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. 

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?"

How to Increase Intergenerational Mobility

Intergenerational mobility is low in the US. Economist Timothy Taylor discusses findings from a recent study that investigates how we might make improvements: Intergenerational Mobility and Neighborhood Effects. The unique study incorporates 20.5 million Americans and enables them to analyze down to the city block level.

 

The study determined that neighborhood (.5 mile radius around family) is twice as significant in determining upward mobility compared to family status. Two policy options to consider:

 

First, empowering families to move to locations with greater opportunities. For a variety of reasons, low-income families have significant barriers in relocating for better opportunities. The article shows that when low-income people are provided with brokerage service (much like wealthy professionals get when being relocated) they relocate at dramatically higher rates.

 

Second, rebuilding impoverished neighborhoods with the institutions and resources necessary to achieve upward mobility for people who live there. This one is more problematic to measure and therefore more difficult to confidently address. But it does seem to suggest neighborhood development, including economic development, is more critical than isolated aid to families. It seems aid to families without corresponding improvement in societal support systems is not highly effective. 

Why Population Control Is Not The Answer to Climate Change

Population control is sometimes championed as a way to fight climate change. Bernie Sanders recently raised this idea. The world population is growing. There are 7.7 billion people today. There will be nearly 11 billion in 2100, according to United Nations estimates. Extra people mean extra CO2 emissions. While two children per woman may seem reasonable, women in the poorest countries can average five or sex. Sanders and others believe this excess fertility is why the world population is growing. Fewer children will mean less CO2. Unfortunately, this perception is decades out of date.

We are already at “peak children.” Globally, there are 680 million children under the age of five. U.N. projections show a peak of 700 million about 2060. There are projected to be 650 million children in 2100, less children than there are today. Yet the overall population will grow by nearly 50%. How can that be? It is the compounding effect of people already born that will drive population growth over the next century, not excessive birth rates.

Trends in Fertility

Assume women have two children over their lifetime. They replace themselves and one other. Population size will be stable from generation to generation. (The actual replacement fertility rate for an affluent nation is 2.1 children per woman.) Throughout history, the total fertility rate has been six or seven children. One quarter of children died before their first birthday. Another sizable percentage died before age five. Of those who made it past five, many died before marrying and having children. High fertility rates ensured a couple of children would survive to continue the family.

As affluence emerged and health practices changed (first in Europe and then spreading elsewhere) more children survived into adulthood. We needed fewer births to perpetuate a family but it took a while for customs related to fertility to adjust downward. That lag between declining death rates and declining fertility rates is what led to the population explosion that began two centuries ago. That growth accelerated into the twentieth century and continues into its final stages today. As recently as the 1960s, the global total fertility rate was as high as five children per woman.

Today, the global total fertility rate is about 2.4 and dropping, but the rate is not evenly spread throughout the world. Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and other regions have fertility rates below the replacement rate, well below it in many nations. A handful of smaller poor countries have fertility rates of five or six, but they also have some of the highest child death rates. The world average is fast approaching the 2.1 replacement rate. However, because the global fertility rate has usually been higher than the replacement rate for most of us now living, it means the cohort of people born one year is usually larger than the cohort of people born the previous year. So let us think about what that means for the future.

The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility

To keep things simple, assume going forward that we birth the same number of children each year, the death rate stays the same, and no one lives past one hundred years. Now say there are 100,000 people age 100. By next year, all will have died. The group that was 99 will now be 100. Because more of them were born, there will now be, say, 105,000 people 100 years old. After two years have passed, the new group of 100 hundred year old people will be the people who are 98 years old today. They will be a still larger group. That will continue for one hundred years.

At the other end of the age continuum, we have the largest number of children ever born in a year and the largest age cohort alive. A year later, this youngest age cohort will replace a smaller cohort a year older than them. But keep in mind that for the next forty-five years the number of women of childbearing age will be increasing each year. Therefore, each year the total fertility rate will need to fall slightly more below the replacement rate if the population is to stabilize. It can then rise to the replacement rate after forty-five years. This will continue until 2120 when each age cohort is the largest age cohort that has ever existed for that age. This is the primary driver of population growth going forward but there is at least one other key factor. (Clearly, I am oversimplifying to illustrate my point. We are not down to replacement rate fertility, so there is still some marginal population growth due to “excess” fertility.)

Furthermore, actual global death rates are not constant. They are dropping. People are living longer. So not only is each age cohort larger than the one before, it is living slightly longer than the one before. This too contributes to population growth over coming decades.

Therefore, we would need considerably less than replacement-rate fertility to limit global population growth substantially. In fact, there are credible projections of a population peak at fewer than nine billion. Demographers once assumed transition to low fertility and death rates would stabilize at about the replacement rate. Instead, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement rate in nearly every affluent nation, in some cases nearly one child per woman. From the narrow view of CO2 emissions, this may look like a good thing. From a holistic standpoint, many social scientists are troubled. Depopulation can be as destructive to human well-being as overpopulation.

The Depopulation Problem

A vibrant society needs a critical mass of productive workers relative to its dependents (primarily children and the elderly.) This is the dependency ratio (dependents divided by workers multiplied by 100). With excessively low fertility rates, it is possible to have a great imbalance with a large number of seniors and too few workers to provide for society. We have already seen that current UN projections say we will have nearly the same number of children now as in 2100 but the overall population will be nearly 50% larger at eleven billion. That growth is a consequence of a burgeoning number of elders. A smaller population of nine billion may mean fewer total people but an even worse dependency ratio.

Modest help may come from lengthening the number of years people work or a higher participation rate in the work force for working age people but at some point that will be insufficient. Then consider the possibility of medical breakthroughs that cure cancer or dramatically reduce heart disease. That means more people living longer, intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance.

As an ever shrinking number of people (potentially a minority of the population) is expected to support everyone else, improvement in living standards will begin to stall and possibly reverse, making the world ripe for any number of societal dysfunctions. It will not take eighty years for this challenge to become real. Japan is already struggling with these issues. China is already headed down this road. One can envision China opening up to immigration from the remaining regions with the highest fertility rate and investing there resources in growth economies, but if every nation is headed to fertility rates well below the replacement rates, that is only a temporary fix. The dependency ratio for a world with eleven billion people is already seen as a challenge. The only way to get a peak population under nine billion people is to achieve fertility rates well below replacement rates substantially intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance just a generation or two down the road. (For more detail see the Brookings' piece, How will we cope when there are too few young people in the world?)

Decoupled Economic Growth

At the most basic level, climate policy needs to be about economic growth decoupled from CO2 emissions. Population growth is one issue driving this need for economic growth. But also consider people are advocating for a $15 living wage for every worker in the United States. That would put nearly every US worker in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. Meanwhile, despite astonishing improvements in human well-being around the world and the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, there are still hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. A couple billion more have more stable lives but still live well below standards we would consider tolerable. If it is a matter of justice that everyone in the US has a $15 an hour living standard, then it is only just that all citizens of the world have something approximating that standard. The only way that happens is through economic growth. Measures like population control are shortsighted and potentially calamitous. The principle mission is decoupling economic growth from fossil fuel consumption, along with other disruptive measures like decoupling land use from agricultural production.

Why So Much Outrage? Thinking About My Discipleship

Bloomberg had an excellent piece by science journalist Faye Flam, titled It's an Outrage! See? Look How Outraged I Am! Her lead is "Science is starting to shed some light on the curiously continuous cycle of moral outrages." Expressions of collective outrage are not particularly new but it does seem to me the frequency of expressed outrage, and outrage over more and more trivial events, has increased. Why? Psychologists offer this thought:

Psychologists say it all starts to make sense if you think of outrage as a form of display. Expressing it advertises a person’s views and allegiances to potential allies. And the more popular a victim's cause, the less risky it is to join in displaying your umbrage.

So is the outrage disingenuous?

 

Psychologist Jillian Jordan, who led the Yale experiment, said she wasn't trying to suggest that people were faking outrage for the purpose of looking good. She believes people genuinely feel the outrage. The point was to explain the urge to share it so ostentatiously.

 

In real-world cases, most people unconsciously tally costs and benefits, said Harvard psychologist Max Krasnow. There is a cost to outrage, in terms of social risk. The cost shrinks when there are more and more people expressing it in solidarity. If you’re the only person lobbing yogurt at the Icelandic Parliament, you might well get arrested. But if you’re part of a teeming mob, your collective display of outrage can lead to the ousting of the prime minister.

 

So what triggers outrage?

Why do some incidents provoke almost universal outrage and others set off only those in certain age groups or of particular political leanings? One of the most universal sources of outrage is stealing or hoarding resources, said psychologist Eric Pederson. The theory is that this is ingrained in humans because our ancestors' foraging cultures survived by sharing; if Joe helped himself to what others hunted and gathered, but then did not share his good fortune when he found berries or killed a wildebeest, he’d get in deep trouble.

Humanity’s deeply rooted antipathy for cheaters helps explain the outrage over the tax evaders revealed by the Panama Papers. But in other cases, said psychologist Robert Boyd, the definition of what's outrageous is dictated by less objectively obvious cultural norms. Humans are wired to pick up cultural rules and norms, and to aim outrage at violators, he said. Cultural norms vary by political leanings, geography and other factors. Often there’s a large generation gap.

Harvard’s Krasnow said it all comes back to the fact that displays are aimed at potential allies. An outraged person may have no personal tie to a given issue, but outrage can signal sympathy with those who do. This can be quite noble and selfless, not entirely self-serving; the two blur together in ways that allow human civilization to work to the extent that it does.

According to an anthropologist I read, human reason evolved in the context of communal survival. People observed patterns in events around them and developed heuristic models for survival. They fashioned stories to make sense of events and their place in them. Reason developed as a way to reinforce stories and strengthen societal cohesion. Which is also to say, reason that challenged societal stories and cohesion was a threat. We are not naturally wired for objectivity.

 

It seems to me that expression of outrage serves a similar function. Narrowly, outrage is about calling out destructive behavior, but more broadly, it is about expressing social solidarity. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is the driving motivator.

 

I have long suspected that the rising waves of outrage may have more and more to do with a need for social solidarity than moral indignation. In a post-modern era, identity is much harder to define and solidify, making us feel more insecure. That insecurity leads us to seek out opportunities for solidarity. Expressing outrage is just such an opportunity, particularly if the offending party/parties are of a "tribe" whom we jointly find disagreeable. The person(s) at the center of the outrage may become completely objectified, serving as a prop in the solidarity building exercise. Exaggerations, misrepresentations, and apocryphal stories will often be added to heighten the outrage and amplify the endorphin-releasing satisfaction that comes from intensely felt "outrage" solidarity.

 

The problem, of course, is that in our rush to solidarity we can dehumanize others and make poor decisions. Applying a little objectivity will often show a more complex set of circumstances than our outrage will allow. Over the years, I can't possibly recall the number of times I have calmly pointed out some exaggeration or misinformation in a charged conversation. It doesn't matter that I may even be entirely sympathetic with those who are outraged. The reaction is predictable. I am a traitor. I am at least being dismissive of people's suffering. When I point out their is no change in the number police officers killed on duty in the face of claims of increasing murderous violence against police officers because of Black Lives Matter, I am insensitive to police officers. When I point that global extreme-poverty has halved over the past thirty years and global inequality is declining in the face of claims that "neoliberal capitalism" is making the poor poorer and driving up inequality, I am insensitive to people suffering in poverty. Objective input is not welcome because ultimately the conversation is about subjective commitments, not objective discernment.

 

Flam closes the article with:

 

“It’s a complicated game we’re playing," Krasnow said, "and sometimes the best strategy is to say nothing.”

 

I agree but the operative word is "sometimes." How about the other times? How are we to conduct ourselves then? I do not write this as someone who has achieved objectivity and never participates in outrage. Not every expression of outrage is inappropriate. Hardly! And yet, I am self-aware enough to see the dehumanizing, exaggerating, hyperbolic, demon lurking at the edge of consciousness when I am outraged. I am aware of how good it feels to be in solidarity with a tribe who feels my intense outrage. As a Christian, I know discipleship has political consequences but does following Jesus really look like a endless rolling wave of outrage? What does it mean when we are so quick to misrepresent facts and dehumanize our opponents when the one we say we follow said:

 

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors [and the Republicans, and the Democrats, and the ...] doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matt 5:43-48)

 

It is almost as if Jesus is saying that love should be our solidifying value, not outrage. I do not know. I still working on it. Let me know if you figure it out.

Confronting Liberal and Conservative Biases on Science

New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter has an excellent piece about how ideology shapes our embrace/rejection of science. The left loves to harangue about the "anti-science" right when in fact the left participates just as much in the same anti-science behavior, and the left's anti-science behavior is every bit as destructive.

“The left is turning anti-science,” Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape who as a venture capitalist has become one of the most prominent thinkers of Silicon Valley, told me not long ago.

He was reflecting broadly about science and technology. His concerns ranged from liberals’ fear of genetically modified organisms to their mistrust of technology’s displacement of workers in some industries. “San Francisco is an interesting case,” he noted. “The left has become reactionary.”

Still, liberal biases may be most dangerous in the context of climate change, the most significant scientific and technological challenge of our time. For starters, they stand against the only technology with an established track record of generating electricity at scale while emitting virtually no greenhouse gases: nuclear power.

Only 35 percent of Democrats, compared with 60 percent of Republicans, favor building more nuclear power plants, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

It is the G.O.P. that is closer to the scientific consensus. According to a separate Pew poll of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 65 percent of scientists want more nuclear power too.

He goes on to note:

Research suggests that better scientific knowledge will not be sufficient, on its own, to overcome our biases. Neither will it be mostly about improving education in STEM fields. To defeat our scientific phobias and taboos will require understanding how the findings of science and their consequences fit into the cultural makeup of both liberals and conservatives.

Explaining in more detail:

It is not hard to figure out the biases. People on the right tend to like private businesses, which they see as productive job creators. They mistrust government. It’s not surprising they will play down climate change when it seems to imply a package of policies that curb the actions of the former and give a bigger role to the latter.

On the left, by contrast, people tend to mistrust corporations — especially big ones — as corrupt and destructive. These are the institutions bringing us both nuclear power and genetically modified agriculture.

“When science is aligned with big corporations the left immediately, intuitively perceives the technology as not benefiting the greater good but only benefiting the corporation,” said Matthew Nisbet, an expert on the communication of science at Northeastern University.

So when assessing the risks of different technological options, the left finds the risk of nuclear energy looming the highest, regardless of contrary evidence.

This doesn’t affect only beliefs about climate change and energy policy. The research identified similar distortions in people’s beliefs about the scientific consensus on the consequences of allowing concealed handguns. Biases also color beliefs in what science says and means across a range of other issues.

In the context of climate change, this heuristic presents an odd problem. It suggests that attitudes about climate change have little to do with education and people’s understanding of science.

Fixing it won’t require just better science. Eliminating the roadblocks against taking substantive action against climate change may require somehow dissociating the scientific facts from deeply rooted preferences about the world we want to live in, on both sides of the ideological divide.

And it is the last sentence that is key. How do we do that! It seems to me we have to create spaces for productive conversations. No matter how emotionally satisfying it may be to engage in tribal disdain for those of another tribe for being "anti-science," it is precisely this behavior that entrenches those we may wish to persuade. And the glaring truth is that very very few of us are pro-science. We are pro-ideology and pro-heuristics, and happy to embrace science when it meets these prior concerns. The reality is that there are multiple ways to frame an agenda. So another piece of the puzzle is to enter the mind of opponents and to figure out how to frame concerns in a way that resonates with things they value. But research shows, unsurprisingly, that we nearly always attempt persuasion from the angle that is most persuasive for us, projecting our values on to others. It usually has the effect of driving the opponent in further away.

I think the answer lies with these considerations. I didn't say it was an easy answer. What thoughts do you have?

Rosling Univeristy (How to be smarter than a chimp)

Are you smarter than a chimp? When it comes to knowledge about global socioeconomic trends, there is a good chance you are not. For years, Swedish global health expert, Hans Rosling, has been giving Ted talks and making presentations about global trends. One his favorite teaching tools is to ask people a question like this:

Globally, over the past 20 years, the rate extreme poverty has:

1. Doubled.
2. Stayed the same.
3. Decreased by more than half.

Now chimps will select at random, giving a 33% chance of each answer. Yet when Rosling asks audiences, at least half will say A, a sizable percentage will say B, while a few will say C. Yet C is the correct answer! This is the case on one variable after another. Audiences routinely score worse than chimps, choosing the most negative option.

As an old adage has it, "It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know that ain't so." That we routinely pick the wrong answer more often than chimps shows that we clearly we have bias.

In the Ted talk, How not to be ignorant about the world, Hans' son Rosling notes that part of the problem is our education system. Teachers go to college at a particular point in time and learn the state of the world at that time. But they tend not to learn about ongoing developments. The data has often been hard to come by and hard to interpret. So teachers are biased by what they learned years ago. (Reporter have the same problem.) But there are other factors.

During our evolutionary history, our brains became wired to notice threats. Hunters walking through the brush who were attentive to the possibility of tigers lying in wait, likely survived those who went about carelessly enjoying a beautiful day. So when we reflect on broad human trends, we are disposed to fixate on perceived threats. What was useful for us in the wild, is counter-productive for us as we try to interpret socioeconomic trends. If you want to outscore a chimp on an exam about global well-being, Ola Rosling suggests that you must drop your predispositions and adopt these four rules of thumb:

1. Assume most things are improving.
2. Assume most people are in the middle of a distribution, not a binary of rich and poor.
3. Assume social development precedes becoming wealthy. (Don’t assume that a population must be rich before meeting basic social needs.)
4. Assume you are exaggerating the threat if the topic is something about which you personally have great fear.

Additionally, Hans, Ola, and others have been working to build the Gapminder website to provide you with data that can be presented in meaningful ways. But one of the most important contributions the Roslings have made is their collection of entertaining and informative videos. In this post I am including every video I can find with a brief annotation. (I'll add more as I find any.) Many of the videos overlap or cover similar data but they are all well worth viewing. So here is your resource for becoming smarter than a chimp. Don't say I never gave you anything.

(This link also has links to most of these videos including some shorts not listed here: Gapminder Video)

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes (2010)

If you are just getting acquainted with Rosling, I'd begin here. This 4 minute presentation gives you a quick sense of what he is talking about.

 

Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world. TED June 2014

This is the second video to watch. The front half is Hans making his case that the world is improving and the back half is Ola explaining, as I recounted above, why are so disinclined to see positive change.

 

Hans Rosling: The magic washing machine. TED December 2010

This is the third one to watch. This one of my favorites. While fully embracing the concern about environmental impacts of economic growth, Rosling shows the importance of economic growth through the story of the washing machine.

 

THE REST ARE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Hans Rosling: The best stats you've ever seen. TED February 2006

The TED presentation that kicked it all off. He focuses on the positive changes underway in world and points to his efforts to liberate, integrate, and animate data, and to find ways to present data the public finds understandable.

 

Hans Rosling: New Insights on Poverty. TED March 2007

Rosling shows that social development tends to precede economic development. He addresses the issue that unfortunately to date, economic development has always been based on fossil fuels. Higher yields, technology, and markets are key to ending poverty but there are more dimensions that need our attention like human rights, environment, governance, economic growth, education, health, and culture. The ending has a great surprise!

 

Human Rights and Democracy Statistics- Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling describes why human rights are so hard describe and evaluate.

Source

Yes they can! - Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling explains that poor nations will one day become prosperous and we should welcome that.

Source

Poor Beats Rich in MDG Race - Gapminder c. 2008

Rosling shows that countries that have developed from poverty to well-being have done so at far faster rates that Western nations did. Poor countries today can make the transition much quicker because of what previous countries have learned.

Source

What stops population growth? - Gapminder c. 2008

The key to ending population is small families, and the key to small families is childhood survival.

Source

Hans Rosling: Insights on HIV, in stunning data visuals. TED February 2009

Uses Gapminder data to show nuances in how AIDS has spread and what it takes to  defeat it.

 

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset. TED June 2009

This is the third video should watch. Rosling deconstructs the dichotomy of wealthy and developing nations, and challenges the idea of thinking in sweeping terms like "Africa."

 

The Joy of Stats with Professor Hans Rosling - Gapminder c. 2010

Rosling shows how making data available and animating is empowering people to make better decisions, sometimes without really realizing they are using statistics.

Source

Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when. TED Nov 2009

Rosling forecasts when China and India catches up with the USA and UK.

 

 Hans Rosling: Global population growth, box by box. TED June 2010

 Rosling says that child survival is the new green. This video explains why.

 

Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? We're winning the war against child mortality. TED September 2010

Rosling breaks down the remarkable trends in child mortality. Education of women accounts for at least 50% of the drop.

 

 

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. TED April 2012

Religion is not a factor in family size. No significant difference between Islamic and Christian countries when it comes to births per woman. The defining difference is economic well-being.

 

 DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population. BBC November 2013

 A one hour investigation into the dynamics of population growth using stories about real live families interspersed with Rosling's entertaining presentation of data.

 

Don't Panic - How to End Poverty in 15 Years. BBC September 2015

No embed is available.

You can view the video here.

Here is a link to a series of short videos on how to use development data visually.

An introduction to visualising development data

 

Tom's Shoes: A Closer Look (Adam Ruins Everything)

This video is funny and disturbing at the same time. Good intentions, stereotypes, and warm fuzzies can be destructive. Thinking with an economic lens that evaluates actual outcomes is essential. Yet, attempts to bring such a lens to the conversation is usually met with strong resistance. It feels so right, how could it be wrong? As I've said over and over - We need to do mission with warm hearts and cool heads. We need to think and observe, not just emote and respond.

The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality

The Atlantic: The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality

"In his upcoming October cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how mass incarceration has affected African American families. "There's a long history in this country of dealing with problems in the African American community through the criminal justice system," he says in this animated interview. "The enduring view of African Americans in this country is as a race of people who are prone to criminality." You can read the full story on September 15, 2015."

Looks like and interesting series.

Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

Scientific American: Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says They Are Safe

... In the paper, we identify several intuitions that may affect people’s perception of GMOs.Psychological essentialism, for instance, makes us think of DNA as an organism’s “essence” - an unobservable and immutable core that causes the organism’s behaviour and development and determines its identity. As such, when a gene is transferred between two distantly related species, people are likely to believe that this process will cause characteristics typical of the source organism to emerge in the recipient. For example, in an opinion survey in the United States, more than half of respondents said that a tomato modified with fish DNA would taste like fish (of course, it would not).

Essentialism clearly plays a role in public attitudes towards GMOs. People are typically more opposed to GM applications that involve the transfer of DNA between two different species (“transgenic”) than within the same species (“cisgenic”). Anti-GMO organizations, such as NGOs, exploit these intuitions by publishing images of tomatoes with fish tails or by telling the public that companies modify corn with scorpion DNA to make crispier cereals.      

Intuitions about purposes and intentions also have an impact on people’s thinking about GMOs. They render us vulnerable to the idea that purely natural phenomena exist or happen for a purpose that is intended by some agent. These assumptions are part and parcel of religious beliefs, but in secular environments they lead people to regard nature as a beneficial process or entity that secures our wellbeing and that humans shouldn’t meddle with. In the context of opposition to GMOs, genetic modification is deemed “unnatural” and biotechnologists are accused of “playing God”. The popular term “Frankenfood” captures what is at stake: by going against the will of nature in an act of hubris, we are bound to bring enormous disaster upon ourselves.

Disgust also affects people’s attitudes towards GMOs. The emotion probably evolved, at least in part, as a pathogen avoidance mechanism, preventing the body from consuming or touching harmful substances. We feel repelled by things that possibly contain or indicate the presence of pathogens such as bodily fluids, rotten meat, and maggots. This would explain why disgust operates on a hair trigger: it is better to forego an edible meal under the misguided assumption that it is contaminated, than to consume sickening, or even lethal, food that is erroneously thought to be safe. Hence, disgust can be elicited by completely innocuous food. ...

... The impact of intuitions and emotions on people’s understanding of, and attitudes towards, GMOs has important implications for science education and communication. Because the mind is prone to distorting or rejecting scientific information in favour of more intuitive beliefs, simply transmitting the facts will not necessarily persuade people of the safety, or benefits, of GMOs, especially if people have been subjected to emotive, anti-GMO propaganda.

In the long run, education starting from a young age and specifically targeted at tackling common misconceptions might immunize the population against unsubstantiated anti-GMO messages. Other concerns can be addressed and discussed in the wider context of agricultural practices and the place of science and technology in society. However, for now, the best way to turn the tide and generate a more positive public response to GMOs is to play into people’s intuitions as well. For instance, emphasizing the benefits of current and future GM applications — improved soil structures because herbicide resistant crops require less or no tilling, higher income for farmers in developing countries, reduced vitamin A deficiency, virus and drought resistance, to name a few — might constitute the most effective approach to changing people’s minds. Given the benefits and promises of GM technology, such a change is much needed.

This is one of the most insightful articles I've read on the topic. I think his advice in the last paragraph is particularly important and needs to be heeded when dealing with any number of unjustified oppositions to factual realities - from climate change, to vaccinations, to nuclear power. Yet our propensity is to just shout the facts louder and to use opposition to the facts as a rallying cry for our tribe versus the "anti-science" dolts from the other tribe.

Fair Trade: Does It Help Poor Workers?

From Marginal Revolution University.

Food Deserts Are Not The Problem

National Bureau of Economic Research: What Drives Nutritional Disparities? Retail Access and Food Purchases Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum

Food deserts are not the problem when it comes to poor nutrition for low-income people, at least according to this study.

Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell

NBER Working Paper No. 21126
Issued in April 2015
NBER Program(s):   HE

The poor diets of many consumers are often attributed to limited access to healthy foods. In this paper, we use detailed data describing the healthfulness of household food purchases and the retail landscapes in which these consumers are making these decisions to study the role of access in explaining why some people in the United States eat more nutritious foods than others. We first confirm that households with lower income and education purchase less healthful foods. We then measure the spatial variation in the average nutritional quality of available food products across local markets, revealing that healthy foods are less likely to be available in low-income neighborhoods. Though significant, spatial differences in access are small and explain only a fraction of the variation that we observe in the nutritional content of household purchases. Systematic socioeconomic disparities in household purchases persist after controlling for access: even in the same store, more educated households purchase more healthful foods. Consistent with this result, we further find that the nutritional quality of purchases made by households with low levels of income and education respond very little when new stores enter or when existing stores change their product offerings. Together, our results indicate that policies aimed at improving access to healthy foods in underserved areas will leave most of the socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption intact.

China and India Overtake Mexico for Inflow of Foreign-Born US Residents

Conversable Economist: China and India Overtake Mexico for Inflow of Foreign-Born US Residents

Americans, Led by Democrats, Get Friendlier With Free Trade

Conversable Economist: Americans, Led by Democrats, Get Friendlier With Free Trade

" ... I welcome the overall shift toward a more positive view of foreign trade among Americans. As I've argued on this blog before, the next few decades seem likely to be a time when the most rapid economic growth is happening outside the high-income countries of the world, and finding ways for the US economy to connect with and participate in that rapid growth could be an important driver of US economic growth in the decades ahead.  In a broad sense, US attitudes over foreign trade mirror the behavior of the US trade deficit: that is, when the US trade deficit was getting worse in the early 2000s, the share of those viewing trade as a "threat" was rising, but at about the same time that the US trade deficit started declining, the share of those viewing trade as an "opportunity" started to rise.

However, I feel considerable uncertainty over how to interpret these findings. For example, it's not clear to me why Democrats and Independents are shifting their opinions about trade more strongly than Republicans. This shift doesn't seem to reflect the political divisions in Congress, where it seems that Republicans are more often the ones to be pushing for agreements to reduce trade barriers and Democrats are more likely to be opposing them."

From Live Aid to Live Trade

Thirty years ago this July, Bob Geldof helped organize Live Aid, a concert to help victims of a lengthy famine in Ethiopia. Months earlier, he was behind the release of the song Do They Know It's Christmas? that raised money for Ethiopia as well. While clearly well intended, both ventures - and the Aid ventures they would spawn - reflected a highly Western-centric and paternalistic view of Africans, portraying Africans as dysfunctional and helpless without the help of the Great White Hope. Their welfare is a contingent on Western benevolence, not their own initiative and creativity.

Pope John Paul II said the poverty is not lack of wealth. Poverty is exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange. The solution to poverty is appreciation for the God given creative capacity in each person and the inclusion of everyone in networks of productivity and exchange.

Now, thirty years later, some of these rockers are seeing the light. Bono of U2 has been singing the praises of entrepreneurial capitalism for a few years now. (Bono: 'Capitalism Takes More People Out of Poverty Than Aid') And now we learn Bob Geldof himself has entered the venture capital business. (Rock Star Bob Geldof Spearheads U.S. Private-Equity Push Into Ethiopia)

Below is a video interview with Geldof about his ventures. Note that right out of the gate the interviewer challenges Geldof because Geldof will be making a profit off of his ventures. Yes! That is exactly right! That is because profit for all parties is what happens when equals - creative productive people - specialize and began to exchange goods and services. Their profits get invested in expansion or in new ventures, creating more wealth, jobs, and higher standards of living. Instead, the interviewer's paradigm is of a patron to an inferior, an inferior with nothing of value to produce and exchange. Maybe some of our paternalism will begin to fade as these high profile celebrities begin to embrace economic development and exchange.

Welfare is Key to Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth

The Atlantic: Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurial

A common perspective among political conservatives, especially of the libertarian and Tea Party varieties, is that welfare is a drag on economic growth and it is a disincentive to initiative. Paul Ryan wants a safety net and not safety hammock. Some libertarians don’t even want the net. It would be better to let people assume their own risks. Money taxed away by the government is money that people could have used to buy goods and services and boost the economy.

I do not dispute that government programs could be a drag on the economy but this conservative narrative is grossly incomplete! Entrepreneurship and economic innovation are, at the heart, calculations about risk. By taking a bold step, what are the chances I will be better off (however I measure that) and what are the chances I could lose everything? Do the chances of “better off” outweigh the status quo, especially if I could lose even what I have now? So here is the key point: By reducing the risk of losing everything we tip the risk calculation toward taking making more risk, and therefore economic growth.

... Take food stamps. Conservatives have long argued that they breed dependence on government. In a 2014 paper, Olds examined the link between entrepreneurship and food stamps, and found that the expansion of the program in some states in the early 2000s increased the chance that newly eligible households would own an incorporated business by 16 percent. (Incorporated firms are a better proxy for job-creating startups than unincorporated ones.)

Interestingly, most of these new entrepreneurs didn’t actually enroll in the food stamp program. It seems that expanding the availability of food stamps increased business formation by making it less risky for entrepreneurs to strike out on their own. Simply knowing that they could fall back on food stamps if their venture failed was enough to make them more likely to take risks. ...

... The rate of incorporated business ownership for those [CHIP] eligible households just below the cutoff was 31 percent greater than for similarly situated families that could not rely on CHIP to care for their children if they needed it.

The same is true of recent immigrants to the United States. Contrary to claims by the right that welfare keeps immigrants from living up to their historic role as entrepreneurs, CHIP eligibility increased those households’ chances of owning an incorporated business by 28 percent.

The mechanism in each case is the same: publicly funded insurance lowers the risk of starting a business, since entrepreneurs needn’t fear financial ruin. (This same logic explains why more forgiving bankruptcy laws are associated with more entrepreneurship.) ...

... American men were more likely to start a business just after turning 65 and qualifying for Medicare than just before. Here again, government can make entrepreneurship more appealing by making it less risky. ...

... Sometimes, though, a robust safety net may serve to discourage entrepreneurship. The best path in such cases, however, may not be to cut the program, but rather, to reform it. When France lowered the barriers to receiving unemployment insurance, it actually increased the rate of entrepreneurship.. Until 2001, citizens on unemployment insurance had little incentive to start businesses, since doing so would terminate their benefits. Instead of gutting the program, the state simply decided to let anyone who founded a business keep drawing benefits for a limited period, and guaranteed that they would be eligible again if that business failed. The result: a 25 percent increase in the rate of new-firm creation. ...

Other examples are reported. You get the picture. Here is the conclusion.

... The evidence simply does not support the idea of a consistent tradeoff between bigger government and a more entrepreneurial economy. At least in some cases, the reverse is actually true. When governments provide citizens with economic security, they embolden them to take more risks. Properly deployed, a robust social safety net encourages more Americans to attempt the high-wire act of entrepreneurship.

The challenge is not the particular size of government. The issue is the precise programmatic design of any given program. Markets generate a real-time feedback loop that allows independent individuals to prioritize their choices. Government has less effective ways of being adaptive and responsive. I lean toward market solutions where practical. Yet, there are some deliverables that markets alone are not capable of generating. How this mix should all come together is a topic on which reasonable people can disagree. But the idea that government cuts necessarily lead to more economic vitality is no more valid than the idea that wildly throwing money at welfare programs helps people. The real world is far messier than ideologues are willing to grant.

Why We Reject Facts & Embrace Conflict

Real Clear Science: Why We Reject Facts & Embrace Conflict

There is a growing body of research suggesting that when beliefs become tied to one’s sense of identity, they are not easily revised. Instead, when these axioms are threatened, people look for ways to outright dismiss inconvenient data. If this cannot be achieved by highlighting logical, methodological or factual errors, the typical response is to leave the empirical sphere altogether and elevate the discussion into the moral and ideological domain, whose tenets are much more difficult to outright falsify (generally evoking whatever moral framework best suits one’s rhetorical needs).

While often described in pejorative terms, these phenomena may be more akin to “features,” than “bugs,” of our psychology. ...

For instance, the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis holds that the primary function of rationality is social, rather than epistemic. Specifically, our rational faculties were designed to mitigate social conflicts (or conflicting interests). But on this account, rationality is not a neutral mediator. Instead, it is deployed in the service of one’s own interests and desires—which are themselves heavily informed by our sense of identity. ...

... Accordingly, the best way to reduce polarization is not by obscuring critical differences under the pretense of universalism. Instead, societies should aspire to lower the perceived stakes of these identity conflicts.  

For example, rigidity, polarization and groupthink are much less common, and more easily addressed, in deliberations within an identity group; closed-mindedness is largely a response to a perceived threat from outside. In heterogeneous contexts, many of the benefits of this enclave deliberation can be achieved by engaging interlocutors in terms of their own framing and narratives, mindful of their expressed concerns and grievances. That is, identity differences should not be suppressed, avoided or merely tolerated, but instead emphasized, encouraged and substantively respected—emphasizing pluralism over sectarianism. This can create a foundation where good-faith exchange and intergroup cooperation are feasible. Or put another way, the problem isn’t cultural cognition, it’s the lack of cross-cultural competence.

Excellent article!

Why People "Fly from Facts"

Scientific American: Why People "Fly from Facts"

Research shows the appeal of untestable beliefs, and how it leads to a polarized society ...

“There was a scientific study that showed vaccines cause autism.”

“Actually, the researcher in that study lost his medical license, and overwhelming research since then has shown no link between vaccines and autism.”

“Well, regardless, it’s still my personal right as a parent to make decisions for my child.”

Does that exchange sound familiar: a debate that starts with testable factual statements, but then, when the truth becomes inconvenient, the person takes a flight from facts. ...

... We presented 174 American participants who supported or opposed same-sex marriage with (supposed) scientific facts that supported or disputed their position. When the facts opposed their views, our participants—on both sides of the issue—were more likely to state that same-sex marriage isn’t actually about facts, it’s more a question of moral opinion. But, when the facts were on their side, they more often stated that their opinions were fact-based and much less about morals. In other words, we observed something beyond the denial of particular facts: We observed a denial of the relevance of facts. ...

... These experiments show that when people’s beliefs are threatened, they often take flight to a land where facts do not matter. In scientific terms, their beliefs become less “falsifiable” because they can no longer be tested scientifically for verification or refutation. ...

... While it is difficult to objectively test that idea, we can experimentally assess a fundamental question: When people are made to see their important beliefs as relatively less rather than more testable, does it increase polarization and commitment to desired beliefs? Two experiments we conducted suggest so. ...

...  So after examining the power of untestable beliefs, what have we learned about dealing with human psychology? We’ve learned that bias is a disease and to fight it we need a healthy treatment of facts and education.  We find that when facts are injected into the conversation, the symptoms of bias become less severe. But, unfortunately, we’ve also learned that facts can only do so much. To avoid coming to undesirable conclusions, people can fly from the facts and use other tools in their deep belief protecting toolbox.

With the disease of bias, then, societal immunity is better achieved when we encourage people to accept ambiguity, engage in critical thinking, and reject strict ideology. This society is something the new common core education system and at times The Daily Show are at least in theory attempting to help create. We will never eradicate bias—not from others, not from ourselves, and not from society. But we can become a people more free of ideology and less free of facts.

Excellent piece!

Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

Forbes: Groups Aim to Lure Conservatives Out of the Closet on Climate Change

This is an excellent article! Climate change and the left-wing narrative of "capitalism-is-exploitation" have been closely intertwined. Scientist tend to lean left-wing already, but when Al Gore became the official face climate change, that relationship of science and ideology became cemented. The problem is that whenever you wed a scientific challenge to an ideology in a deeply partisan culture, you guarantee rejection by half the populous. The challenge is to find ways to build coalitions across multiple political "tribes."

"A new Republican-led group, the ClearPath Foundation, is angling to breach those prison walls [captivity to climate change skeptics] — not just for members of U.S. Congress, but for moderates and conservatives everywhere who yearn for a meaningful role in the climate conversation. ...

... [Low engagement is] not for lack of understanding, Powell noted. The problem, rather, is that messages on global warming tend to come from groups associated with the far left, and to a lesser extent, the far right of the political spectrum. In between sits a vast audience comprised of political moderates and conservatives who understand the science and, when asked, support many economic and entrepreneurial initiatives that would help curb planet-warming emissions. And yet, no one is speaking directly to them, Powell said — a realization that has provided ClearPath with its mission. ...

And this is key:

... Evidence emerging from the social sciences suggests that the strategy makes some sense — not least because scientific literacy has been shown to be a poor predictor of whether or not most people consider climate change to be an issue of concern. Much more telling are the shared value systems and general world-views that act as both the glue for intellectual tribes within the larger community, and the filter by which those tribes ignore or discount messages emanating from the outside.

Virtually everyone is susceptible to this sort of motivated reasoning, according to one 2012 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, such that conservatives tend to hear undertones of “government overreach” in the words “climate change,” while liberals tend to hear “insatiable corporate greed” when the discussion turns to economic and market-driven solutions to the problem.

From that 2012 study:

“[P]eople who subscribe to a hierarchical, individualistic world-view — one that ties authority to conspicuous social rankings and eschews collective interference with the decisions of individuals possessing such authority — tend to be skeptical of environmental risks. Such people intuitively perceive that widespread acceptance of such risks would license restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior that hierarchical individualists value. In contrast, people who hold an egalitarian, communitarian world-view — one favoring less regimented forms of social organization and greater collective attention to individual needs — tend to be morally suspicious of commerce and industry, to which they attribute social inequity. They therefore find it congenial to believe those forms of behavior are dangerous and worthy of restriction." ...

YES! YES! A thousand times YES! Thus these attempts to frame climate issues in a way that energizes conservative and moderate involvement.

...That’s not to suggest, of course, that Republicans and Democrats won’t continue to disagree on the best strategies for addressing global warming. It’s a safe bet, after all, that many on the left will find GOP-sponsored solutions to be too slow, too shortsighted, or too mindful of industry interests — just as those on the right will view left-leaning initiatives as economically fraught, scientifically unwarranted and alarmist. Such is the cacophony of competing tribal values.

But for those seeking to bring Republicans more fully into the climate discussion, the efforts of ClearPath and other groups to nurture a conversation somewhere between the poles must be a welcome development. ...

I know my progressive and liberal friends don't want to hear it, and it irritates them every time I say this, but I am more convinced than ever that the more you insist on exclusively using capitalism-is-exploitation narratives to solicit support for climate change action, the more narrow will be the support. Many progressives are either so insulated that they cannot see how their ideology bleeds through, or they are aware of their science/ideology linkage and climate change as a tool for promoting an ideological agenda is higher priority than developing broad support for action. Good to see some activists trying to broaden the discussion.

"Anti-Science" and Social Identity

Tom Jacobs has an excellent piece at Pacific Standard, Threaten My Group, and I’ll Belittle Your Science. He writes:

Newly published research provides at least a partial answer. It finds scientific findings that challenge the assumptions of a group you strongly identify with motivate people to derogate the research in online comments.

When informal membership in a group—say, the anti-vaccine movement, or those opposed to genetically modified foods—informs your sense of self, and/or provides a feeling of pride and belonging, a perceived attack on its basic beliefs is grounds for a counterattack. Today, that often means writing nasty, dismissive comments online. ...

... While conceding that there are a number of reasons why gamers would choose to angrily argue with the science rather than seriously consider its implications, the researchers focus on one particularly interesting psychological framework: Social identity theory.

This school of thought contends that group membership (be it political, religious, or something as innocuous as being a fan of a particular sports team) is a significant source of our self-esteem. It follows logically that members have an interest in boosting the group’s status (and degrading the status of competing groups), since its prominence, or lack thereof, rubs off on ourselves. ...

... Perhaps this discovery can provide an opening for educators and policymakers as they attempt to get around this frustrating psychological block. If scientific findings are to be accepted and acted upon, they have to somehow be presented in a way that does not trigger a defensive reaction. 

We remain, in many ways, a tribal species, and if you challenge my “tribe,” don’t be surprised if the response is a metaphorical poke in the eye.

To this I would add that the reason a great majority of people hold a scientifically sanctioned position is not because of science, but also because of social identity. Science affirms my narrative and my tribe. "Science" becomes a weapon to deploy against other tribes. It lets me beat my chest in defiant superiority. It becomes a club with which to bludgeon those who threaten my tribe. Advocacy of the "scientific" position frequently has precious little to do with a concern for science. I don't care if it is climate change, vaccinations, evolution, GMOs, nuclear safety, or a host of other topics. It is far more about affirmation than information.

I'll also add this - if you think you are not affected by this dynamic, then you are likely either Commander Data from Star Trek or delusional. ;-) It is inescapable. We are communal creatures and tribalism is always a factor. The realistic response is to continually strive to be self-aware of our own tribal issues and be more accepting of the tribal buttons we push in others. Only then can we move toward genuine dialog.

Pew: Major Gaps Between the Public, Scientists on Key Issues

From Pew Research:

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.

Low-income communities are not needy -- they have assets

Faith and Leadership Blog: John McKnight: Low-income communities are not needy -- they have assets

Most people and institutions that want to serve poor communities are focused on what the residents lack. “What are the needs?” is often the first question asked.

John McKnight says that approach has it backward.

“I knew from being a neighborhood organizer that you could never change people or neighborhoods with the basic proposition that what we need to do is fix them,” he said. “What made for change was communities that believed they had capacities, skills, abilities and could create power when they came together in a community.”

McKnight is co-director of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and professor emeritus of communications studies and education and social policy at Northwestern University.

He and his longtime colleague John Kretzmann created the asset-based community development (ABCD) strategy for community building. Together they wrote a basic guide to the approach called “Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets.”

McKnight also wrote “The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits” and, with co-author Peter Block, “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.” ...

McKnight spoke to Faith & Leadership about asset-based community development and the role the church can play in helping people identify and leverage their strengths to empower their communities. The following is an edited transcript. ...

Excellent piece on a asset-based community development. Read the whole thing. More churches need to learn to think this way.

I Stand With My Friends ... Black and Blue

There is an old joke about a mealy-mouthed politician who says, “Some of my friends are for this measure. Some of friends are against it. As me for me, I stand with my friends.” I’ve always loved that joke, but through the years I’ve learned that there are circumstances where standing with my friends is the right response.

Today I am told I must choose between supporting police officers and supporting minorities who tell of problems in dealing with law enforcement. Each camp points to the most extreme behavior of opponents to justify dismissive and dehumanizing responses. Yet one of the most challenging articles I’ve read came shortly after the Ferguson verdict. (Why I Feel Torn About the Ferguston Verdict) Safiya Jafari Simmons, a black woman who is the wife of a police officer and the mother of a black son, writes of her dilemma in telling her husband to do what he has to do to come home safe each night while also worrying about what may happen to her son through profiling or a misunderstanding by police. The choice between supporting law enforcement and supporting minorities with frustrations is a false choice.

As we mourn the loss of the two murdered NYPD officers, let us pray for God’s shalom to be made full, especially as we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Shalom. And let us pray that God would reveal to each of us our role in the realization of that shalom.

#bluelivesmatter #blacklivesmatter

Race and Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement

Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt recently recounted this conversation between her and her son:

I’m on an airplane with my son. And he looks up and he sees a black man, and he says, “Hey, that guy looks like daddy.”

And I look at the guy, he doesn’t look anything like my husband, and I notice he’s the only black guy on the plane. And he says, “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.”

And I said, “Well, why would you say that?”

And he looked at me and he said, “I don’t know why I said that.”

And so we’re living with such severe racial stratification that even a 5-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next.

As early as five years old, children (even black children!) learn that black men are suspect. One recent study showed that more than 40% of people think many or most black men are violent. It was 15% for white men and black women, and even lower for white women.

Another interesting study flashed a picture to a group of people. Two white men were fighting. One was holding a knife. When asked who had held the knife, most of the subjects gave the correct answer. A second picture featured a white man and a black man. The white man was holding the knife. When asked about this second picture, most people - black and white - incorrectly identified the black man as holding the knife. Deeply engrained biases actually alter what we see. What might this mean for law enforcement?

I have documented that the rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement has been increasing since 2000, even as the rate of crime has been falling. I take this as a proxy indicator for more violence in general being used by law enforcement. I have also noted two possible contributing factors. First, “Broken windows” policing came into vogue in the wake of the of a crack cocaine epidemic twenty-five years ago. Minor violations were enforced in an effort to restore order in beleaguered neighborhoods. People wanted more aggressive policing. Second, 9/11 has moved our collective psyche toward viewing ourselves as continuously living with imminent threats. Policing tactics become more aggressive in an emergency and maybe this spills over into everyday policing. I would suggest a third factor upon more reflection. The collapse of the economy in 2008, has left many people with much less confidence in the government’s ability to work well and to protect them. Domestic events like Sandy Hook and international events like ISIS beheadings create a sense of world running amok.

These factors may explain why justifiable homicides have been increasing but why should this have a disproportionate impact on blacks killed by police relative the rate crime in their communities? Some activists see a calculated race war against African-Americans. Law enforcement is only one step removed from Bull Connor or the KKK. Studies suggest that upwards of about 25% of Americans have openly hostile attitudes about African-Americans. Law enforcement officers are drawn from society so there are no doubt represented among law enforcement. With 17,000+ law enforcement agencies in the U.S., I have no doubt particular law enforcement agencies can come under the sway of such attitudes. But the idea that law enforcement community is part of some orchestrated act of oppression goes much too far. All the evidence points to most police officers being highly dedicated people who genuinely want to serve all the public well. Does this then mean that apart from a few bad apples, that there is no racial component to what is happening?

As I listen to conversations about recent controversies, I hear a common refrain from many in the white community. If there was no explicit exclamation of racial animus by a police officer, then there was no racism. Any attempt to raise race as a piece of the problem is viewed as “reading things in,” or even worse, an attempt at race-baiting or playing the race card. This seeing racial bias purely in terms of conscious motivations of individual actors errors in another direction.

I think race is an issue in the rise of justifiable homicide rates in at least three important ways. First, look at the strategies and tactics we use. Neighborhoods most at risk from becoming bases of serious criminal activity are poorer neighborhoods. Minorities make up disproportionately high percentages of these neighborhoods. Any aggressive policing strategy, like broken windows, is going to have disproportionate impact on minorities. Confrontational interactions between law enforcement and citizens will rise, and more interactions mean more opportunities for lethal force. In some cases, our policing strategies set the stage for disproportionate negative impacts with police regardless of the motivations of any particular officers.

Second, we have deep-seated perceptions about black communities and black men. Officers have discretion as to use of lethal force when they feel threatened. Like the young black boy on the airplane, there will be a perception of a black man as a greater threat. The threshold for an officer to act or react will be lower. Without any willful malice toward black men, race will have had an impact in the death of some black men. Studies show that, with good training, officers can learn to ignore irrelevant issues like race but how widespread and effective is that training?

Third, there are bad or incompetent actors in law enforcement who do not belong there. Law enforcement is difficult disciplined work and, as with any human organization, there are going to be unqualified people who slip through even the best screening process. So let us not ignore that there are officers who do harbor ill will. Aggressive protocols give opportunity for expression of this will.

So even absent conscious malice by individual players, race is thoroughly “baked in” to the decisions we make about law enforcement. It is easy for me to be emotionally detached from this problem as a middle-aged white guy but when your whole life is peppered with what feels like constant harassment by law enforcement it is a different story. Marry to this frustration the living memory of once pervasive lynching and miscarriages of justice done with impunity toward the black community, and visceral reactions are not surprising. Justifiable homicide is just an extreme example of a more pervasive reality.

So I will conclude this series of three posts suggesting that what we have is not so much a law enforcement problem but a societal problem. There a bad apples and incompetent players in law enforcement, just as there are in any human institution, but law enforcement is made up mostly of dedicated people who want to serve well. The difference here is that when officers mess up people can get killed. Standards must be high. But law enforcement is also responsive to the public’s demands. And if our fearful demands lead to policies that have unintended negative consequences, should we be blaming law enforcement for those consequences? Better collection of data and reforming a process where the final determination on justifiable homicide is being made by law enforcement agencies and prosecuting attorneys who exist in a symbiotic relationship, are two reform measures that are being discussed. But even before that, I think we need to reflect on to what degree fear is driving us to make bad policy decisions.

But there is another societal problem. Racial perceptions pervade our society. As law enforcement draws it officers from our society, it ranks will be reflective of the views held by society as a whole. We certainly need to work to drive racial bias out of law enforcement behavior but foremost we need to work to drive bias out of society. That would in turn rectify law enforcement behavior. And to that end, I would suggest that white Americans need to stop looking to every excess by either rioting protestors or self-aggrandizing activists as a basis for being dismissive of black voices. I’m now moving out beyond the issue of justifiable homicide but we are kidding ourselves if we think we can solve problems like these with a narrow focus on reforming law enforcement.

The two previous posts:

Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers

Why the Increase in Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement?

Why employees earn more at big-box chains than mom-and-pop shops (and other observations)

PBS News Hour has a piece Why employees earn more at big-box chains than mom-and-pop shops.

Contrary to widespread belief, big-box stores and chains have increased wages in the retail sector as they have spread, according to “Do Large Modern Retailers Pay Premium Wages?” (NBER Working Paper No. 20313). Retail wages rise markedly with the size of the chain and the individual store, according to the study by Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Francine Lafontaine and Kathryn Shaw. As retail chains’ share of establishments has risen from one-fifth in 1963 to more than one-third by 2000, the number of jobs that pay better than traditional mom-and-pop stores has proliferated.

Half of the difference in wages between large and small retailers appears to be attributable to differences in the average skill level of workers in the two groups of firms. On average, better workers find their way to the bigger companies. With more levels of hierarchy than small stores, larger establishments also allow better workers to move into management positions, increasing their pay even more.

“The increasing firm size and establishment size that are a hallmark of modern retail are accompanied by increasing wages and opportunities for promotion for many workers,” the authors write. “While retail pay is considerably below that in manufacturing, pay in retail is above that found in service jobs… [These results] contradict the image of the retail sector as one comprised of the lowest paying jobs in the economy.” ...

An anti-consumerism Dickensian narrative frequently emerges among critics of big box stores. Wal-Mart (or another big box) moves into an area, drives out virtuous small businesses and their owners, drives down wages, and throws people into the cold uncaring machinery of greedy behemoth. The narrative is wrong at several levels.

First, there is considerable nostalgia and romance built into the preference for small businesses. In reality, relative to big box stores, small businesses vary widely in quality of management. Management and personnel policies are often subject to quirky whims of the owners. Cross-training to improve skills and opportunities for advance are minimal. Family nepotism not infrequently triumphs over meritorious performance. Wages are lower. Big box stores are better on all these fronts.

Second, stores like Wal-Mart do not tend to drive out small business. Wal-Mart’s major disruptive impact is on other discount store chains. In fact, Wal-Mart can be a boost to small business. By creating high traffic areas, small specialty businesses can open nearby and draw from the traffic generated by Wal-Mart.

Third, rather than drive down wages, these stores actually pay better wages than the mom and pop enterprises. The also offer substantially greater opportunity for learning and wage growth, even management opportunity. And if you think the stores are monolithic soul-sucking monstrosities, I’d invited you to read about Charles Platt’s experience as an editor for Wired who went to work for Wal-Mart to find out what it was like. See Life at Wal-Mart.

Finally, there is an additional indirect, but significant, Wal-Mart impact. Your standard living can improve in two ways: Increased wages and lower prices. The article makes clear that big box stores like Wal-Mart raise wages. But Wal-Mart also brings in a wide range of quality goods at low prices. It particularly does so for things like food, clothing, household goods, and medicine. These items make up a much higher percentage of the monthly budget for low-income people. Through low prices, big box stores have a positive impact on living standards that disproportionately benefits low income people.

When Wal-Mart stores open, it is not uncommon to have ten times as many applications as jobs. Wal-Mart tried to open a store in Chicago five years ago and one source published a map that shows support for the idea by Ward (See here.) The strongest support came from the poorest wards and support decreased as you moved up the economic scale. The big box stores offend the aesthetic and ideological sensibilities of the wealthy but low-income people overwhelmingly embrace them.

I do not give blanket endorsement to the big box stores but if my wealthier and more intellectual friends are truly concerned about justice and poverty, they may want to dig a little deeper than their moralistic anti-consumerism narratives take them.

Why the Increase in Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement?

The rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement is much higher in the United States than in other developed nations. The number of incidents has been increasing since 2000, even as the crime rate has dropped markedly. (See Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers) Why is this so?

The reason for the high rate of justifiable homicide relative to other nations seems straightforward to me. America is a violent society. Blame it on our frontier heritage, or whatever you will, the fact is that American homicide rates are much higher than in other developed nations. Firearms are abundant. Confrontations have a much greater chance of involving lethal force. Our relatively high rate strikes me as a statement about our society, not about the law enforcement community. The

The challenging question is why the rate of justifiable homicide by law enforcement should be increasing while crime rates have been falling. I am not certain. I am not a criminologist. The criminologist I read say solid data is lacking. Definitive answers are hard to come by. Here are my speculations.

Verbal Judo

Several years ago, I read book by a police officer named George Thompson called Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion. Thompson had been an English professor with a black-belt in karate before going into law enforcement. He tells about his first night on patrol. He pulled over a man for a traffic violation. When the man got mouthy, Thompson forcibly subdued and arrested him. Thompson was summoned to his superior at the end of the shift. He anticipated praise for his work. Instead, his captain explained that such a stop should not have ended in an arrest. Thompson would never make it as a police officer if he could not learn how to deal better with people.

During his apprenticeship as a police officer, Thompson came to see karate and judo as metaphors for a policing mindset. Karate is about meeting force with force while Judo is about using your opponent’s momentum to throw him the direction you want him to go. So how might this work with an irritable speeder?

Officer: “Sir, I need to your driver’s license and registration.” (The officer makes clear what compliance looks like.)

Speeder: “Seriously! What did I do? Fail to flip a freakin’ turn signal? Drug dealers on the street and terrorist blowing up buildings. Don’t you jackasses have something better to do? How many people’s houses are being robbed?”

Officer: (calmly) “I can appreciate that sir but I still need to see your driver’s license and registration.”

There might be two or three iterations of this interchange with the officer calmly making clear what is required each time. The officer is giving the offender an opportunity to vent while still making clear the need for compliance. If compliance is still not forthcoming, the officer might say something like:

Officer: (calmly) “Sir, if you do not comply, I will have to arrest you. You will spend the night in a cold uncomfortable cell instead of in your nice warm bed. I will have to spend an hour or more, sitting in my car, filling out paperwork. Neither of us wants that. Please hand me your driver’s license and registration.”

The officer is reiterating the need for compliance but he is now making clear the consequences of non-compliance. He appeals to the direction the offender wants to go (home to a warm bed) as an act of verbal judo.

If the offender still will not comply, then the officer will say something like:

Officer: (calmly) “Sir, are you sure there is nothing I can say to gain your compliance?”

At that point, the officer and his partner are positioning themselves to spring into action to apprehend the noncompliant offender.

This is verbal judo. It is applicable to almost any position of authority. The subject is not required to like the person in authority or to like the demand. He or she has the space to voice opposition. The goal is to gain compliance by helping the person clearly see the consequences of noncompliance and help him or her see that compliance is desirable. The aim is to defuse resistance, not escalate it. Most often, the person will comply before things escalate to using force.

My point is not the specifics of the technique. I am pointing to the mindset. “Verbal Judo” is a different mindset than rolling up on a scene, barking orders, and taking the least perceived slight as justification for escalating to tasers, take downs, and lethal force. I believe most officers have typically embraced a defusing model of policing. A base that on my limited interaction with the few law enforcement officers I have known and for whom I have great respect. They genuinely see their job as a calling to serve and protect.

Unfortunately, I worry this sense of calling is eroding. It concerns me that too many officers may now see Thompson’s aggressive escalating rookie behavior as the optimal model. I cannot empirically substantiate this except to so say that I see the rising rate of justifiable homicides as a likely proxy for violence by law enforcement in general. Furthermore, the Justice Department just completed a study of the Cleveland Police Department and found the following patterns:

• The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;
• the unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including Tasers, chemical spray and fists;
• Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and
• The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable. (Source)

A former St. Louis police officer recently wrote:

… As a cop, it shouldn’t surprise you that people will curse at you, or be disappointed by your arrival. That’s part of the job. But too many times, officers saw young black and brown men as targets. They would respond with force to even minor offenses. And because cops are rarely held accountable for their actions, they didn’t think too hard about the consequences. …

… I, too, have faced mortal danger. I’ve been shot at and attacked. But I know it’s almost always possible to defuse a situation.

Once, a sergeant and I got a call about someone wielding a weapon in an apartment. When we showed up, we found someone sitting on the bed with a very large butcher knife. Rather than storming him and screaming “put the knife down” like my colleagues would have done, we kept our distance. We talked to him, tried to calm him down.

It became clear to us that he was dealing with mental illness. So eventually, we convinced him to come to the hospital with us.

I’m certain many other officers in the department would have escalated the situation fast. They would have screamed at him, gotten close to him, threatened him. And then, any movement from him, even an effort to drop the knife, would have been treated as an excuse to shoot until their clips were empty. … (Source)

I have listened to other ex-officers from other cities give similar testimony. Despite what I perceive to be majority of officers entering their work as noble calling, the evidence seems to point to systemic problems that goes beyond isolated individuals going rogue. I nominate two factors for consideration.

Broken Windows

First, broken windows policing. As I understand it, this model suggests that disorder in a community makes residents withdraw and isolate themselves. This creates opportunities for more serious criminal activity to move in. A downward cycle ensues. Broken windows policing focuses on addressing even minor problems as means of restoring a sense of order, catalyzing an upward positive cycle.

The broken windows policy came into vogue with the crack-cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The crime rate did plummet after 1994, and this policy may have played a key role. But is there a point at which neighborhoods reach a semblance of health and it is counterproductive to continue this policy? Does continuation begin to feel like harassment? Add to this that has typically been implemented  in minority neighborhoods. Continued enforcement means minority residents being charged with violations that are routinely ignored in white communities. It is not hard to see how a cycle of escalating resentment between law enforcement and citizens could emerge.

9/11

Second, 9/11. It is curious that 2001 is the year where we see the divergence between a dropping crime rate and rising justifiable homicide rate. Law enforcement must take extraordinary measures in crises. We give law enforcement officers considerably more latitude. Many perceive our society to have been in a perpetual state of crisis ever since the attack on the World Trade Center. Militarization is on the rise, both in mindset and in the equipment law enforcement agencies are acquiring. Fear of terrorism has become wedded to a perception that crime and chaos is spinning wildly out of control. (As noted in the previous post, crime rates have plummeted to their lowest rates in fifty years, but the widespread perception is much different.)  (Related: Police Violence Is The Exception.)

In this environment, defusing difficult encounters becomes a luxury. I routinely hear conservative commentators characterizing those who the police shoot as “resisting arrest” when they do not instantly follow an officer’s direction. They justify law enforcement in aggressive confrontation.  This could certainly be true in a crisis situation, but for jaywalking? For selling “loosies?” I absolutely agree that citizens should show respect for police officers but I flatly reject that failure to show such respect necessitates escalation by an officer. Officers who do not know how to defuse situations, or are unwilling to try, are not qualified to be in law enforcement. George Thompson’s captain was right.

I’m not suggesting that these are the only two variables. For instance, a National Sheriff’s Association report points to an increase in encounters between police and people suffering from mental illness. (Source) Still, I think broken windows and 9/11 are key contributors that set the stage for much else.

Now I have purposely been sidestepping the issue of race because I wanted to lay the above foundation before incorporating race. More in the next post.

What do you think?

 

 

 

 

Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement by the Numbers

It has been more than a week since a grand jury reported a decision not to indict Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. Know we have the no indictment decision by a grand jury in New York for Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner. These cases  are essentially being classified as justifiable homicide. I’ve been listening to the ensuing discussions and I have some observations, which I will spread across at least two posts.

Anytime issues like these come to fore, I find myself wanting to get a handle on the big picture. I've been doing a little research on the topic and it is quite frustrating. Here is what I've leaned.

According the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), there were 461 justifiable homicides by police. (UCR) Let us assume this data is valid for the moment. How can we put that in perspective?

Let's compare it to three other countries. The number justifiable homicides was zero in England for 2013, eight in Germany over the last two years, and about twelve per year in Canada. (Source) These countries are smaller than the USA, so lets increase their population to the size of the USA and assume justified homicides would rise by a corresponding number. Here is what you get:

England = 0

Germany = 16

Canada = 110

USA = 461

So we have a much higher rate than comparable nations.

However, I stipulated an assumption that the data is correct. It is not. The UCR only compiles crimes known to police in 750 of more than 17,000 law enforcement entities. Participation is voluntary and inconsistent across entities. (Source) Analysis of data from 105 of the submitting entities shows 47% more incidents than were reported. (Source) For instance, some entities  do not consider justifiable homicide an “offense” so they do not report their data. Adjusting for this under-count would mean something like 680 justifiable homicides by law enforcement. But we need to go a step further.

There is no federal clearinghouse collecting data on homicide by law enforcement. On May 1, 2013, a Facebook page called Killed By Police was created that attempts to catalog every death that happens at the hands of police from news sources across the nation. It chronicles every kind of death, including someone who dies of a heart attack after being arrested or dies in a collision with a police vehicle in a high-speed chase. The FiveThirtyEight folks did an analysis of the data, weeding out deaths that were not related to the process of an arrest, and estimated the number deaths to be about 1,100 a year. (Source)

We simply do not know the exact number of justifiable homicides by law enforcement and therefore we have no definitive means of measuring trends in the frequency of such cases. We do not know the characteristics of the people involved. That said, it seems likely that rate of justifiable homicides by law enforcement has been rising.

If we assume the Uniform Crime Report data is from the same law enforcement entities using the same methods from year to year, we see an increase in justifiable homicides by law enforcement from 309 in 2000 to 461 in 2013. (The data only goes back to 1980. The 1999 and 200o stats were the lowest since a previous low of 300 in 1987.) (Source) If we then assume the UCR data as a proxy for what has happened in non-reporting areas as well, then the instances of justifiable homicides by law enforcement has risen by 50% from 2000 to 2013.

Now keep in mind, the rate of crime as reported by the UCR dropped by 20% during the 2000-2013 time frame. The murder rate shows a drop of 5.5 per 100k population to 4.5, about a 20% drop. (Calculated from here.) But also remember that the UCR data is not the best measure of actual incidents of crime. Victimization studies (annual surveys asking about victimization whether reported to police or not) show a 50% drop in crime. (Source)

In short, justifiable homicide by law enforcement is far more common in the USA than in other advanced nations. And the perplexing reality is that it appears to be getting appreciably worse with each passing year, despite less and less crime. Something is not right.

What do you think is going on? I'll offer my thoughts in a follow-up post, including how race figures into this, but I'm curious to know what 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.

The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for the fifth straight year. Here’s why.

Washington Post: The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for the fifth straight year. Here’s why.

The U.S. imprisonment rate has fallen for a fifth straight year, a run not seen since Richard Nixon was in The White House.  According to data released Tuesday from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while the U.S. incarceration rate is still remarkably high, 2013 marks a 10-year low.  For five reasons, the de-incarceration trend has an excellent chance of continuing.

First, crime is down by about 50% in the past two decades. ...

Second, U.S. prison policy is primarily set by states and hence is less constrained than other potential reforms stalled by Washington's political gridlock. ...

Third, even though conservatives and liberals are battling each other vigorously on many policy fronts, de-incarceration is not one of them.  ...

Fourth, a new generation of evidence-based community supervision programs  ...

Last, just as a high crime rate can create the conditions for more crime (e.g., by overwhelming law enforcement) and a low crime rate can create the conditions for less crime (e.g., by encouraging more citizens to walk the streets at night), lower imprisonment rates also appear capable of creating virtuous self-reinforcing cycles....

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.

Universal Basic Income: A Thought Experiment

Conversable Economist: Universal Basic Income: A Thought Experiment

"... What about the politics of a universal basic income? It's no surprise that many who lean liberal like the idea of guaranteeing a basic income. However, the idea has a reasonable number of conservative and libertarian supporters, who like the idea of a program that addresses the basic concern over helping those with low incomes, but in a clean, clear way that involves much less interference of eligibility rules and phase-ins and phase-outs in people's lives. Dolan claims that there are lively debates over a universal basic income happening behind the scenes between those with very different political persuasions.

The idea of a universal basic income is appealing to me in theory, but I have a hard time believing that once enacted, the U.S. political process would be willing or able to leave it alone. One one side, those who favor higher tax rates for those with high incomes would immediate start trying to figure out ways to claw back payments to those with high incomes. On another side, there would be continual pressures to reinstate programs like Food Stamps, or targeted welfare payments for certain types of families, or favored tax provisions for home-buying or charitable contributions or retirement. There would be continual political pressure to alter the amount of a universal basic income, as well. The U.S. political system does not excel at replacing complexity with simplicity, and then leaving well enough alone."

This is pretty much my perspective.

 

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.

Think Progress exaggerates child hunger by 8,000%

Just Facts Daily: Think Progress exaggerates child hunger by 8,000%

... However, instead of reporting the facts of this important issue, a number of influential media sources are greatly exaggerating the problem.

One of these sources is Think Progress, which ranks among the nation’s top-15 political websites. In a recent article, Alan Pyke, the Deputy Economic Policy Editor of Think Progress, reports that “more than a fifth of America’s children are going hungry,” government food “programs have faced wave upon wave of funding cuts,” and “America does a slightly better job at feeding adults” than children.

All of those statements are categorically false according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Census Bureau, and the White House Office of Management and Budget. These primary sources show, for example, that on an average day, less than 1% of U.S. households with children have a child who experiences hunger.

These sources also show that the annual hunger rate for children is lower than adults and that federal spending on food and nutrition programs has risen by more than two thirds since 2007, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Below is the documentation of these facts, along with the details of how Think Progress has distorted the truth.

“Food insecure” does not mean “hungry”

The crux of Pyke’s misreporting is that he falsely equates food insecurity with hunger. “Food insecurity” is a technical term used by the USDA to categorize households based upon a survey conducted by the Census Bureau.

This annual survey includes a series of questions about food consumption, and if respondents answer “yes” to at least three of ten questions, their households are classified as food insecure. For example, respondents are asked if they ever “worried” that their “food would run out before” they “got money to buy more.” For another example, they are asked if they “couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.”

According to this survey, 21.6% of children and 15.9% of adults lived in households that were food-insecure at some point during 2012. These are the figures quoted by Pyke, but they do not apply to hunger, especially for children.

The title of Pyke’s article is “More Than A Fifth Of America’s Children Are Going Hungry.” Just to be clear, “hungry” means hungry (not food-insecure), “children” means children (not households), and “going” means currently (not once during the past year). Beyond the standard ten questions in this survey, the Census asked direct questions about child hunger, and the results look nothing like what Pyke reports. ...

... Pyke is not the only purveyor of inflated hunger statistics. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning fact check organization, has alleged: “According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ‘food insecurity’ means that at some point in a year, someone in a household went hungry because the household couldn’t afford food.”

That claim is in direct opposition to what the USDA explicitly states. Again: “Households classified as having low food security have reported multiple indications of food access problems, but typically have reported few, if any, indications of reduced food intake.” ...

The article also includes this graph:

I'm glad to see someone do a detailed analysis of these claims about hunger. I hear and read so many widely varying claims about hunger in the U.S. that it is hard to know what is factual. I simply haven't taken the time to research this myself, and while I didn't know what the right number was (less than 1%), the 21.6% was just preposterous. It is good to understand how the misconception has occurred.

Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

Barna: Global Poverty Is on the Decline, But Almost No One Believes It

April 29, 2014—Did you know that, in the past 30 years, the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty has decreased by more than half?

If you said no—if you thought the number had gone up; that more people, not less, live in extreme poverty—you aren't alone. According to a recent Barna Group survey, done in partnership with Compassion International and the new book Hope Rising by Dr. Scott Todd, more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has reduced so drastically. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.

Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.

Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it's possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.

How does this sense of fatalism about global economic and health issues affect Americans' view of the developing world? Does it hinder charitable giving? And are Christians' views any different? ...

Interesting research. One of things I found interesting was how people who regularly attend church are more interested in globlal poverty and more involved in addressing it than those who don't go to church.

Repackaging Climate Action

Over recent years I've posted about the messaging we typically get on climate change. (Most recently Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)) The predominate approach is to hit people with dire visions of what is happening to the world, lecture on the evils of capitalism and consumerism, and then offer a few practical solutions. This resonates well with a minority of people. But effective change requires that a majority consensus be built around specific action. The lopsided attention to scare tactics over solutions tends to make many feel helpless so they chose to ignore the issue. Others are turned off by the not so subtle attacks on what they feel is a good a decent way of life, inclining them to not only reject solutions but the validity of the climate concerns at all.

Yet research shows that when the focus is solution oriented, optimistic, and seen as means of preserving a way of life, many more people warm to the cause. Upworthy recently posted a clip by Jason Silva about The Solutions Project. (I love Silva as the host of Nat Geo's Brain Games.) I think Silva has done his homework. Watch the video and see how he frames the message. Notice that he is much less interested in getting people to coalesce on ideologies of what is wrong and is far more interested in getting people energized about solutions. People can bring a variety of narratives to the project but the aim is to unite them in solutions. For the sake of this conversation, I'm not interested in whether we think climate change is a threat or if we think his solutions are realistic. I'm pointing to the messaging question.

(One caveat: At 1:14 he says "the smartest men in the world." He might want to include women in that statement. ;-) )

Global Warming Scare Tactics (They Usually Backfire)

New York Times: Global Warming Scare Tactics

This article confirms what I've been arguing for some time now:

... evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. ...

... What works, say environmental pollsters and researchers, is focusing on popular solutions. Climate advocates often do this, arguing that solar and wind can reduce emissions while strengthening the economy. But when renewable energy technologies are offered as solutions to the exclusion of other low-carbon alternatives, they polarize rather than unite.

One recent study, published by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, found that conservatives become less skeptical about global warming if they first read articles suggesting nuclear energy or geoengineering as solutions. Another study, in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2012, concluded that “communication should focus on how mitigation efforts can promote a better society” rather than “on the reality of climate change and averting its risks.” ...

There is going to be substantial economic growth in coming years. Presently, the global median income is about $1,000 per year. If we were to freeze the economy as is (impossible, but work with me here) we would have two alternatives: 1) leave billions living in poverty while a minority live with much higher income,  or 2) balance out global income to about $7,000 a year, meaning the standard of living of people in advanced nations would drop to a fraction of current standards. The first is immoral and the second, short of global totalitarian government, isn't going to happen. Therefore, there will be growth, growth will require energy, and present forms of energy are carbon based.

If we are serious about carbon being a problem and about the realities I just described exist, then we will pragmatically find ways to reduce carbon in ways that honor these realities, not just throw out idealistic ideas and scream "anti-science" and "denier" when people balk at them. The unwillingness of so many activists to pursue pragmatic solutions is to me one of the biggest indicators that this is more about ideological demagoguing in pursuit of other ends than it is about addressing any truly imminent threat.

My thoughts are that we need to work toward greater energy efficiency in both production and in final products. We need to ramp up use of natural gas as an intermediate energy source. It is still a fossil fuel but produces much less CO2. That would buy us more time to build more nuclear power plants and to bring renewable energy technology to a level where it will be able to make a cost-effective contribution.

Furthermore, while there is scientific certainty that humans have an impact on climate, the climate's sensitivity to human influence is not so clear. Neither are the environmental impacts clear. Buying more time allows us to improve our understanding of the climate, helping us better understand the risks and benefits involved. In essence we, are talking about prudence and risk management.

Your New Born Is Wealthier than 60 Million Americans

Robert Reich’s increasingly well-traveled observation is that “The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us.” But think about what that means. What is “wealth?” I routinely sense that most people incorrectly think this means how much money you have, or much stuff you own including money (i.e., assets.) No.

Wealth is the sum of your assets minus the sum of your liabilities. Consequently, the person with a $300,000 home, $25,000 car, and in other assets of $50,000 (total assets of $375,000), and with a $275,000 mortgage, $25,000 car loan, and $80,000 in student loans and other debt (total liabilities of $380,000) has a net worth (i.e., wealth) of -$5,000. The homeless person living under a bridge with no assets and no liabilities is wealthier than this person. Approximately 1 in 5 households have negative net worth, which means your new born baby is wealthier than 60 million Americans.

The fact is that most of us start out as young adults with very little wealth (i.e., assets minus liabilities). In fact, I suspect many high school grads are wealthier than many recent college grads because college loans create a negative net worth for many. Wealth builds over the years through saving and investment. Someone with a modest income who is 55 years old and has been regularly saving and investing well likely have hundreds of thousands of dollars in wealth, while many 25 year olds with professional degrees and good incomes will be at break-even or even have negative wealth. Wealth inequality is part of the natural process and it will always be considerably greater than income inequality.

Reich’s statement may be true but it strikes me as sensationalist without more context. A great many of the 150 million people at the bottom have considerable assets but also have much debt. Some in the top 150 million have modest assets but little debt. I suspect Reich’s statement gives the impression to many that half of America lives on just a few dollars a day. I’m just saying we need to be more clear in our thinking.

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.

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.

 

Nordic welfare state being cut down to size

Yahoo! News: Nordic welfare state being cut down to size

Copenhagen (AFP) - The Nordic model, known for high taxes and its cradle-to-grave welfare system, is getting a radical makeover as nations find themselves cash-strapped.

During the post-war period, the Scandinavian economies became famous for a "softer" version of capitalism that placed more importance on social equality than other western nations, such as Britain and the United States, did.

But globalisation, economic necessity and an ideological shift to the right has led to a scaling back of the public sector.

In Sweden, visitors are sometimes surprised to learn about year-long waiting times for cancer patients, rioting in low-income suburbs and train derailments amid lagging infrastructure investment.

"The generosity of the system has declined," said Jonas Hinnfors, a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.

"Much of this already started changing in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s," he added. ...

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.

Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

Matt Ridley: Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

... In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.

That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.

But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.

Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy. ...

... Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink. ...

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?  ...

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.

Norway Breaks with Social Democracy

New Geography: Norway Breaks with Social Democracy

Largely uncommented on in the US press, Europe’s long-standing social democratic tilt has changed. During recent years, almost all Western European nations have seen a dramatic fall in support for the traditional Social Democratic parties, which for so long have dominated the political landscapes. In response, the centre-left parties have morphed, moving towards greater emphasis on the benefits of free markets and individual responsibility. In several countries the former communist parties now claim that they fill the role of traditional Social Democrats. A new breed of modernized centre-left parties is likely to replace several centre‑right governments during coming years. The third consecutive loss for the German Social Democrats illustrates the continuing difficulties for Europe’s labor movements to gather the strong support that they previously almost took for granted.

Until recently oil-rich Norway has remained unique, as the only nation where Social Democrats have resisted change to highly generous welfare benefits. In 1999 the former Swedish social democratic minister of business, Björn Rosengren, famously called Norway “the last Soviet state” due to the lack of willingness to adopt market policies. But now even Norway is shifting with the recent election of a centre‑right government formed by Erna Solberg. Making the transition from a full-scale welfare state to a system which consistently rewards work more than public handouts will be a difficult one for Norway. Hopefully, the newly elected government will draw inspiration from the neighbor to the east.

Politicians in Norway for long admired the Swedish social system, seeing their larger neighbor as a pioneer of Social Democratic policies.

Recently however, particularly the left has begun to emphasize the uniqueness of the Norwegian Welfare Model rather than the Scandinavian Welfare Model. Swedish policies have even been used in the recent election as deterrence by the left. It is easy to see why. The current centre-right government in Sweden, elected in 2006 and re‑elected in 2010, has focused on a broad reform agenda. The workfare policies introduced include: somewhat less generous benefits, tax reductions aimed particularly at those with lower incomes, liberalizations of the temporary employment contracts and a gate-keeping mechanism for receiving sick and disability benefits. ...

I always think of articles like these everytime I hear American conservatives complain we are becoming more like Sweden, or liberals highlighting how we need to adopt socialism based on how happy the Scandinavians are. Both sides may want to look a little closer.

 

What the right keeps missing about the recovery

James Pethokoukis: What the right keeps missing about the recovery

The center-right community continues to make two big mistakes when thinking and talking about the US economy.

First, too much negativity and pessimism. Yes, this is an historical weak recovery when measured by GDP or jobs. But a pair of economic reports out today offer optimism. Unexpectedly low weekly initial jobless claims means the monthly average has fallen its lowest level since early June 2007. Monthly payrolls gains should accelerate. ...

..  Second, too much blame on Obamanomics. Again, little doubt tax hikes, poorly designed stimulus, and sweeping regulatory efforts like Obamacare have been terribly anti-growth. You also have the opportunity cost from not following pro-growth policies such as cutting corporate taxes and reforming entitlements.

But that’s not the whole story. Pew Research notes that at 42 months and counting, the current job recovery is slowest since Truman was president. But as the above chart shows, the previous two recessions also had long jobless recoveries: ...

... We can do better than easy answers and reflexive gloominess.