tend to stick better in the mind than positive stories, it makes sense that gossip about people who violated norms would be more instructive than gossip about people who are really great at norms. (What’s more, one study found that sharing a negative opinion of a person with someone is better for bonding with them than sharing a positive opinion.)

It strikes me that a considerable portion of political discourse plays a similar role. A small group of people are having a conversation when someone offhandedly makes a disparaging remark about a politician, a political party, or a public policy. Joe says, "Did you see the news today that this is the 17th straight year where global temps have not increased? So much for global warming." (Or "Did you see the news about the ice caps becoming 10% smaller over the last year? How does anyone deny global warming?") Though it may appear on the surface that the remark is inviting discussion, most often it is not. It is being deployed as means of reinforcing social cohesion. And woe to you if you are not discerning enough to know the difference.

The "appropriate" response is to affirm what has been said with your own comments. As members of the group hear each other express affirming remarks, group solidarity is built. And as the article suggests, affirming negative opinions seems more potent. Knowing that we all have a common view on this one topic builds a basis for cohesion as we move on to more interaction. It isn't just a philosophical excercise to challenge the remark, it is a threat to group solidarity.

That leaves a dissenter in a difficult place, espeically if he has been public at all with a differing view. If you join in with the affirming chorus, then you may soon be outed as a hypocrite. If you challenge the remark, then you will be seen as a troublemaker. If you say nothing, then your views may later be discovered and you will be percieved as being decietful. It is a bit of a minefield.

Another layer to this is that sometimes the person inititating the remark knows that a member(s) of the group has differing views. By making the disparaging remark, she signals others to rally to her flag with affirming remarks, putting the dissenter in an awkward or defensive posture. It is an attempt to dominate and enforce solidarity.

The idea that talking about others behind their backs and sharing a common disapproval of others generates social cohesion poses some challenging questions for discipleship. I once read that not every movement needs a god but every movement needs a Satan. I doubt it is possible to fully escape this dynamic. I have no easy answers. But I suspect if our aim is to love our neighbor as ourself, then maybe the first place to begin is by deeply listening to our casual conversations, conciously evaluating what we intend to accomplish with the views we express in any given context.

Subsidiarity: Turning solidarity into social justice

Crux Now: Subsidiarity: Turning solidarity into social justice

... Yet despite these unfortunate attempts at redefinition, progressive Catholics who value Catholic social teaching should reexamine subsidiarity, as it is a principle that they can and should embrace.

Subsidiarity is an essential component of Church teaching. The catechism states that under subsidiarity, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.” In terms of government action, “The principle of subsidiarity holds that the functions of government should be performed at the lowest level possible, as long as they can be performed adequately. When the needs in question cannot adequately be met at the lower level, then it is not only necessary, but imperative that higher levels of government intervene.”

Subsidiarity helps us to translate our sense of solidarity into social justice. While it is solidarity that gives us the desire to achieve the common good and protect the most vulnerable members of our communities, the principle of subsidiarity is particularly useful in helping us to achieve this preeminent goal. It protects us from large corporations and excessive government invading the most intimate spheres of our lives and inhibiting our freedom to reach our full potential as persons.

Subsidiarity also protects civil society, the foundation of a strong democratic culture. It recognizes the inevitable need for communities between the person and the state, the inherent duties that exist within these communities, and the threat to these posed by tyrannical regimes, kleptocracies, and other forms of domination by powerful interests. ...

I don't endorse everything he has to say in this post but I think his opposition to collapsing "subsidiarity" into a synonym for "states rights" is correct. There is inherent tension between needing vibrant local community and needing larger entities that bring order, address the destructiveness that can emerge in local community, and sometimes do things that simply could not be done without bigness. There is considerable room for debate about how this all should work but ideology that knee-jerk defaults to government intervention to solve each problem, or sees every government involvement as sinister, is destructive.

How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

The Atlantic: How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen

Environmentalists warn us that apocalypse awaits. Economists tell us that minimal fixes will get us through. Here's how we can move beyond the impasse.

This is an exceptionally good piece by Charles Mann on how we think and talk about climate change. It is a long article. Here are a few excerpts.

"... On the one hand, the transformation of the Antarctic seems like an unfathomable disaster. On the other hand, the disaster will never affect me or anyone I know; nor, very probably, will it trouble my grandchildren. How much consideration do I owe the people it will affect, my 40-times-great-grandchildren, who, many climate researchers believe, will still be confronted by rising temperatures and seas? Americans don’t even save for their own retirement! How can we worry about such distant, hypothetical beings?

Worse, confronting climate change requires swearing off something that has been an extraordinary boon to humankind: cheap energy from fossil fuels. ..."

"... Rhetorical overreach, moral miscalculation, shouting at cross-purposes: this toxic blend is particularly evident when activists, who want to scare Americans into taking action, come up against economists, with their cool calculations of acceptable costs. Eco-advocates insist that only the radical transformation of society—the old order demolished, foundation to roof—can fend off the worst consequences of climate change. Economists argue for adapting to the most-likely consequences; cheerleaders for industrial capitalism, they propose quite different, much milder policies, and are ready to let nature take a bigger hit in the short and long terms alike. Both envelop themselves in the mantle of Science, emitting a fug of charts and graphs. (Actually, every side in the debate, including the minority who deny that humans can affect the climate at all, claims the backing of Science.) Bewildered and battered by the back-and-forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands. For all the hot air expended on the subject, we still don’t know how to talk about climate change.

As an issue, climate change was unlucky: when nonspecialists first became aware of it, in the 1990s, environmental attitudes had already become tribal political markers. ..."

He does a great job of recounting the history of the politics that has led us to where we are today.

"As an issue, climate change is perfect for symbolic battle, because it is as yet mostly invisible. ..."

Yes! And my conviction is that most conversations I encounter are far more about symbolic identification with a particular reference group, an expression of personal identity, and a means for ideological warfare, than a genuine appreciation for the nuances and risks of the human impact on climate.

In concrete terms, Americans encounter climate change mainly in the form of three graphs, staples of environmental articles. The first shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide has been steadily increasing. Almost nobody disputes this. The second graph shows rising global temperatures. This measurement is trickier: ... The third graph typically shows the consequences such models predict, ranging from worrisome (mainly) to catastrophic (possibly). ...

... The only solution to our ecological woes, McKibben argues, is to live simpler, more local, less resource-intensive existences—something he believes is already occurring. ...

... At base, he says, ecologism seeks not to save nature but to purify humankind through self-flagellating asceticism.

To Bruckner, ecologism is both ethnocentric and counterproductive. Ethnocentric because eco-denunciations of capitalism simply give new, green garb to the long-standing Euro-American fear of losing dominance over the developing world (whose recent growth derives, irksomely, from fossil fuels). Counterproductive because ecologism induces indifference, or even hostility to environmental issues. In the quest to force humanity into a puritanical straitjacket of rural simplicity, ecologism employs what should be neutral, fact-based descriptions of a real-world problem (too much carbon dioxide raises temperatures) as bludgeons to compel people to accept modes of existence they would otherwise reject. Intuiting moral blackmail underlying the apparently objective charts and graphs, Bruckner argues, people react with suspicion, skepticism, and sighing apathy—the opposite of the reaction McKibbenites hope to evoke. ...

Exactly!

Does climate change, as Nordhaus claims, truly slip into the silk glove of standard economic thought? The dispute is at the center of Jamieson’s Reason in a Dark Time. Parsing logic with the care of a raccoon washing a shiny stone, Jamieson maintains that economists’ discussions of climate change are almost as problematic as those of environmentalists and politicians, though for different reasons. ...

... If the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rises only slightly above its current 400 parts per million, most climatologists believe, there is (roughly) a 90 percent chance that global temperatures will eventually rise between 3 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit, with the most likely jump being between 4 and 5 degrees. Nordhaus and most other economists conclude that humankind can slowly constrain this relatively modest rise in carbon without taking extraordinary, society-transforming measures, though neither decreasing the use of fossil fuels nor offsetting their emissions will be cheap or easy. But the same estimates show (again in rough terms) a 5 percent chance that letting carbon dioxide rise much above its current level would set off a domino-style reaction leading to global devastation. (No one pays much attention to the remaining 5 percent chance that the carbon rise would have very little effect on temperature.)

In our daily lives, we typically focus on the most likely result: I decide whether to jaywalk without considering the chance that I will trip in the street and get run over. But sometimes we focus on the extreme: I lock up my gun and hide the bullets in a separate place to minimize the chance that my kids will find and play with them. For climate change, should we focus on adapting to the most probable outcome or averting the most dangerous one? Cost-benefit analyses typically ignore the most-radical outcomes: they assume that society has agreed to accept the small but real risk of catastrophe—something environmentalists, to take one particularly vehement section of society, have by no means done.

On top of this, Jamieson argues, there is a second problem in the models economists use to discus climate change. Because the payoff from carbon-dioxide reduction will occur many decades from now, Nordhausian analysis suggests that we should do the bare minimum today, even if that means saddling our descendants with a warmer world. Doing the minimum is expensive enough already, economists say. Because people tomorrow will be richer than we are, as we are richer than our grandparents were, they will be better able to pay to clean up our emissions. Unfortunately, this is an ethically problematic stance. How can we weigh the interests of someone born in 2050 against those of someone born in 1950? In this kind of trade-off between generations, Jamieson argues, “there is no plausible value” for how much we owe the future.

Given their moral problems, he concludes, economic models are much less useful as guides than their proponents believe. For all their ostensible practicality—for all their attempts to skirt the paralysis-inducing specter of the apocalypse—economists, too, don’t have a good way to talk about climate change. ...

Amen!

... let’s assume that rising carbon-dioxide levels will become a problem of some magnitude at some time and that we will want to do something practical about it. Is there something we should do, no matter what technical arcanae underlie the cost-benefit analyses, no matter when we guess the bad effects from climate change will kick in, no matter how we value future generations, no matter what we think of global capitalism? Indeed, is there some course of action that makes sense even if we think that climate change isn’t much of a problem at all? ...

Read the article to see how he answers the question. I pretty much agree. But I particularly like how he has framed our problem with the problem of climate change.

I've been saying this for years but I still think the best response is one of risk management. Risk involves factoring in both the likelihood something will happen and the significance of the thing happening if it does. Apocalyptic ecologism or dismissive economism gets us nowhere.

Is Evangelical Morality Still Acceptable in America?

Alan Noble as a very good piece in the Atlantic: Is Evangelical Morality Still Acceptable in America? He doesn't define exactly what he means by "Evangelical Morality" but clearly he is talking about people who hold more traditionalist views on a set of moral issues. Here are some excerpts:

"... Behind all of these charges is the suspicion that evangelicals are simply refusing to accept contemporary American mores; they are privileging their faith over the moral spirit of the age. But for many evangelicals, these beliefs are not actually a sign of retreat from public life. Instead, there is a fear that in an increasingly secularized society, there will be less tolerance for people who wish to act upon their deeply held religious beliefs, except in narrowly defined, privatized spaces. This is a fundamentally American concern: Will I have the right to serve God as I believe I am obligated to? ..."

"... To a large extent, this tension has been caused by a shift in what we think of as the domain of morality. The vocabulary we use to describe same-sex marriage and contraceptives has changed from the language of morality to the language of rights. ..."

"... Often, the Christian defense of what they believe is their religious liberty is framed as fundamental hatefulness, homophobia, and misogyny, rather than disagreement grounded in morality. Much to the shame of the faith, a few who claim to be Christian really are motivated by hate. Those who disagree with them see little point in engaging with them on these issues, which is understandable, but it’s unfair and counterproductive to extend that attitude to all evangelical Christians. If the evangelical worldview is deemed invalid in the public sphere, then the public sphere loses the value of being public. American discourse will be marked by paranoid conformity, rather than principled and earnest disagreement. And our ability to prophetically speak to one another and to our nation’s troubles will be restrained.

The right framework here is one of pluralism: the ability of many different kinds of people to live out their faith in public with and among those who deeply disagree with them. This is no easy challenge; it's painful and ugly and hard. But the alternative to is a thin, univocal culture, one in which the only disagreements we have are trivial. And that would be a shame."

I don't share many of  the values to which Evangelicals subscribe but that is just the point. The issue is not how should I deal with people who have views with which I disagree. The measure is how would I want to be dealt with if I were the one with an unpopular view.

Progressive Pragmatism

The American Interest: Progressive Pragmatism

The Obama Administration represents the dawn of a new and superior conception of American foreign policy. ...

... Over the past two decades, policy has oscillated between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism. Liberal internationalism dominated during the Clinton years, with UN- or NATO-backed humanitarian interventions in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Neoconservatism defined the George W. Bush Administration’s approach to post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both approaches took an aggressive interest in military expeditions abroad, and, despite their differing conceptions of the national interest, both struggled to achieve positive post-combat political outcomes from those expeditions. ...

... Obama’s foreign policy has been widely attacked in ways that range from unprincipled to defeatist to incoherent to downright incompetent. The critics protest too much. ...

... Progressive pragmatism is based on two central principles. The progressive principle is a belief in bottom-up democracy, in the self-determination of a people. Neoconservatives and liberal internationalists are both willing to forcefully push political and economic development from outside a country’s borders. During the 1990s and 2000s, each camp supported military interventions abroad, at least ostensibly or in part to promote democracy and human rights. During the 1990s, each group also supported the Washington Consensus’s one-size-fits-all approach to economic development.

Progressive pragmatists believe that communities need to take charge of their own destinies. When it comes to intervention or overthrowing governments, progressive pragmatists will often balk; self-determination calls for revolts to come from below. In a 1980 essay, “The Moral Standing of States”, Michael Walzer explained the relationship between intervention and respect for the self-determination of a political community. If a government ceases to meet the people’s political demands, the people are free to rebel, or not to rebel. In some cases, the people may be loyal to leaders, think success is unlikely, or simply be accustomed to an autocratic style of rule. But they retain the choice to rebel, no matter how draconian their overlords may be. When a foreign state intervenes, it violates the people’s ability to organize its own historical path and to develop its own cultural destiny. Similarly, progressive pragmatists believe that the constitutional design or economic policies of foreign countries need not look exactly like those of the West in order to produce effective and legitimate institutions. People should choose how to govern themselves. ...

... The second foundational principle, the pragmaticprinciple, is a belief in real-world limitations, in the need to assess carefully the costs, benefits, and unintended consequences of actions. For founding progressives William James, and John Dewey, pragmatism didn’t just mean “what works” in a technocratic sense. It meant learning from experience within the context of a person’s (or community’s) particular experiences, culture, and beliefs. We each have opinions and biases that are frequently challenged by new facts or that are unable to explain new situations. Over time, we learn from these new experiences and change our views. Knowledge is therefore always partial, fallible, and contingent. It is tested and reshaped over time. As a consequence, genuine pragmatists are humble: They cannot discern perfect truths or certain futures, and they know it. ...

... The pragmatic principle is best captured by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, though Niebuhr himself was not exactly a “pragmatist” or even a “progressive.” Niebuhr, whom President Obama has called one of his favorite philosophers, placed humility at the center of his approach to foreign policy. He believed that history is defined by contingency and irony, not by utopian triumph or purely rational actions. The central guide to policy, therefore, is not dogma or ideology, but experience. American idealism, he argued, needs to confront “the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic confrontations of power”, and embrace the “slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.” ...

... Progressive pragmatists will take action when necessary to further American interests. But when it comes to promoting American values, they take an indirect approach. Instead of making the world safe for democracy, they seek very patiently to make the world ready for democracy. They focus not on immediate regime change and democracy promotion, but on creating conditions that enable states to become more democratic and more responsible in their own time and in their own ways. Progressive pragmatism requires restraint when it comes to direct intervention, but assertive action when it comes to long-term cultural change. With reforms to international institutions, open access to information, fostering education abroad, cultural exchanges, and other such programs to shape culture and values, the United States can empower people around the world to embrace one of the most important progressive values: self-government.

An excellent essay. I resonate strongly with progressive pragmatism as described here, if not necessarily with every particular action of the Obama administration. I think Obama gets it mostly right.

Is the Cognitive Consonance of Climate Activists Blocking Meaningful Action?

Nick Cohen has a piece in the Guardian The climate change deniers have won. He is mourning the fact the "climate deniers" seem to be winning the day and exlpores why that might be. He writes:

... Clive Hamilton, the Australian author of Requiem for a Species, made the essential point a few years ago that climate change denial was no longer just a corporate lobbying campaign. The opponents of science would say what they said unbribed. The movement was in the grip of "cognitive dissonance", a condition first defined by Leon Festinger and his colleagues in the 1950s . They examined a cult that had attached itself to a Chicago housewife called Dorothy Martin. She convinced her followers to resign from their jobs and sell their possessions because a great flood was to engulf the earth on 21 December 1954. They would be the only survivors. Aliens in a flying saucer would swoop down and save the chosen few.

When 21 December came and went, and the Earth carried on as before, the group did not despair. Martin announced that the aliens had sent her a message saying that they had decided at the last minute not to flood the planet after all. Her followers believed her. They had given up so much for their faith that they would believe anything rather than admit their sacrifices had been pointless.

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel. ...

Let me say at the start that I think there is considerable truth in what he says. A great many of those who reject climate change alarm do not do so because they have a detailed knowledge of science. It is because it poses a significant threat to their view of the world.

Now let me add that is also true that a great many of those who embrace climate alarm do so not because they have a detailed knowledge of science. They do so because it gives them cognitive consonance. It reinforces their view of the world.

The marriage of climate alarm to anti-market, anti-growth, pro-state ideology is powerfully real but it is not a conscious marriage. It is intuitive. It creates cognitive harmony. To campaign for one is to campaign for the other.

If the real issue is solving the climate problem, then the messaging must be realistic. Take anti-growth. The global median annual income is about $1,000 per person. If there is to be no growth, then we have one of two options. First, freeze the world as it is and billions of people continue to live indefinitely at just above subsistence levels. Second, we install a global government to equalize income across the world meaning that the average American or European family (median income approx $50,000) will see a 98% drop to $1,000 a year. (And of course the very notion that income exists independent of the economic arrangements generating the income, which would have to be disassembled to achieve this goal, is absurd, but you get my point.) The first is immoral and the second beyond unrealistic. Therefore, the economy must grow and any realistic attempt to meet a climate change challenge will incorporate this. Period! End of discussion.

Innovation, adaptation, and substitution, and the free economies these activities need in order to thrive, are critical to addressing challenges, but they are anathema to so many climate advocates that embracing them creates cognitive dissonance. There are studies that suggest that when climate change is framed a little differently ... for instance, as a threat to future prosperity and freedom ... it gets a broader hearing among more conservative populations. Take the same-sex marriage movement. Regardless of what you think of its merits, a primary reason the movement has been successful is because it was able to tap into widely shared values of freedom of choice, tolerance, and equality. So it could just as easily be argued that it is the cognitive consonance of advocates that is blocking realistic meaningful responses to climate change.

Why the Big Sort?

Almost five years ago I did a series of posts on Bill Bishop's book The Big Sort. (Series here) Bishop explains that for at least thirty years we have been sorting ourselves into enclaves of polarized groups, even physically locating ourselves with others who think and live like us. But the big question is why?

Avi Tuschman has a piece in The Atlantic that has some interesting ideas, Why Americans Are So Polarized: Education and Evolution. The lead reads: "Improvements in learning—which correlates with stronger partisanship—and the tendency to choose likeminded mates may be helping to create divided politics."

He writes:

"... The dynamics that fuel the Big Sort accelerated in the second half of the 20th century, coinciding with a massive increase in education. Between 1960 and 2008, for instance, the proportion of women with bachelor’s degrees nearly quintupled. The dramatic rise in educational attainment has a couple of unexpected side effects. For one, research shows that higher education has a polarizing effect on people: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, while highly educated conservatives grow more conservative. Second, people with college degrees enjoy greater freedoms, including social and geographic mobility. During the 1980s and 1990s, 45 percent of college-educated Americans moved to a new state within five years of graduation, compared with only 19 percent of their counterparts who had only a high-school diploma.

Meanwhile, evolutionary forces are pulling these more mobile, like-minded individuals together, because our political orientations play a key role in our choice of a mate. In society as a whole, spouses tend to resemble one another—at least a bit more than they would if coupling occurred at random—on most biometric and social traits. These traits include everything from skin color to earlobe size to income to major personality dimensions like Extraversion. Most of these statistical relationships are quite weak. But one of the strongest of all correlations between spouses by far is between their political orientations (0.65, to be precise). Spouses tend to have similar attitudes on moral issues like school prayer and abortion not because they converge over time, but rather because “birds of a feather flock together.” Biologists call this assortative mating. ...

I think he is on to something. I think he is also correct when he writes:

... The silver lining to these gloomy findings is that our ideological positions are not set in stone. Only about half of the variance in political orientations comes from genetic differences between individuals; the rest comes from the environment. So it’s certainly possible to transcend the attitudes that threaten to divide us. The first steps in doing so are to understand our political nature, develop realistic expectations about ideological diversity, and make a renewed commitment to pragmatism over ideology."

I think Tuschman is on to something. From my perspective, I find myself asking what role the church plays in all of this. Seems to me the church just mirrors what is happening in society and Christians on the left and right are quite content with that.

The Alternative to Climate Alarmists & Deniers

Daily Tech: Climate Alarmists & Deniers: Please, Just Shut Up

Researchers at George Mason University and Yale University bring the grave news that "belief in global warming" is at a "six year low". 
 
I. Do You Believe?
 
The study [PDF] comes courtesy of principle investigator Professor Anthony Leiserowitz, an environmental scientist at Yale.  Other principle investigators include Professors Edward Maibach and Connie Roser-Renouf (GMU communications professors, specializing in climate).  Geoff Feinberg, a Yale university employee who lacks a Ph.D but was a private sector polling specialist on environmental issues also contributed to the work. 
 
Another odd addition was psychopathology researcher turned climatology investigator Professor Seth Rosenthal, a member of Yale's climatology team. Rounding out the team was Professor Jennifer Marlon, a PhD expert in geography who currently teaches climate science at Yale.
 
The first oddity -- which you may notice -- is that there's nary a Ph.D credentialed climatologist in the field.  I think this is worth noting as critics of the more alarmist brands of "global warming" rhetoric are often attacked for not holding climatology degrees, despite the fact that many of them hold master's degrees or doctorates in related fields, such as physics or civil engineering. ...

This is a rather lengthy article but it is the conclusion that caught my eye.

IV. More Science, More Debate, Less Politics
 
There's a need for research.  But surveys on public opinion asked in shrill black and white terms offer little help to a legitimate debate.
 
And as much as there's a need for research, there's an equal age to push to remove this issue from a political debate.  Until someone can come up with a financially sound approach to emissions control, the government needs to step back and let the private sector handle its own affairs.
 
Mankind is changing the climate in numerous ways, many of which surpass even strong warming on a local basis.  From desertification to water cycle changes due to deforestation, many serious manmade climate changes are overlooked due to global warming's chokehold on media attention.

Instead of focusing on querying public beliefs and condemning (or praising) "nonbelievers", let us instead focus the dialogue on constructive solutions to both adopt a sensible path to alternative energy (e.g. algae, nuclear power, solar), so that when fossil fuel supplies do near exhaustion, we're prepared.  And let's acknowledge that climate change -- manmade or not -- has always been occurring on planet Earth.

Last, but not least, let's not blame the media for putting things in alarmist or overly skeptical terms, when researchers themselves often resort to the same extremes for funding.  After all, most members of the media have at least a bachelor's degree in a technical subject.  Like many who publish climate research, we lack a Ph.D in climatology.  But so long as we express our opinions respectfully, keeping an open and questioning mind, I see no reason why the media's opinions are more or less valid than non-climatologist thinking heads in academia.  To suggest otherwise is simply elitist "ivory tower" type thinking.

I have no doubt the climate is changing. I don't doubt that human activity plays a role. I am not certain how big that role is. Based on significantly errant predictions about climate (temps have remained stable for 15 years and are now outside the 95% confidence level of modeled scientific predictions), I don't have confidence that scientists have a good grasp on the climate yet. Some are suggesting the 15 year hiatus in warming could last another 15 years. Furthermore, calculations about CO2 emissions all assume GDP growth and energy use are perfectly coupled. Yet, evidence is emerging that the two are decoupling and that GDP is taking less energy per dollar of GDP. That means less than predicted CO2. As with the temperature predictions, my confidence level in scientists’ ability to predict specific impacts is not high, but it is not zero. In short, I'm not greatly worried ... yet.

With all that said, there is a lot in there I could be wrong about. Maybe by a little. Maybe by a lot. There are significant unknowns. And that means we are looking at a risk management question. Rather than feeling the need to cling exclusively to one pole or another ... alarm or denial ... I'm hedging my actions against the idea the the challenges are not threatening. It doesn't hurt that there are some significant advantages to nuclear and renewable energy beyond climate concerns. That makes me willing to hedge even more in that direction. What I find most disappointing is those who think total alarm or total denial are the only strategic options that may be considered. For them, it is most often about making ideology prevail versus dealing prudently with challenges.

What I am articulating is not a "moderate" position between two extremes or some attempt to find a "third way." I see at as realism ... decision-making in the face of uncertainty and recognizing climate change remediation is more than a one dimensional challenge. I see what I'm advocating as an alternative way to todays default option, unwavering allegiance to exaggerated claims of certainty by alarmists and deniers.

 

Developing Countries Are More Than Economic Rivals and Terror Threats

The Atlantic: Developing Countries Are More Than Economic Rivals and Terror Threats

I still hear many people today talk about the "Third World." It refers to those nations that were poor and not aligned with either the Western capitalism (First World) or the communist world (Second World.) The Third World has vanished and it is time to bury the term. The world’s nations and populations exist on a continuum and there are now multiple poles, not two, shaping the world. Furthermore, the story is not one of descent into global dystopia but one of rising prosperity. It is hard to meaningfully address contemporary problems with antiquated frameworks.

It’s time to develop a new framework for assessing the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. ...

... The three worlds used to be capitalist, communist, and the rest. Now they are the West, the failed states, and the emerging challengers. But that's still too simple a view. A small and declining number of developing countries are charity cases. And none are competitors with us in a zero-sum game. Rather than dividing most of the planet into two threatening classes, we need to see states of the developing world as vital partners—both in strengthening the global economy and in preserving the global environment. ...

... Given that much of the world only makes headlines when it is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis and U.S. assistance is on the way, it isn’t surprising that the average American thinks things are going to hell in a handbasket: a recent survey of Americans found that two thirds believe extreme poverty worldwide has doubled over the past 20 years. The truth is that it has more than halved. This might also explain why Americans think that 28 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid—more than 28 times the actual share.

According to the World Bank, the developing world as a whole has seen average incomes rise from $1,000 in 1980 to $2,300 in 2011. Life expectancy at birth has increased from 60 to 69 years over that same time, and college enrollment has climbed from 6 to 23 percent of the college-age population. Progress is happening everywhere, including Africa: Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies over the past decade are in Africa. There were no inter-state conflicts in the world in 2013 and, despite tragic violence in countries including Syria and Afghanistan, the number of ongoing civil wars has dropped considerably over the last three decades. Emerging markets themselves are also playing an ever-expanding role in ensuring global security. The developing world is the major source for blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers, who are ending wars and preserving stability in 16 different operations worldwide. The 20 biggest contributors of police and military personnel to the UN’s 96,887 peacekeepers are developing countries. ...

Very interesting piece. For more data, see yesterday's post, The (Mostly) Improving State of the World.

A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

New York Times: A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops

... Like some others on the nine-member Council, Greggor Ilagan was not even sure at the outset of the debate exactly what genetically modified organisms were: living things whose DNA has been altered, often with the addition of a gene from a distant species, to produce a desired trait. But he could see why almost all of his colleagues had been persuaded of the virtue of turning the island into what the bill’s proponents called a “G.M.O.-free oasis.”

“You just type ‘G.M.O.’ and everything you see is negative,” he told his staff. Opposing the ban also seemed likely to ruin anyone’s re-election prospects. ...

...At stake is how to grow healthful food most efficiently, at a time when a warming world and a growing population make that goal all the more urgent.

Scientists, who have come to rely on liberals in political battles over stem-cell research, climate change and the teaching of evolution, have been dismayed to find themselves at odds with their traditional allies on this issue. Some compare the hostility to G.M.O.s to the rejection of climate-change science, except with liberal opponents instead of conservative ones.

“These are my people, they’re lefties, I’m with them on almost everything,” said Michael Shintaku, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, who testified several times against the bill. “It hurts.” ...

This is a very interesting article with implications for how we wrestle with a host of complex issues. The scientific perspective on stem-cell research, climate change, and evolution dovetails well with the meta-narrative liberals have of the world. G.M.O.'s (and I'll add nuclear power) do not. What this tells us is that despite progressive pretentions of having a superior commitment to science, they don’t. Emotion enters into decision-making (“You a discrediting my narrative!”). They operate not irrationally but within bounded rationality, reason based in a limited understanding that is consistent with the way they generally understand the world to operate. They rely on heuristics to make sense of complex issues. They are not driven by science to their positions, but rather the science conveniently corresponds with a previously held narrative on some issues (and they are quite happy to appropriate that science in furtherance of their narrative.) But when the science runs counter to the narrative, it is the narrative, not science, which is determinative. It short liberals are just like the rest of us: human.

I’ve become increasingly aware over the years of hard it is to move past my initial emotional reactions when my metanarratives are challenges and press deeper to get at the truth. The personal disorientation is often stressful. But I also came to a realization early in life that the search for truth is often socially disruptive. The truth of these complex issues is frequently unfriendly to all metanarratives in one way or another, and as soon as you step on someone’s metanarrative you risk relationships. While I’m not intimidated by dealing with conflict, I certainly get no joy from perpetual battles. And that is precisely where pursuit of truth often leads.

I have a lot of admiration for Greggor Ilagan in this story. I’m sure I’m more right of center than he is and we would likely disagree on any number of policy matters. Still, I have a strong identification with Ilagan and the personal costs he experienced for being authentic in his discernment. He is an inspiration to me. May God grant that each of us would learn better to discern with warm hearts and cool heads.

Subsidiarity in Five Minutes

Here is a good video on subsidiarity with interesting commentary on why our present political difficulties may be connected to a failure to appreciate it.

How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

Atlantic: How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

We're living at a far more equal, peaceful, and prosperous time than the pontiff acknowledges....

Pope Francis is Times’ Person of the Year, an excellent pick in my estimation. He strikes me as man with incredible integrity. I’m enjoying watching him live into this new calling.

Of particular interest to me has been response to his Evangelii Gaudium, with the left gleeful about his condemnation of capitalism and the right going apoplectic about the same. In our age of bumper sticker sound bites, I don’t think either side is listening with appropriate nuance. I haven’t read and digested the whole document but I have read the sections that deal with economic issues. I don’t see a radical departure with what previous Pope’s have written.

Twenty years ago Pope John Paul II wrote the following in Centesimus Annus:

Can it perhaps be said that after the failure of communism capitalism is the victorious social system and the capitalism is the victorious social system and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path of true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy,” “market economy,” or simply “free economy.” But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (Centesimus Annus, 42)

I don’t find Pope Francis saying a great deal different although his emphasis may be a little different. We need to remember that John Paul II ministered under the tyranny of Soviet Communism while Francis did so under the tyranny of right-wing dictatorship. These differences are surely a factor.

The part that does trouble me some, as it does with an overwhelming number of religious figures who speak to economic issues, is a distorted picture of what is happening in the world. It isn’t what is said. It’s what’s missing. For the past century or two we have been living through the most astonishing surge in human flourishing in history. That reality needs to be brought into discussion every bit as much as the challenges and the injustices.

David Ropeik in How Risky Is It Really: Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts shows that we are innately inclined to fixate on threats and negative developments. People who do so aren’t stupid or ideological … they are human. All of us do it. The inclination to focus on threats is instinctive and has served human beings well over millennia. But in the face of very complex issues we need to bring our concerns into perspective with more objective analysis. Otherwise we run the risk of doing more harm than good. We need to approach problems with warm hearts and cool heads.

I have some minor quibbles with Tupy in the article but it brings important balance. I’ve documented some similar factors in past series like American Social Indicators and World Social Indicators, two series I intend to update next year. I think the challenge is to hear the Pope’s important calls for inclusion of the poor and his warning against our propensity to justify indifference. Not heeding the Pope's warnings is also to misunderstand the world. But we need to heed the warnings with an informed understanding of what is unfolding in the world. Read the Atalantic article and see what you think.

The Dutch Rethink the Welfare State

New Geography: The Dutch Rethink the Welfare State

When the Netherlands’ newly coronated king made his first annual appearance before parliament, he turned some heads when he addressed the deficiencies of the Dutch welfare state.   “Due to social developments such as globalisation and an ageing population, our labour market and public services are no longer suited to the demands of the times”, the king said in a speech written by Liberal prime minister Mark Ruttes cabinet. “The classical welfare state is slowly but surely evolving into a ‘participation society’”, Willem-Alexander continued. By this he meant that the public systems should start encouraging self-reliance over government dependency.

It is worthwhile to reflect on the challenges faced by the Dutch welfare system. In a knowledge based economy, influenced by strong global competition and dynamic economic development, public policy must encourage thrift, education and build-up of social capital. Discouragingly high taxes and encouragingly high benefits are no way of doing so. Such policies are therefore likely to become even greater obstacles to social and economic development as they are today....

... Privatisation of social security and a shift from welfare to workfare have been coupled with the introduction of elaborate markets in the provision of health care and social protection. Not only other European welfare states, but in some regards even the US, can learn much from the Dutch policies of combining a universally compulsory Social health insurance scheme with market mechanisms. Netherlands has, similarly to Denmark, moved towards a “flexicurity” system where labour market regulations have been significantly liberalized within the frame of the welfare system. Taxes in the country peaked at 46 percent of GDP in the late 1980s, but have since fallen to ca. 38-39 percent. The Netherlands has moved from being a country with a large to a medium-sized welfare system, something that still cannot yet be said about culturally and politically similar Sweden and Denmark. The Dutch seem to have been earlier than their Nordic cousins in realizing that overly generous welfare systems and high taxes led to not only sluggish economic growth, but also exclusion of large groups from the labour market. ...

... There is a good chance that the Netherlands will continue on a long-term route towards smaller government and greater prosperity. This does not mean abandoning the idea of public welfare for its citizens but focusing more on enabling people to take care of themselves. The positive experience of past changes, coupled with the realization that change is needed, can catalyze change. If change indeed happens, it will likely not occur over-night. Continuous small steps towards change are more likely. The direction of European nations such as the Netherlands might not excite a US audience, but perhaps there is a lesson to be learned about the value of pragmatic and steady reforms?  ...

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 esepcially 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 have had a consensus on what that change would look like.  We’ve been divided about major issues through each stage in the life-cycle. Now, with all of us older than fifty, our mortality is becoming ever more apparent. 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 certainly true that many who use generational analysis way over-interpret, treating it like a generational horoscope. Strauss and Howe describe eras more as the turning of four seasons over roughly an eighty year period. The generation born during each of the seasons takes on qualities similar to generations 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 prior to the Civil War, and to the 1770s prior to 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 the generation younger than the Boomers tends 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)

 

The conservative shift in public opinion has happened in all 50 states

Washington Post, Monkey Cage: The conservative shift in public opinion has happened in all 50 states

... The figure below presents one illustration of this pattern. Here we compare the policy mood in each state in the early 1960s (hollow dots) and in the early 2000s (solid dots). Higher values indicate a more conservative policy mood. In each instance, the solid dot is to the right of the hollow dot, suggesting that the public’s policy mood has moved in a conservative direction in every state. Furthermore, most of these increases are statistically significant.

... Importantly, the public has not moved in a conservative direction in all issue areas. For example, support for same-sex marriage has been increasing across all states. It is also worth noting that our findings on the 1960s and 2000s hides important shifts in policy mood between these periods, such as increased policy liberalism during the 1980s. However, when it comes to support of government programs, the net conservative shift is clear.  Considering the evidence that inequality is near an all-time high, this may seem like a surprising result. Prominent economic models, for example, expect that as the rich get richer, public support for government policies like spending more on education, infrastructure, and job creation would increase. Instead, across the country, the public’s policy mood has moved in a conservative direction. ...

I'd love to know what with the variables they measured over the last five years or so. Is there a move away from the conservative view? I thinking there probably has not been much.

The chart fits my perception of the electorate. I think we have been witnessing the emergence of a libertarian "live and let live" philosophy ... conservative on government and liberal on many social issues.

We Interrupt Budget Negotiations for This Observation

A momentary aside from the budget negotiations.

Remember after the Gabby Giffords shooting three years ago? Some people seized on violent metaphors by conservatives as an impetus for the shooting (like Sarah Palin putting crosshairs over the faces of candidates she opposed at her website). Other recent incidents have been framed in similar ways. President Obama made a speech about the need to avoid violent rhetoric in public discourse.

I’ve noted before that use of violent metaphors is a bipartisan behavior. That usually gets pushback from my left-leaning friends, saying that conservatives are far worse about this than liberals. I maintain it is worse with whichever camp is most aggrieved at the moment. On that note, I invite you to listen during our present troubles to the rhetoric of liberals, Democrats, and the President, as they talk about the Republicans as “terrorists,” “hostage takers,” and “suicide bombers,” with bombs strapped to their chest, ready to “blow up the government.”  

ALL of us have a tendency, when hearing violent metaphors, to overly ascribe malevolence to people with whom we disagree and to discount it when uttered by those with whom we agree. When it is used toward people with whom we agree, we tend to take it personally. When it is used toward people with whom we disagree, we are less critical. The metaphors give voice to our anger and frustration. For that reason, if we are unable to achieve some emotional distance from the fray, as so many of us seem unable to do, we genuinely perceive that other tribes are meaner.

Personally, while I agree violent metaphors can become excessive, I don’t generally find them troubling. Jesus used them. “I will make you fishers of men.” Ever thought about this from the fish's standpoint? The Kingdom of God is where people get violently snatched from their lives, killed, and then consumed by their captors? Or how about Paul writing to the Galatians that he wished the Judaizers had cut the whole thing off during circumcision? Ouch! Violent metaphors are a part of everyday speech that, when used sparingly and appropriately, give voice to our emotional state. (However, they aren’t so effective in persuasion.) So while I agree that we see many public figures going over the top with this stuff, let us also admit that there is also a lot of posturing to show just how evil and insane the other tribe is with their violent rhetoric while ignoring our own.

You may now return to your news coverage of the budget negotiations. As for me, I’m focusing on the road to the World Series and cheering for the Cardinals to totally annihilate each of their adversaries … but in a Christ-like manner.

Note to Progressives: How Not to Critique Adam Smith

Gavin Kennedy at Adam Smith's Lost Legacy has another excellent post on misconceptions about Adam Smith: Five Errors About Adam Smith and Classical Political Economy. He quotes an article that appeared in the Grand Island Independent by Lee Elliott and then shows five errors the author makes based on widely circulated myths. I don't know the political persuasion of the author, but his case is similar to the case I hear from many progressives as they critique Smith on the way to critiquing capitalism. Here is the pertinent part of the article:

“There has been a fascinating struggle going on within the field of economics since the 1970s.

Historically, economics has been known as the “dismal” science because of its ruthless belief that people are motivated solely by their financial interests. This came from Adam Smith’s notion that if all of us act selfishly, then an “invisible hand” will guide the creation of the best society possible.

There is a flaw. Smith recognized there was a feature of human character that just didn’t fit this idea. That feature is altruism.

He said we do things for others even though we derive nothing from it except for the pleasure of caring for others. It just doesn’t seem to fit classic economic theory. It also was almost impossible to measure. As a result, economists dropped the idea that we’re altruistic.

In fact, there is a second flaw. Classic economics assumes we are consistently rational. We’re not. In fact, it has been demonstrated that, at times, we are quite irrational but we are consistent in our irrationality.”

Kennedy goes into detail but in short A) the "dismal science" label came from Thomas Carlye in 1849, with his opposition to abolition of slavery promoted by economists who saw people as equal and deserving of liberty (read more here), B) Smith wrote positively about the importance of altruism but understood it alone to be insufficient for a sustainable economy, C) Smith used the "invisible hand" metaphor twice in the Wealth of Nations, neither time to refer to markets as a magically directing us to the best possible society, and D) the idea of homo economicus, the human being as nothing more than machines calculating utility, didn't emerge until a century after Smith's work. Read Kennedy's whole article.

My point is that whatever legitimate points Elliott has to make about modern economics (and I think he has valid points) he severely undermines his credibility by butchering the facts about the history of the position he critiques. Like so many others, he takes at face value the appropriation of Adam Smith by some modern conservatives to justify their positions. Critiquing the fiction as fact places the critic in the same camp as his or her targets. Both camps demonstrate that they are not serious about a historically rooted conversation, but rather use fiction to buttress ideological views they arrived at by other than historical analysis. A reliable critic would first unmask the false appropriations of Smith then target what they believe to be erroneous about modern economic conceptions. If critics of modern economics would actually read Smith, I think they would be quite surprised at how much of a neoclassical neoconservative he was not. 

 

Will Religious Progressives Replace the Religious Right?

There has recently been speculation about religious progressives becoming the new Religious Right. See the Atlantic The Rise of the Christian Left in America and Slate Are Millennials Killing Off the Religious Right? and Salon The rise of the religious left. Commonweal's Peter Steinfels offers some good insights in his piece, Religious Progressives? He is not persuaded that such a transition will happen:

... Two findings of the study itself feed my doubts.  One is the low percentage of religious progressives (11%) who say that their religion is “the most important thing in my life” compared to the high proportion (54%) of religious conservatives saying the same thing. ...

... A second finding feeds my doubts about the potential impact of religious progressives.  It turns out that 87% of religious progressives view religion as a “private matter” that should be kept out of public debate on political and social issues.  That view may provide a negative counter to aggressive religious intervention on behalf of traditional sexual and personal norms, but it does not provide much ground for religious engagement on the kinds of issues that the study puts before us – helping the poor, maintaining the safety net, and opposing inequality. ...

I think he is on to something. I do not believe that most religious progressives have religion and church at the center of their lives and social networks, at least not in the same numbers as conservatives. Their religion functions more in an advisory copacity to be considered with a variety of other inputs, rather than as a guiding force. The vitality of the religious right has been based on being able to marry this guiding force to a particular political ideology. I don't think that will ever be the same for religious progressives. My perception is that the Religious Right is more inclined to be animated by out of their religious conviction to pursue political ends while progressives are motivated by their political convictions, seeing the church as chaplain to their cause.

Will Science Journalists Ever Confront Democrats?

Real Clear Science: Will Science Journalists Ever Confront Democrats

... He [Phil Pliat at Slate] also rattles off a list of anti-science Congressmen, all Republicans. Excluded from his list are the 53 Democratic Congressmen and Senators (compared to only two Republicans) who wrote a letter to the FDA demanding labels on genetically modified food. This policy position is in direct opposition to that held by organizations representing America’s finest scientists and doctors – the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Medical Association (AMA).

Plait also failed to mention the group of Democratic Congressmen who support a resolution proposing a new hypothesis about global warming: That climate change will cause an increase in the number of hookers around the globe.

Also AWOL from Plait’s list is Tom Harkin, the quack-loving, homeopathy-pushing Senator from Iowa who is responsible for helping legitimize alternative medicine. Such pseudoscientific voodoo has done more to harm average Americans than any misguided teachings on evolution or climate change.

Plait goes on to lament how scientific reports were censored in the “Bad Old Days” of the George W. Bush administration. He conveniently leaves out that the Obama Administration purposefully withheld information from scientists during the BP oil spill and doctored documents to make it appear as if scientists agreed with the drilling moratorium they implemented. And he did not mention that the Obama administration interfered with the FDA’s approval of genetically modified salmon. ...

... Finally, at the end of the article, Plait makes something of a confession:

I know I focus a lot on these attacks coming from the far right—because that’s where the overwhelming majority originate—but in truth they’re coming from all directions, and it’s up to us to do something about it. [Emphasis added]

Wrong. Plait focuses on the far right because he is a partisan. He ignores the equally massive volume of anti-science garbage coming from the far left because he sympathizes with that side of the aisle. It is confirmation bias combined with motivated forgetting. ...

Debt, Spending and Taxes: All Time Highs? (3 Charts)

Business Insider has these three interesting graphs from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Personal taxes are a little below the forty year average but federal spending including transfers is near all time highs, mostly due to an explosion in transfer payments. There is some good news from the New York Times: The Incredible Shrinking Budget Deficit

... The number crunchers at Goldman Sachs have lowered their estimates of the deficit both this year and next, on the back of higher-than-expected revenues and lower-than-projected spending. Analysts started the year projecting that the deficit in the current fiscal year would be about $900 billion. Earlier this year, they lowered the estimate to $850 billion. Now they have lowered it again, to $775 billion, or about 4.8 percent of economic output.

“Spending in the fiscal year to date is lower than a year ago and the nominal growth rate is lower than it has been in decades,” the Goldman economists wrote in a note to clients. “Revenues have also exceeded expectations, with a 12 percent gain fiscal year to date. What is more notable is that the strength in revenues preceded the payroll tax hike at the start of the year, and the spending decline does not seem to reflect sequestration, which has just started to take effect.” To translate: the deficit could come in even smaller than currently anticipated because of spending cuts and higher tax rates. ...

Not everyone is as postive about the growth projections. See the NYT piece for more details

Of Freedom and Fairness - Jonathan Haidt

Democracy: Of Freedom and Fairness - Jonathan Haidt

Someday I'm actually going to finish reading Haidt's book but in the meantime I found this article fascinating. I think it fits well as I try to listen to the narratives and values underlying confrontation over controversial issues.

... I conducted interviews to find out how people feel about harmless taboo violations—for example, a family that eats its pet dog after the dog was killed by a car, or a woman who cuts up her nation’s flag to make rags to clean her toilet. In all cases the actions are performed in private and nobody is harmed; yet the actions feel wrong to many people—they found them disgusting or disrespectful. In my interviews, only one group of research subjects—college students in the United States—fully embraced the principle of harmlessness and said that people have a right to do whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. People in Brazil and India, in contrast, had a broader moral domain—they were willing to condemn even actions that they admitted were harmless. Disgust and disrespect were sufficient grounds for moral condemnation.

I had predicted those cross-national differences. What I hadn’t predicted was that differences across social classes within each nation would be larger than differences across nations. In other words, college students at the University of Pennsylvania were more similar to college students in Recife, Brazil, than they were to the working-class adults I interviewed in West Philadelphia, a few blocks from campus. There’s something about the process of becoming comparatively well-off and educated that seems to shrink the moral domain down to its bare minimum—I won’t hurt you, you don’t hurt me, and beyond that, to each her own. ...

... Drawing on the work of many anthropologists (particularly Richard Shweder at the University of Chicago) and many evolutionary biologists and psychologists, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that there are six best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral mind: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.

Moral foundations theory helped to explain the differing responses to those harmless taboo violations (the dog-eating and flag-shredding). Those stories always violated the Loyalty, Authority, or Sanctity foundations in ways that were harmless. My educated American subjects (who, in retrospect, I realize were mostly liberal) generally rejected those three foundations and had a moral “cuisine” built entirely on the first three foundations; so if an action doesn’t harm anyone (Care/Harm), cheat anyone (Fairness/Cheating), or violate anyone’s freedom (Liberty/Oppression), then you can’t condemn someone for doing it. But in more traditional societies, the moral domain is broader. Moral “cuisines” are typically based on all six foundations (though often with much less reliance on Liberty), and it is perfectly sensible to condemn people for homosexual behavior among consenting adults, or other behaviors that challenge traditions or question authority.

Everyone values the first three foundations, although liberals value the Care foundation more strongly. For example, they show the strongest agreement with assertions such as “Compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” But this difference on Care is small compared to the enormous difference on items such as these: “People should be loyal to their family members, even when they have done something wrong.” “Respect for authority is something all children need to learn.” “People should not do things that are disgusting, even if no one is harmed.” Those three items come from the scales we use to measure the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, respectively. You can see how social conservatives, whose morality rests in large part on those foundations, don’t see eye to eye with liberals. Basically, liberals want to loosen things up, especially in ways that they believe will make more room for women, African Americans, gay people, and other oppressed groups to escape from traditional strictures, express themselves, and succeed. Conservatives want to tighten things up, especially in ways that they perceive will help parents to raise more respectful and self-controlled kids, and will assist the police and other authorities in maintaining order. You can see how those disagreements led to battle after battle on issues related to sexuality, drug use, religion, family life, and patriotism. You can see why liberals sometimes say that conservatives are racist, sexist, and otherwise intolerant. You can see why social conservatives sometimes say that liberals are libertine anarchists. ...

The Emotional Psychology of a Two-Party System

The Atlantic: The Emotional Psychology of a Two-Party System

Defense mechanisms against emotional ambivalence incline us to fully embrace one side and fully reject the other -- which makes compromise nearly impossible.

... Such rhetoric reflects a black-and-white, us-versus-them approach that views each debate over taxation, social policy and the role of government not as a problem in need of a solution but a battle within an ongoing war. During warfare, our aim is of course to vanquish the enemy and emerge victorious; to reach out to your enemy makes you a villainous collaborator, a traitor to your cause. On the right, anyone with the temerity to suggest that Obama and the Democrats have some redeeming qualities is likely to be attacked from within the party. Just ask Chris Christie.

Propaganda during wartime typically dehumanizes the enemy. Our current political rhetoric likewise relies on two-dimensional caricatures to de-legitimize the opposition, encouraging us to hate "them." The process is more blatantly vocal on the political right, with the radio voices of conservatism inciting hatred for cartoon versions of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, members of the liberal press, etc. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to compare Obama to Adolf Hitler, the epitome of unalloyed evil. While less obvious, the left has its own set of two-dimensional villains to hate: greedy and heartless bankers, evil corporations, gun-toting religious freaks.

For both sides, the Other often lacks true dimension. In propaganda, the enemy never has a legitimate point of view that needs to be taken seriously and balanced against our own views. Hating an enemy leaves no room for complex, ambiguous problems without an obvious solution. It eliminates the uncomfortable tension that arises from doubt and uncertainty amidst difficult choices. ...

I'm not convinced that "... process is more blatantly vocal on the political right ..." but other than that I think he is on to something.

... As the neurologist Robert Burton has noted , ambiguity or confusion is so difficult for many of us to bear that we instead retreat from it into a feeling of certainty, believing we know something without any doubts, even when we actually don't and often can't know. Those of us who have trouble with such discomfort often resort to black-and-white thinking instead. Rather than feeling uncertain or ambivalent, struggling with areas of gray, we reduce that complexity to either/or.

We may define one idea or point of view as bad (black) and reject it, aligning ourselves with the good (white) perspective. Feelings of anger and self-righteousness often accompany this process, bolstering our conviction that we are in the right and the other side in the wrong. Hatred for the rejected point of view keeps ambiguity and uncomfortable complexity from re-entering the field.

Black-and-white thinking reflects the psychological process known as splitting. When we feel unable to tolerate the tension aroused by complexity, we "resolve" that complexity by splitting it into two simplified and opposing parts, usually aligning ourselves with one of them and rejecting the other. As a result, we may feel a sort of comfort in believing we know something with absolute certainty; at the same time, we've over-simplified a complex issue.

On the emotional front, splitting comes into play when we feel hostile toward the people we love. Holding onto feelings of love in the presence of anger and even hatred is a difficult thing for most of us to do. Sometimes hatred proves so powerful that it overwhelms and eclipses love, bringing the relationship to an end. More often we repress awareness of our hostile feelings; or we might split them off and direct them elsewhere, away from the people we care about.

In other words, splitting as a psychological defense mechanism resolves emotional ambivalence -- love and hatred toward the same person -- by splitting off one half of those feelings and directing them elsewhere, away from the loved one. ...

And when you consider that a great many of the challenges we confront are polarities to be managed, not problems to be solved, our battles to be won, all sorts of dysfunction emerges from splitting. By analogy, try splitting inhaling from exhaling and see what happens. I think the same is true for many problems we face in social institutions and in society at large.

Saturday Links

1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)

"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their uniform color.

Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.

Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."

 2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...

... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.

The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies. ...

3. Speaking of technology and its impact on industries Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

4. Businessweek has a piece about Indie Capitalism

Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:

• Creativity generates economic value. Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which translates into a market advantage and big margins.

• Creativity drives capitalism. These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.

• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth. Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth, growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and growth.

5. Business Insider reports on Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Returning To America For The First Time In Decades

 The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.

Here's why:

1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...

2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...

3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...

4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...

5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...

6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.

7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.

6. 3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production.

"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."

7. And more about 3-D Printing. 3D Printing On The Frontlines — Army Deploying $2.8M Mobile Fabrication Labs.

Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.

But how would military operations change if soldiers on the battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and in very little time? ...

8. And how about 4-D printing? 4D Printing Is The Future Of 3D Printing And It’s Already Here

"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."

7. The New York Times reports that Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit

The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.

The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.

The Economist also posted this chart this week:

8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"

9.  Europe's Youth Unemployment Nightmare Started Long Before The Euro Crisis 

"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."

10. Benjamin Wright - Book Review: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Vieth, Jr.

11. Rough Type: Students to e-textbooks: no thanks

"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."

12. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

13. Top 10 Causes of Death in the U.S.

14. ABC reports that Young Hispanics Leaving Catholic Church for Protestant Faith

The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29 identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older than 50.

15. Robert Jones says Don't write off mainline Protestants

The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.

16.Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion while liberals, and praticularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.

17. Bruce Fieler has an interesting piece in the Atlantic. Want to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement

Saturday Links

1. Christian History magazine has an entire issue devoted to Christians in the New Industrial Economy: The World Changed, the Church Responded. It is a priceless collection of essays on how various religious traditions responded to (or failed to) the challenges of the Industrial Revolution.

Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.

2. Orange County Register says Don't count out mainline Protestants yet.

As flocks shrink, denominations that once defined America fight to stay relevant with new ways of reaching out.

3. The Washington Post reports that Megachurches thriving in tough economic times.

"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new survey shows.

Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years. Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."

4. Harvard Business Review: Steve Blank on Why Big Companies Can't Innovate

... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...

... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...

... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...

... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...

5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea

6. The rise of post-industrial China? (Economist)

7. New Geography thinks, U.S. LATE TO THE PARTY ON LATIN AMERICA, AFRICA.

"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.

This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."

8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.

9. A Portrait of U.S. Immigrants

Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.

10. Marketing Daily says More Latinos See Themselves As Bicultural

With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a Latino market perceived to be homogenous?

11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”

"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about the scarcity of resources.  (If you belong to both of those groups, there is little advice that I can offer.)  However, in between those poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."

12. Being a Republican or a Democrat may all be in your head: Republican Brains Differ From Democrats' In New FMRI Study

... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...

... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs, however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents' political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the researchers wrote. ...

13. Health Care Without the Doctors Coming to a Walmart Near You

STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.

He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...

... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...

14. Is this a case of marketing going too far? Young Japanese Women Rent Out Their Bare Legs as Advertising Space

15. Nanotechnology Rebuilds the Periodic Table

Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the building blocks for cutting-edge materials.

Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...

16. ExtremeTech says NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane.

17. Atlantic Cities has some great maps showing the impact of railroads on travel time in the early 19th Century, thus shrinking the nation. A Mapped History of Train Travel in the United States

18. A soccer goalie's worst nightmare.

19. You might want to think twice before a game of horse with this cheerleader.

Is the Default Position Shifting to Subsidiarity?

Catholic Culture: Is the Default Position Shifting to Subsidiarity?

Not so long ago, most ecclesiastical officials and Catholic academicians emphasized solidarity as a political ideal. Owing to a common misunderstanding of both government and solidarity, that emphasis was almost always at the expense of subsidiarity. In recent years, however, the tide in favor of subsidiarity has begun to turn.

It remains true that concern for the poor and marginalized must be a significant political priority, reflected in how we conceive and use government. But what too many Catholics missed for much of the twentieth century was that solidarity is not really a political virtue at all, whereas subsidiarity is. Solidarity is the concern of all for all. It is the sense of responsibility we are all supposed to have for each other. It leads to that true care and reciprocity which are the marks of a healthy society, and it is prior to politics and government.

But insofar as solidarity has been incorrectly viewed as a political virtue, too many Catholics have insisted on the need to mimic solidarity by using government to enforce what they think the results of solidarity should look like. ... 

... In contrast, the principle of subsidiarity is distinctively a political virtue, though not exclusively so. Based on the truth that human dignity includes the right and the duty of persons to freely participate in the solutions to their own problems, the principle of subsidiarity states that everything should be done at the lowest possible level of organization, and that whenever something more is needed, higher levels of organization are obliged to assist lower levels rather than to supplant them. This means that in the political order the virtue of subsidiarity actually preserves and fosters the conditions within which solidarity can flourish, even if solidarity does not necessarily flourish as a direct result. ...

 

Fifty Equal States

Fakeisthenewreal.org: Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population)

Their methodology is pretty interesting. I now live in Nodaway. What do you think?

The Nordic countries: The next supermodel

The Economist: The Nordic countries: The next supermodel

Politicians from both right and left could learn from the Nordic countries.

...The idea of lean Nordic government will come as a shock both to French leftists who dream of socialist Scandinavia and to American conservatives who fear that Barack Obama is bent on “Swedenisation”. They are out of date. In the 1970s and 1980s the Nordics were indeed tax-and-spend countries. Sweden’s public spending reached 67% of GDP in 1993. Astrid Lindgren, the inventor of Pippi Longstocking, was forced to pay more than 100% of her income in taxes. But tax-and-spend did not work: Sweden fell from being the fourth-richest country in the world in 1970 to the 14th in 1993.

Since then the Nordics have changed course—mainly to the right. Government’s share of GDP in Sweden, which has dropped by around 18 percentage points, is lower than France’s and could soon be lower than Britain’s. Taxes have been cut: the corporate rate is 22%, far lower than America’s. The Nordics have focused on balancing the books. While Mr Obama and Congress dither over entitlement reform, Sweden has reformed its pension system (see Free exchange). Its budget deficit is 0.3% of GDP; America’s is 7%.

On public services the Nordics have been similarly pragmatic. So long as public services work, they do not mind who provides them. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Sweden has a universal system of school vouchers, with private for-profit schools competing with public schools. Denmark also has vouchers—but ones that you can top up. When it comes to choice, Milton Friedman would be more at home in Stockholm than in Washington, DC.

All Western politicians claim to promote transparency and technology. The Nordics can do so with more justification than most. The performance of all schools and hospitals is measured. Governments are forced to operate in the harsh light of day: Sweden gives everyone access to official records. Politicians are vilified if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. The home of Skype and Spotify is also a leader in e-government: you can pay your taxes with an SMS message.

This may sound like enhanced Thatcherism, but the Nordics also offer something for the progressive left by proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state: they employ 30% of their workforce in the public sector, compared with an OECD average of 15%. They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies: Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China’s Geely. But they also focus on the long term—most obviously through Norway’s $600 billion sovereign-wealth fund—and they look for ways to temper capitalism’s harsher effects. Denmark, for instance, has a system of “flexicurity” that makes it easier for employers to sack people but provides support and training for the unemployed, and Finland organises venture-capital networks. ...