Month: October 2016

Obedience Out of Love

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This post is a talk that I gave in my congregation a couple of weeks ago. A few folks asked me for copies, so I thought putting it online would be the simplest approach.

Love or Fear

I have heard it said that every decision a human makes fundamentally comes down to one of only two motivations: fear or love. That’s it.

Scientists are a little less romantic about it, but they actually have the same basic concept. From biology to computer science whether you’re talking about an amoeba or an artificial intelligence the fundamental choice every agent has to make comes down to attraction or avoidance. You are attracted to the good stuff. You avoid the bad stuff. If you’re a bacterium, it means you move towards food and you move away from anything that thinks your food. So these are the two motives any creature can have: we either move towards what we want or we move away from what we don’t want.

An Irritant or a Quest

President Benson said

When obedience ceases to be an irritant and becomes our quest, in that moment God will endow us with power. [ref]via Elder Donald L. Staheli in Obedience—Life’s Great Challenge[/ref]

What I want to talk about is how we make that transition. How do we change our attitude towards obedience? How do move beyond the place where obedience feels like a burden and get to the place where obedience feels like a challenge? How do we turn obedience from an irritant into a quest?

I believe that it comes down to fear and love. We have to wean ourselves away from fear-based obedience and towards love-based obedience. We have to fear less and love more. It’s like Paul told Timothy:

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.[ref]2 Timothy 1:7[/ref]

Fearful Obedience

On my mission I set goals all the time. My companion and I would sit down, we’d pray, and we’d set “realistic” goals. We’d set goals that—sitting in the apartment, feeling charged to go out and do the Lord’s work—seemed easily attainable.

I don’t think we hit 50% of our weekly goals a single time. Not even once. And yet somehow, we never learned. Every week we felt really horrible about how bad our goals were going, and every week we rallied and we did the exact same thing.

The Lord can work with all kinds of tools, but I’m pretty sure that even he appreciates the value of a sharp instrument over a blunt one. As a missionary I was definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed. It never occurred to me, not even once, that the only realistic goals would be to start with what we actually accomplished last week and then build from there.

It’s not actually that I was too dumb. The truth is that I was too proud to admit how far from perfect I was. I wanted to think of myself as a good missionary. I’d wanted to serve my whole life, I was following the rules, and I truly wanted to be there. So I just assumed—naturally—given all my good intentions I had to be pretty good, right?

Well, not. First of all, that’s not realistic. That’s just wishful thinking. I try to be a lot more realistic now than I was then. (My wife doesn’t think I’m very good at that, yet.) More importantly, however, I was operating out of fear. It was fear-based obedience. I was afraid of failure. And, I have come to learn, there is a mile of difference between trying to avoid failure and pursuing success. They may look similar from the outside, but from the inside they could not be more opposite.

Trying to be obedient out of fear means that you’re in constant stress. You’re unwilling to take risks—and risks are necessary for growth. Over time, this can lead to shriveling and atrophy. You remember the parable of the talents? The rich man gives his servants 5 talents, 2 talents, and 1 talent. The story has always bugged me, because it’s the poor guy who only gets 1 talent that messes it up. I’d like the story more if it was the guy who got 5 talents who was lazy. But that’s not the point. The point is that the first two invested. They risked. They turned doubled their talents. But the last guy? He was so afraid of losing his talent he just buried it. That’s fear right there.

Still Better than Disobedience

Let me pause for a second and make a very important disclaimer. Fear-based obedience is not as good as love-based obedience, but it’s still a whole lot better than disobedience. I don’t want anybody misunderstanding me on that point, OK?

And there’s a reason for that.

The laws of nature, the laws of God, the laws of life, are one and the same and are always in full force.[ref]Elder Richard L. Evans Where Are You Really Going?[/ref]

No matter why you are obedient, you’re still going to enjoy at least some of the blessings of that obedience because the laws of God are always in full force. The laws of physics don’t care why you buckle your seat-belt, right? If you get into an accident, your motivation does not enter into the equation. If you have the seat-belt on, you’re going to be safe. If you have it off, you’re going to be in a lot more danger.

O my beloved young friends, even selfishly it is smart to keep the commandments God has given.[ref]lder Richard L. Evans Where Are You Really Going?[/ref]

So, step 1 is be obedient. What we’re talking about now is step 2, which is how to be obedient.

Look, if your option is to either be obedient because you feel like you’re supposed to or be disobedient, then go ahead: be obedience out of obligation. When I was growing up I avoided a lot of pitfalls because I was afraid. That’s the honest truth. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink, I didn’t watch pornography. It’s not because I’m such an awesome, righteous guy. It’s because I was risk averse. I saw that a lot of bad stuff came along with drinking and smoking, and in general I never wanted to lose control. I was obedient because I was afraid. That’s better than disobedient. And there are plenty of days when I just don’t feel all excited about following the commandments, and I just go through the motions because it’s what I promised to do. Going through the motions is better than not doing it at all.

So, fearful obedience is better than disobedience, but it’s not that great. We want love-based obedience. This is tricky, in a way, because we’re changing horses in mid-stream. We need to find a way out of fear-based obedience and into love-based obedience. Let’s start with letting go of fear.

A Remission of Sins

I have always been struck by the phrase “remission of sins.” We pretty much always hear about it around baptism.

John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.[ref]Mark 1:4, emphasis added[/ref]

And the only other time we ever use the word “remission” is when we’re talking about cancer. I’m not a scholar. I know that the word remission has two definitions. It can mean “the cancellation of a debt” or it can mean “a temporary recovery.” And I’m not certain which one fits best with our understanding of baptism. But as I understand it, the idea of cancer going into remission and the idea of sins going into remission is basically the same. The one difference is this: when your cancer goes into remission you can’t control if or when it will come back. But when your sins go into remission you are in control. As long as you abide by the covenant you made when you were baptized, they are in remission.

What this means to me is: you don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to live in fear. When you have faith in Christ, you get to live in hope.

That’s the first key to transitioning away from fear-based obedience.

Humility

The second key is being humble. That was my biggest problem as a goal-setting missionary. I was too proud to admit how weak I was. That got a lot easier as I got older. My life, in many ways, has been a string of disastrous failures ever since I got home from my mission. I have failed at so many things and in so many ways and with such utter gracelessness that I have been blessed with the inability to take myself very seriously anymore. I am like the poor Zoramites who were not allowed into the synagogues that they had built.

because ye are compelled to be humble blessed are ye[ref]Alma 32:13[/ref]

This humiliation has been a great blessing. It has taught me that fear of your own sins is a kind of arrogance. It is like saying that your evil is greater than Christ’s good. It is like saying that you have the ability to dig a hole too deep for your Savior to lift you out of. And if there’s only one thing you remember from my talk, let it be this: as long as you want to be saved there are no holes that deep.

When you are humble, failure loses the power to intimidate you. That’s why the devil hates humble people, they are practically impossible to push around. When you have faith and are humble, you are ready to let go of fear.

Godly Ambition

I’m going to share one of my favorite quotes. It’s from a man named Ira Glass, and—on the surface, at least—it won’t sound very religious. But it is. You’ll see. Here is his quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.[ref]The quote is all over the place. The most original source I could find was YouTube.[/ref]

This quote is about love and fear. All artists have to confront the gap between what they want to do (make good art) and what they are doing (making terrible art) and then they have to make a decision: love or fear. If they choose fear, they will quit, because the pain of failure is too much. If they choose love, they will refuse to give up. And that means they will keep on failing. They will write bad stories. They will write terrible poetry. They will take horrible photographs. And they will do it again and again and again until they get it right.

This applies to all of us.

Every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ[ref]Moroni 7:16[/ref]

We all see light and truth and kindness and beauty in our lives at some point. We love those things. And we all see our own actions and we see darkness and deception, selfishness and ugliness. And then we have to choose: love or fear.

If we choose love, then—just like the artists—we go right on ahead and keep failing. We fail at being perfectly kind. We fail at being perfectly wise. We fail at being perfectly honest. And every morning we get up and we do it again and again until one day we get it right. And that is what it means to be a saint.

A saint is not necessarily a person who is perfect, but he is a person who strives for perfection—one who tries to overcome those faults and failings which take him away from God. A true saint will seek to change his manner of living to conform more closely to the ways of the Lord.[ref]Elder Theodore M. Burton in The Need for Total Commitment[/ref]

Artists learn to be better artists by first being bad artists. They practice. And people learn to be better people by first being bad people. They practice. And the name for that practice is: obedience. When you “seek to change [your] manner of living to conform more closely to the ways of the Lord” because you love the things which “inviteth to do good” then—for you—obedience has become a quest. Keeping the commandments will always be hard, but it will no longer feel like a burden because you will understand that keeping the commandments is the path to becoming the kind of person you would be proud to be.

—

If you’d like a printable copy of the talk, here you go.

IMF: Stop With the Protectionism

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Image result for protectionismA new IMF publication finds that “[t]he waning pace of trade liberalization over the past few years and the recent uptick in protectionist measures could be limiting the sustained policy-driven reductions in trade costs achieved during 1985–2007, which provided a strong impetus to trade growth (Evenett and Fritz 2016; Hufbauer and Jung 2016)” (pg. 63). Their suggestion? “[R]esisting all forms of protectionism and reviving the process of trade liberalization to dismantle remaining trade barriers” in order to “provide much-needed support for trade growth, including through possibly kicking off a new round of global value chain development” (pg. 86). The Wall Street Journal reports,

Rising protectionism, record debt levels and a continuing economic malaise in wealthy countries will drag on global growth next year despite a turnaround in several key emerging markets, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday. Global growth should only marginally pick up in 2017 to 3.4% from 3.1% this year, the fund said in its latest World Economic Outlook, despite policy makers pushing central bank stimulus into uncharted territories…A political backlash against the perceived negative effects of globalization threatens to undermine an already-weak and precarious recovery, the IMF warned.

“Subpar growth at recent levels risks feeding on itself through the negative economic and political forces it is unleashing,” IMF chief economist Maurice Obstfeld said, referring in large part to the surge in trade barriers around the world and the rise in opposition to free trade and immigration in the politics of the U.S. and Europe. Fearful of a trend toward protectionism when the global economy is already struggling with deflation risks, the IMF highlighted the potential shocks to growth from a sudden increase in tariffs and other trade barriers.

…The IMF also took pains to caution policy makers against the temptation to revert to protectionism as trade growth stalls in the low-growth era. Such anti-trade trends risk tilting the world economy deeper into a long-term funk. The fund estimated that a surge in trade barriers around the globe that pushed up import prices by 10% could sap nearly 2 percentage points off world growth over five years, force a 15% decline in exports and pull investment down by more than 4%.

This makes the anti-trade rhetoric of politicians all the more frightening. For example, take Donald Trump’s ill-conceived anti-NAFTA stance, especially in regards to the automobile industry. The WSJ again:

U.S. automotive competitiveness is highly dependent on global free trade. According to the Mexico City-based consulting firm De la Calle, Madrazo, Mancera, 37% of the U.S.’s imported auto components came from Mexico and Canada in 2015. This sourcing from abroad is important to good-paying U.S. auto-assembly jobs. But parts also flow the other way. U.S. parts manufacturers sent 61% of their exports to Mexico and Canada in 2015.

This synergy has made the U.S. auto industry attractive for investment. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis investment in the auto sector contracted. But from 2010-14 almost $70 billion was invested in the North American automotive industry. Mr. Trump claims that investment is going to Mexico but two-thirds of it went into the U.S., according to a January 2015 report by the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research.

This investment dynamism helped generate 264,800 new U.S. jobs in motor-vehicle production and parts between January 2010 and June 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a 40% increase in employment despite the increasing trend toward robotics in the industry. Shut down Nafta and these workers and future job seekers will pay.

The kind of protectionist rhetoric and policies we’ve seen in both Europe and the U.S. is worrisome to IMF managing director Christine Lagarde and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, with Lagarde going so far as to call it “economic malpractice.”

Let’s hope these recent populist movements are just a blip amongst the increasing economic freedom worldwide.

2016 NAS Report on GMOs: Safe With Relatively Minor Concerns

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Image result for gmo

The National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report earlier this year that “builds on previous related Academies reports published between 1987 and 2010 by undertaking a retrospective examination of the purported positive and adverse effects of GE crops and to anticipate what emerging genetic-engineering technologies hold for the future.” Here are the highlights from the press release:

  • Effects on human health: “The committee carefully searched all available research studies for persuasive evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to consumption of foods derived from GE crops but found none. Studies with animals and research on the chemical composition of GE foods currently on the market reveal no differences that would implicate a higher risk to human health and safety than from eating their non-GE counterparts. Though long-term epidemiological studies have not directly addressed GE food consumption, available epidemiological data do not show associations between any disease or chronic conditions and the consumption of GE foods. There is some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops have had benefits to human health by reducing insecticide poisonings. In addition, several GE crops are in development that are designed to benefit human health, such as rice with increased beta-carotene content to help prevent blindness and death caused by vitamin A deficiencies in some developing nations.”
  • Effects on the environment: “The use of insect-resistant or herbicide-resistant crops did not reduce the overall diversity of plant and insect life on farms, and sometimes insect-resistant crops resulted in increased insect diversity, the report says. While gene flow – the transfer of genes from a GE crop to a wild relative species – has occurred, no examples have demonstrated an adverse environmental effect from this transfer. Overall, the committee found no conclusive evidence of cause-and-effect relationships between GE crops and environmental problems. However, the complex nature of assessing long-term environmental changes often made it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.”
  • Effects on agriculture: “The available evidence indicates that GE soybean, cotton, and maize have generally had favorable economic outcomes for producers who have adopted these crops, but outcomes have varied depending on pest abundance, farming practices, and agricultural infrastructure. Although GE crops have provided economic benefits to many small-scale farmers in the early years of adoption, enduring and widespread gains will depend on such farmers receiving institutional support, such as access to credit, affordable inputs such as fertilizer, extension services, and access to profitable local and global markets for the crops. Evidence shows that in locations where insect-resistant crops were planted but resistance-management strategies were not followed, damaging levels of resistance evolved in some target insects. If GE crops are to be used sustainably, regulations and incentives are needed so that more integrated and sustainable pest-management approaches become economically feasible. The committee also found that in many locations some weeds had evolved resistance to glyphosate, the herbicide to which most GE crops were engineered to be resistant. Resistance evolution in weeds could be delayed by the use of integrated weed-management approaches, says the report, which also recommends further research to determine better approaches for weed resistance management. Insect-resistant GE crops have decreased crop loss due to plant pests. However, the committee examined data on overall rates of increase in yields of soybean, cotton, and maize in the U.S. for the decades preceding introduction of GE crops and after their introduction, and there was no evidence that GE crops had changed the rate of increase in yields.[ref]I’m surprised by this finding considering there are numerous studies that find GMOs increase crop yields.[/ref] It is feasible that emerging genetic-engineering technologies will speed the rate of increase in yield, but this is not certain, so the committee recommended funding of diverse approaches for increasing and stabilizing crop yield.”

Add this to the statements by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science that GMOs are safe. Concerns over increased chemical use may be somewhat legitimate, though this tends to be complicated. However, fears about herbicides like glyphosate are often overblown, seeing that both the EPA and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and WHO declare that it is not a cancer risk. Furthermore, it is important to note that uncontrolled weeds are actually a potentially huge threat, making weedkillers all the more important. As for increased herbicide resistance, science writer Ronald Bailey explains in his book The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century,

What about “superweeds”? Again, the evolution of resistance by weeds to herbicides is nothing new and is certainly not a problem specifically related to genetically enhanced crops. As of April 2014, the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds reports that there are currently 429 uniquely evolved cases of herbicide resistant weeds globally involving 234 different species. Weeds have evolved resistance to 22 of the 25 known herbicide sites of action and to 154 different herbicides. Herbicide resistant weeds have been reported in 81 crops in sixty-five countries. A preliminary analysis by University of Wyoming weed scientist Andrew Kniss parses the data on herbicide resistance from 1986 to 2012. He finds no increase in the rate at which weeds become resistant to herbicides after biotech crops were introduced in 1996. Since Roundup (glyphosate) is the most popular herbicide used with biotech crops, have the number of weed species resistant to Roundup increased? Kniss finds that the development of Roundup resistant weeds has occurred more frequently among non biotech crops. Glyphosate resistant weeds evolved due to glyphosate use, not directly due to GM crops,” he points out. “Herbicide resistant weed development is not a GMO problem, it is a herbicide problem (pgs. 155-156).

In summary, GMOs are indeed safe with relatively minor concerns. Or, as Slate‘s William Saletan puts it,

The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. First you discover that they aren’t evil. Then you learn that they aren’t perfectly innocent. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent. Pesticide vs. pesticide, technology vs. technology, risk vs. risk—it’s all relative. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label.

Discrimination and Firm Performance

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Image result for politically incorrect guide to capitalismIf an employer has an opening that pays $50,000 in salary, and the Christian applicant will bring in $51,000 in extra revenue to the firm while the Muslim applicant will bring in $55,000, then to discriminate against the creed of the latter will cost the employer $4,000 in potential profits…No government inspector or watchdog agency is required: by definition, discrimination is automatically “fined” in the free market. In addition, not only does the market catch discrimination whenever it occurs, but the amount of the “fine” is also exactly proportional to the severity of the discrimination…In short, employers are free to discriminate in the free market, but this discrimination certainly isn’t free.

– Robert Murphy, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, pg. 31.

It turns out there is good evidence for this theory. As economist Alex Tabarrok reports at Marginal Revolution,

A nice test of the theory can be found in a paper just published in Sociological Science, Are Business Firms that Discriminate More Likely to Go Out of Business? The author, Devah Pager, is a pioneer in using field experiments to study discrimination. In 2004, she and co-authors, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, ran an audit study on discrimination in New York using job applicants with similar resumes but different races and they found significant discrimination in callbacks. Now Pager has gone back to that data and asks what happened to those firms by 2010? She finds that 36% of the firms that discriminated failed but only 17% of the non-discriminatory firms failed.

The sample is small but the results are statistically significant and they continue to hold controlling for size, sales, and industry.

discrimination

So don’t discriminate. Not only is it unethical, it’s bad for business. But if you do, I hope you go out of business.

Paying Their Fair Share

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Making “the rich” pay their “fair share” has been a talking point for some time and became a bit of a slogan during the presidential race. Drawing on the Congressional Budget Office’s most recent report, the Tax Foundation posts,

One of the main takeaways from this year’s report is that the richest Americans pay a lot in taxes. In 2013, the top 1 percent of households paid an average of 34.0 percent of their income in federal taxes. To compare, the middle 20 percent of households paid only 12.8 percent of their income in taxes.

Moreover, taxes on the rich are much higher than they’ve been in recent years. Between 2008 and 2012, the top 1 percent of households paid an average tax rate of 28.8 percent. However, in 2013, this figure spiked to 34.0 percent, as a result of tax increases in the “fiscal cliff” deal and the Affordable Care Act.

We’ve known for a while that taxes rose on the rich in 2013, but the new CBO report puts in perspective exactly how high taxes on the rich are now, compared to the last three decades. For instance, in 2013, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a higher tax rate (34.0 percent) than in the year President Reagan took office (33.2 percent).

According to the CBO, the federal tax system is now “the most progressive it has been since at least the mid-1990s.” Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson notes that “the government is doing more to fight inequality right now than any year on record.”

Economist Mark Perry provides additional insights (as he has in the past) to the CBO report. For example,

  • The bottom three income quintiles are net recipient households, meaning they receive more in transfer payments than they pay in federal taxes. The top two could be designated as net payer households. The top income quintile in particular “finance[s] almost 100% of the transfer payments to the bottom 60%, as well as almost 100% of the tax revenue collected to run the federal government.”

  • The bottom three quintiles receive “more than $1 in government transfer payments for every $1 paid in federal taxes in 2013. The fourth quintile consists of minor net payer households, receiving “slightly less than a dollar in transfer payments on average ($0.85) for every $1 paid in federal taxes. In contrast, “net payer households” in the top income quintile received only $0.17 in government transfer payments per $1 paid in federal taxes in 2013.”

 

  • “Adjusting for government transfers received, the light blue bars in the chart are calculated by dividing “Federal taxes paid minus government transfers received” (row 6 in the table) into Before-Tax Income (row 3), and show average federal tax rates by income quintile after government transfers. For example, the average “net recipient household” in the lowest income quintile received a “negative tax” payment of $8,800 in 2013, had an average before-tax income of $25,400, for a negative federal tax rate of 35%…This further demonstrates that after transfer payments, Americans in the bottom 60% by income are “net recipient households” with negative federal income tax rates, while only households in the top two “net payer” income quintiles had positive federal income tax rates after transfers in 2013.”

Perry concludes,

The CBO study released [in June] provides ample evidence that the richest Americans are paying their “fair share” of federal taxes. In fact, the richest 20% of Americans by income aren’t just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered “fair” – it goes way beyond “fair” – they’re shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending.

…It’s also important to note here that the US has the most progressive federal tax system among all OECD-24 countries, see Tax Foundation president Scott Hodge’s article “No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as the US.” Specifically, the top 10% of American households pay 45.1% of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined), which is the highest tax share for that group in any of the OECD-24 countries and far above the 31.6% average for the tax burden of the top income decile. Accounting for the income share of the top income decile, the US also has the highest ratio of the income tax share of the top 10% (45.1%) to the total income share of that group (33.5%) of 1.35 times, compared to the OECD average ratio of only 1.11.[ref]You can see more commentary on the CBO report in Scott Winship’s Forbes article.[/ref]

Fatherhood: Unique Contributions to Child Health

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Image result for dad roughhousing

The American Academy of Pediatrics released a new clinical report this past June detailing “the unique contributions of fathers to healthy child development” as well as “encourag[ing] pediatricians to make an extra effort to support and involve dads more. It is the first clinical report on fathers the AAP has released in over a decade, and it includes an extensive review of theemerging research on fatherhood.” Defining fathers rather broadly–including biological fathers, stepfathers, foster fathers, grandfathers–the report’s findings include:

  • Father’s playtime or “roughhouse play,” which “decreased externalizing and internalizing behavior problems and enhanced social competence” among preschoolers.
  • Communication style, which usually includes bigger words (compared to the common maternal style of speaking at the child’s level) Research finds that, “at 3 years of age, father-child communication was a significant and unique predictor of advanced language development in the child but mother-child communication was not.”
  • “The report cites the vast body of research that shows father-presence can reduce anti-social behaviors in boys, and is linked to a decrease in early puberty, depression, early sexual activity, and teen pregnancy in girls.”

In summary,

Ultimately, the AAP report concludes: “The message is clear: fathers do not parent like mothers, nor are they a replacement for mothers when they are not at home; they provide a unique, dynamic, and important contribution to their families and children.”

This long overdue message on the irreplaceable role of fathers is not only vital for child healthcare providers to understand and communicate, but also for parents, teachers, and policymakers who want to promote child wellbeing for every family. As the AAP report demonstrates through the large and growing body of research on fatherhood, dads matter as much as moms to children’s health, and they matter in unique ways. Hopefully, more pediatricians will work harder to educate both parents about this truth, and to encourage and facilitate father involvement during every stage of child development.

Healthcare Inequality

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Image result for healthcare insuranceA June 2016 study from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center finds “that both scholars and politicians have largely overlooked a key contributor to earnings inequality: the role of rapidly increasing healthcare costs.” The study “analyzes the link between earnings inequality and rising healthcare costs using unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study finds that the increasing cost of employer-provided healthcare benefits accounts for a significant portion of rising earnings inequality.[ref]It doesn’t help that premiums have been increasing under Obamacare.[/ref] The study urges policymakers interested in addressing earnings inequality to shift their focus from failed redistributive policies to policies aimed at lowering the cost of healthcare benefits.” The key findings:

  • Most previous analyses of inequality focused exclusively on earnings, ignoring total compensation (including healthcare benefits). This oversight significantly inflated the perceived severity of workers’ earnings inequality.
  • While dollar earnings have grown significantly faster for higher-income workers than for lower-income workers, total compensation (including increasingly expensive healthcare benefits) has not.
  • Surging healthcare costs have depressed the annual earnings growth rate for lower-paid, full-time workers four times as much as for the top 1 percent of workers.
  • Redistributive policies do not address the root cause of the apparently increasing inequality, and may be counterproductive because of their negative implications for overall economic growth.
  • The key to lessening earnings inequality is to reduce the rate of increase for healthcare costs.

Check it out.

Back to the Future

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044-oct2016-gencon

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I titled this post “Back to the Future” because we’re taking a break from the historic portion of the GCO to cover the October 2016 General Conference that just wrapped up. One thing I’ve definitely learned this week is that I do better with reading than listening. There are several talks that, in preparing this post, I realized that I’m going to have to read as soon as they’re available because I didn’t get everything there was to get out of them. Also, in this post I’m going to be using quotation marks even in places where I might be paraphrasing a bit. The text isn’t online yet, so I hope you’ll forgive the lack of quote-checking. I’m just going off my notes.

So, first, I want to run through some of the quotes that I liked:

Saturday Morning Session

President Uchtdorf

“One day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that the Plan of Salvation is merciful, just, and true. For us: let today be that day.”

Sister Carol F. McConkie

“We pray by the power of the Holy Ghost.” This means that all members of the Godhood are united in prayer: we pray to the Father, through the Holy Ghost, in the name of the Son.

Elder Juan A. Uceda

“When you pray, are you really praying? Or just saying your prayers?”

Elder J. Devin Cornish

“The answers to Am I good enough? And Will I make it? Are yes” as long as you don’t rationalize, rebel, or fail to repent.”

“Please take comfort from this truth: our Heavenly Father intends for us to make it.

Saturday Afternoon Session

Elder Kazuhiko Yamashita

“Be ambitious for Christ.”

Sunday Morning Session

President Russel M. Nelson

At first I didn’t like this talk because it seemed like a stretch to tell me that we could experience joy and suffering simultaneously. But Elder Nelson pressed the point home, saying that Christ focused on joy in order to endure the trials of the Atonement, and citing a friend who said, “I have learned to suffer with joy. My suffering was swallowed up in the joy of Christ.” Now the concepts are germinating in me, and I’m waiting to see what realizations eventually grow out of them.

Elder Dean M. Davies

“Spiritual experiences have less to do with what is happening around us, and everything to do with what is in our hearts.”

I loved this talk because it went to one of my favorite themes–the idea of finding the sacred and sublime in every day experiences–but I also cracked up when my wife commented that, “Some of us just hope for ordinary meetings, and not weird ones.” There’s truth to that, too!

Elder Lynn G. Robbins

“Unkind things are not usually spoken under the influence of the spirit.”

Sunday Afternoon

Elder Brian K. Ashton

Repentance is not a backup plan.

Elder K. Brett Nattress

“If all that your children knew of the Gospel is what they had learned from you, how much would they know?”

Elder Dale G. Renlund

“Repentance is not only possible, but also joyful because of our Savior. . . I invite you to feel more joy in your life. Joy in the knowledge that the atonement of Jesus Christ is real… and joy in choosing to repent.”

Now, there’s one more thing that I want to talk about. There were a ton of talks about questioning, doubt, and faith crises. Elder Craig C. Christensen said “Joseph Smith had questions, but luckily he did not let his questions overwhelm his faith.” Elder Basset said:

“The Church is making great efforts to be transparent. Even after that, the members are unsatisfied with some things that can’t be understood through study. That is because some things can only be understood through faith.”

Elder Ballard said:

“Before you make the spiritually perilous decision to leave, stop and think about what you have felt here and why you have felt it. Where will you to go find others who believe in personal, loving Heavenly Parents? . . . Where will you to go find people who live by the values you share?”

And he made this incredibly powerful statement that I’m sure will have echoes and reverberations in my mind for many, many years to come: “Jesus understand our infirmities, including the loss of faith.”

He also said:

“My heartfelt plea is that we will encourage, accept, and understand those who are struggling on the path. We need to minister to one another. Just as we should open our arms in a spirit of welcoming a new convert, so should we embrace and support those who have questions and are faltering in their faith.”

Elder Rasband was perhaps the most direct about it, stating at the outset that a friend’s faith crisis had led to his talk, and making memory his theme:

“Recall, especially in times of crisis, when you felt the Spirit and your testimony was strong. I promise that if you avoid things that do not build your testimony or that mock your beliefs, your testimony will come back. You will once again feel the safety and warmth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

He concluded: “Do not forget. Please, do not forget.”

But in some ways the most powerful of all these talks was the one given by Elder Quentin L. Cook, who talked about stumbling blocks, including “the philosophies of men.” What struck me most–and I only picked up on this as I want back through his talk–was that he cited President Heber C. Kimball from back in 1856:

We think we are secure here in the chambers of the everlasting hills, where we can close those few doors of the canyons against mobs and persecutors, the wicked and the vile, who have always beset us with violence and robbery, but I want to say to you, my brethren, the time is coming when we will be mixed up in these peaceful valleys to the extent that it will be difficult to tell the face of a Saint from the face of an enemy to the people of God. Then, brethren, look out for the great sieve, for there will be a great sifting time, and many will fall; for I say unto you there is a test, a TEST, a TEST coming, and who will be able to stand? This church has before it many close places through which it will have to pass before the work of God is crowned with victory.

This is a pretty apocalyptic-sounding prophecy, and so it’s no coincidence that Elder Cook specifically erected a barrier against overcorrection. It’s pretty clear, from his talk and from President Kimball’s quote, that the chief danger comes from what is popular and what is intellectually favored today. And so it is that Elder Cook says we should avoid people who put too much emphasis on particular aspects of the Word of Wisdom or spend extravagant amounts of time and money prepping for the end times. It seems pretty clear that Hollywood and the Ivory Tower are the source of greatest confusion, but that our response has to be to stand our ground, not overcorrect in the opposite direction.

When I looked up President Kimball’s quote, I found it’s been used in many places. (It was new to me, however.) One of those was a 1990 Ensign article by President Hinckley[ref]A City Upon A Hill[/ref] who–after citing just the last parts of the quote–wrote:

I do not know precisely the nature of that test. But I am inclined to think the time is here and that the test lies in our capacity to live the gospel rather than adopt the ways of the world.

President Hinckley also said, “I do not advocate a retreat from society.”

I am eager for transcripts of these talks to be released. I especially want to re-read all the talks in this section carefully.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

The Evidence for Syringe Exchange Programs and Drug Decriminalization

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Image result for syringe exchange programAn article in The New York Times last month highlights some important policies that could be more effective than our currently abysmal War on Drugs: syringe exchange programs. “Evidence abounds that they work,” writes economist Austin Frakt.

A study of the first American program–started in the Tacoma, Wash., area in 1988–found that use of the exchange was associated with a greater than 60 percent reduction in the risk of contracting hepatitis B or C. Another study of over 1,600 injection drug users in New York found that those who didn’t use a syringe exchange in the early 1990s were more than three times as likely to contract H.I.V.

It turns out these programs are also cheaper for taxpayers:

A cost-effectiveness analysis published in 2014 replicated the findings of others that came before it: A dollar invested in syringe exchange programs saves at least six dollars in avoided costs associated with H.I.V. alone. 

But don’t these programs promote drug use and crime? Well, “according to many studies, that isn’t so. Instead, they are associated with increased participation in treatment programs.” When taken with the evidence of the positive effects of Portugal’s drug decriminalization, it seems we have multiple reasons to give up the War on Drugs and the programs to erect in its stead.

What Happened?: Republicans on Trade

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Image result for free trade

I’ve mentioned in passing the oddity of Democrats being more supportive of free trade than their supposedly capitalism-loving Republican opponents. A brand new poll by POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health further confirms this shift. Some of the findings:

  • 47% of Republicans think free trade has hurt their communities, twice that of Democrats (24%). Only 18% of Republicans think free trade has helped, while nearly twice as many Democrats do (33%).
  • When broken down by country (Canada, EU, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, China) and by party, Republicans exceed both Democrats and Independents on every country in claiming that trade hurts. Over 60% of Republicans think trade with Mexico and China have hurt Americans. Democrats were surprisingly the lowest on every country.
  • “54% of Democrats believe that free trade has lost more U.S. jobs than it has created, compared to 66% of Independents and 85% of Republicans. Similarly, 38% of Democrats believe free trade has lowered U.S. wages, compared to 50% of Independents and 66% of Republicans. Only 8% of Republicans, 11% of Independents, and 19% of Democrats think free trade has led to higher wages for U.S. workers” (pg. 3).

There’s much more, including attitudes about the state of the economy and the Affordable Care Act. As one who grew up in a conservative household, I find this all rather worrying. As Trump’s senior policy adviser and economist Peter Navarro told POLITICO, “There’s been a schism for a long time between registered Republicans and the party leadership. That was the essence of the primary election. You had a group of insider politicians singing the same old globalization song. And one candidate saying the emperor has no clothes.” The problem, of course, is that the emperor is fully–clothed.

The Republican party has become a party of mercantilists.