I’m not sure if the packages were actually designed to be able to do this, but it’s still pretty neat.
Month: February 2013
Mankiw: Growth of Entitlement Spending
There’s a lo of talk about budgets, deficits, and debts. I don’t think this picture provides anything like a conclusive political point, but it does give some idea of the scale of “entitlement” spending, which for Greg Mankiw means “stuff the government has to give you if you prove you’re eligible”.
Piedmont Earthworks: Dead End or Fulcrum?
Environmentalism is not a topic I’ve tackled here at Difficult Run, and it’s not something I write about a whole lot. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, however. I just recognize that it’s way outside my area of expertise. I’m at once incredibly skeptical of most environmentalism that comes from a politically liberal mindset because I find it ideologically blind and totally impractical. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. I just don’t know what to do.
The person I respect the most on this issue is Chris Fields-Johnson. Chris is a PhD student in crop soil & soil environmental science at Virginia Tech and is the founder of The Piedmont Earthworks. Chris knows his stuff, and he has spent years studying and honing his skills so that his passion is matched by his depth of expertise. When I want to talk about environmental policy without the politics and with someone who knows what they are talking about, I talk to Chris.
Today he posted a fascinating and informative environmentalism piece discussing the environmental history of the southeast (especially Virginia) from the arrival of early European settlers to this day. The short version (although you should read the full article), is that a combination of beaver hunters and tobacco growers eviscerated the diverse ecosystems, and only the advent of widespread planting of loblolly pine prevented the total desertification of the region.
However, as Chris writes, the loblolly pines are not valuable enough as pulpwood to justify continued investment in the land, and so the degradation continues. Chris asks the question: what next? He suggests homesteading, as he is currently doing, to use the loblolly pines as a basis from which to begin reclaiming the original biodiversity of the region.
I’d like to hear more details about Chris’s suggestion, so I left a comment there. I’m turning comments off on this post so that if you have questions, you can ask them there as well.
Global Cyber War Escalates
A week or two ago there was a spate of stories about big-name US newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times getting hacked by the Chinese. I thought it was pretty noteworthy, and I was going to put up a note when I got distracted by other things.
Then it all went to Hell.
It’s been an open secret for quite some time that the Chinese military are behind an onslaught of cyber attacks on US soil, but outside of tech security circles you probably didn’t hear very much about it. This all changed when US cyber security firm Mandiant issued a scathing report linking the attacks (perpetrated by a group known as “APT1”) with a specific unit within China’s People’s Liberation Army: unit 61398.
Mandiant’s report, summarized via Slashdot, specified that:
“Since 2006, Mandiant has observed APT1 compromise 141 companies spanning 20 major industries,” the report continues. “APT1 has a well-defined attack methodology, honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property.” APT1 has the ability to access victim networks for an average of 356 days, stealing terabytes of compressed data during that period.
Sound ominous? It should. So what’s the point of all this hacking?
Mahonri’s Take on Joanna Brooks
I’ve heard wildly divergent perspectives on Joanna Brooks memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, including one convert who lives on the East Coast and is convinced that Joanna actually grew up in a cult, not vanilla Mormonism. I haven’t read the book yet, but I have been impressed by Joanna’s reasonable and kind tone in blog posts and interviews.
This review from award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart makes me even more curious to read the book.
Anne and I consider ourselves devout Mormons. We connect deeply with and believe in Mormon scripture and theology… Despite that heartfelt and abiding faith, however, there have been times when we have felt like we were foreigners in our own religion… It is here that works like Joanna Brooks’ The Book of Mormon Girl have given me and my wife hope.
I know that I don’t agree with everything that Joanna believes, and so I probably won’t agree with every word in the book. And that, actually, is part of why I want to read the book.
WalkerW: Deriving Holiness from the Profane
DR commenter and fellow Mormon blogger WalkerW wrote an excellent piece about the importance of listening for the sacred in “profane” music.
Suffering, as I noted in my last post, is an intrinsic part of reality. We are expected to mourn with those who mourn. Confronting suffering, pain, and sin head-on is the life of Christian. If our example is Jesus Christ, a man who “loved people in great misery who were taken from Him and did not understand Him” and was then “beaten and executed for espionage and treason,”[3] how then can we as disciples not look misery in the face? We can shy away from music that is filled with angst, despair, and sadness. We can look at it as “unworthy.” But we might miss out on something beautiful. As philosopher Roger Scruton noted, “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in anunlimited variety of ways…[I]t speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend.”
There are lots of great songs in that post. Song full of loss and longing. Here is just one.
Hiking the Minimum Wage
President Obama made a surprise call to increase the national minimum wage to $9 per hour. Is that actually a good idea? Becker and Posner took the issue on directly. Becker writes in a measured, but skeptical tone:
The two main issues debated are the effects of a higher minimum on employment of the low skilled, and its effects on the degree of poverty. Both theory and evidence indicate that higher minimums reduce employment for teenagers and other workers with low productivity, and that it does little to alleviate poverty. Neither conclusion, however, is without controversy, especially the employment effect.
He adds at the end that since recipients of minimum wage are also the customers of companies that have to bear the brunt of paying their workers above market rate: “low-income families are hit by two bullets: some of their members find it harder to get jobs, and they face a higher cost of the goods they consume.”
Posner weighs in with skepticism as well:
The proposal will not commend itself to most economists who study the economic consequences of minimum wages. They make three principal arguments: minimum wage laws reduce employment (and efficient resource allocation) by pricing labor above its market rate; the laws do not reduce poverty, because most beneficiaries of minimum wage laws are not poor; and as a means of reducing economic inequality, such laws are inferior to the Earned Income Tax Credit (i.e., the negative income tax). I will try to assess these arguments.
His conclusion is that, since we know so little and the proposed increase is so large, we should start with a more modest increase. He also suggests that indexing to inflation is a bad idea:
And I don’t think indexing the minimum wage to inflation is a good idea; should inflation surge, which is always a possibility though not (it seems) an imminent one, an equal increase in the minimum wage might contribute to an inflationary spiral.
I actually found an interesting article by Michigan macro professor Miles Kimball which addresses the controversial employment effect. Kimball cites work by Isaac Sorkin (an incredibly brilliant grad student who started the PhD program at the same time that I did) who explained that the employment effect might be much greater than expected; it just takes a long time to go into effect. A lot of companies engineer their production around assumptions about wage, and when the wage assumptions change (e.g. minimum wage goes into effect), they only gradually move to less labor-intensive production because of adjustment costs. In other words: they don’t go out and buy brand new machines on day 1, they just gradually phase out machines and processes to shift towards using fewer employees. That’s more reason to suspect that a minimum wage hike will do more harm than good, and indexing it to inflation would compound the problem.
And then there’s Greg Mankiw (very respected macroeconomist, but also openly Republican) who asks the simple question: why $9? Mankiw’s point is that if minimum wage is a magic wand to increase the salaries of the poor, why wouldn’t you you jump all the way to $25 (equivalent to the current median income of $50,000 for 2,000 hours/year)? Some mysterious force suggest we shouldn’t go too high, but the President isn’t talking about it. What is it? Good question.
My own take is that it is socially useful to have jobs available that pay less than what a person could live off of, primarily for teenagers to gain initial job experience. You need to have a bottom rung of the ladder, a place where you can go, start a resume, and use it as a launching pad for better jobs. I got my first minimum wage job when I was 14, and I’ve worked ever since: janitor, file clerk, bus boy, dishwasher, etc. I didn’t life myself up by my bootstraps, so a starter job is not enough. But it does help. Taking that away won’t help anyone. Fighting poverty and reducing income inequality are valid goals, but this is not a valid strategy to accomplish them.
New Times And Seasons Post: Mormonism and Secularism
Today I published my first post there as a permablogger: Mormonism and the New Religion of Secularism. This is the post that I had mentioned I was writing in the Faith Is Rational post from last week. Give it a read!
Edelstein on The Gatekeepers – Shedding Light on Israel’s Secret Service
I love David Edelstein’s reviews, but this one is especially interesting because it deals directly with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The documentary The Gatekeepers is based on interviews with six leaders of Shin Bet. Why have they decided to open up at this time? From the review:
They are different kinds of men, but their conclusions are remarkably similar: that a series of repressive and/or opportunistic Israeli politicians have endangered — perhaps murdered — any chance of a lasting peace. That’s right, folks, it’s the spooks taking the long view. You know the Holy Land is an unholy mess when the professional paranoiacs with a license to kill come off like peaceniks.
Fascinating reading.
Religion & Happiness: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
There’s been a great deal of research on the connection between religiosity and happiness, and the consensus finding is that religious people tend to be happier and to suffer less from anxiety, depression and stress. (Summary via Wikpedia.) I don’t think this necessarily tells the whole story. A study by the Council for Secular Humanism argued, essentially, that if you looked at “resolute atheists” (instead of merely non-religious people) that finding disappears. That seems reasonable, and in my mind the simplest explanation is that people with extreme beliefs are happier because they experience less cognitive dissonance.
But every now and then you’ll find some particularly militant atheist who simply cannot abide the scientific evidence connecting religiosity and happiness. The most recent such eruption occurred on AlterNet a couple of days ago. The basic thesis is this: states with high religiosity have higher anti-depressant use, ergo religion makes people sad. This isn’t a new theory, it goes back to at least the 1990s when Cherrill Crosby wrote an article for the Salt Lake Tribune called “The Ups and Downs of Prozac” in which she implicated Mormonism for making Utah women unhappy. Unfortunately for the decades-old thesis, the doctors that Crosby interviewed wrote a rebuttal stating, in part, that Crosby had decided to:
ignore one of my most important observations: the fact that Prozac is widely used in Utah may be evidence that [psychiatric] treatment in Utah is superior to other parts of the United States which might benefit from increased prescriptions of antidepressants. Epidemiologic studies clearly show that depression is markedly under-diagnosed and under-treated in the United States. How different the article would have been had the author used this point as her underlying assumption!
So, to recap, militant atheists for the last 20 years have chosen to ignore solid, direct evidence that religiosity makes people happier. Instead, they prefer to rely rely on shaky, indirect evidence and unreasonable assumptions to believe the opposite. So much for science, eh?
What’s really telling to me, however, is that this is a win-win proposition for atheist. If religion makes people happy, it’s the opiate of the masses, and atheist depression shows that they are suffering for their integrity. It religion makes people depressed, it’s an oppressive institution and atheist joy shows they are enjoying their liberation from captivity.
If there’s one thing that human beings are good at it, it’s finding a narrative to fit the data that protects their preconceptions. It’s not surprising that religious people do this (after all: isn’t religion just one big story to shield us from our fear of mortality?) but it’s a bit richer in irony to the see the scientific skeptics engaging so brazenly in the same sort of inventions.
(The story about the Salt Lake Tribune and the rebuttal quotes come from the article “Religiosity and Life Satisfaction among LDS Women“.)