Science writer Ronald Bailey has a brief write-up on some of the research regarding nuclear power and health outcomes:
A 2015 recent analysis by Israeli researcher Yehoshua Socol in the journal Dose-Reponsereconsiders the health consequences of the the Chernobyl accident. Socol argues that using even the most conservative linear no-threshold hypothesis to calculate cancer risk cannot distinguish any increase above normal background rates of cancer incidence and mortality. Assume 50,000 cancer deaths would result from Chernobyl’s radiation. Socol notes, assuming current mortality rates, that over the next 50 years some 50 million people (plus or minus 2.5 million) will die of cancer in developed countries. Given the annual uncertainty of 50,000 deaths per year, it would be impossible to detect what number, if any, of those deaths can be attributed to exposures to Chernobyl.
Socol concludes that “unlike the widespread myths and misperceptions, there is little scientific evidence for carcinogenic, mutagenic or other detrimental health effects caused by the radiation in the Chernobyl-affected area, besides the acute effects and small number of thyroid cancers. On the other hand, it should be stressed that the above-mentioned myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation caused, by themselves, enormous human suffering.”
A fascinating December 2015 study by European researchers in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres asked what would the health consequences to Europe if the continent had closed all of its nuclear power plants and switched to coal-fired generation between 2005 and 2009? They calculated that there would have been an increase of around 100,000 premature deaths annually owing to increased air pollution (most of them due to cardiopulmonary illnesses). If these calculations are correct, the number of deaths attributable to coal would have been three times higher than even the worst-case Chernobyl cancer scenario being pushed by activists. If the WHO’s estimates are right, coal kills at more than 1,000 times the rate of Chernobyl radiation.
Chernobyl was bad enough, but exaggerating its effects to further an unscientific campaign against nuclear power is ethically sleazy and may have the unintended consequence of killing more people than the activists claim they want to save.
“The suddenness of the Great Enrichment is nuts,” writes Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center. “Graphs like this one actually conceal how nuts it is. Imagine a linear horizontal axis that is nothing but a flat line hovering above zero for, like, a mile. And then, about a second ago in geological time, wham! And here you are, probably wearing pants, reading about it on a glowing screen. Nuts is what it is.”
What caused it?
Joel Mokyr says it was the development of science and technology. Douglass North and his followers, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, say it was a matter of stumbling into the right political and economic “institutions”—of getting the “rules of the game” right. Acemoglu and Robinson say institutions need to be “inclusive” rather than “extractive.” They become more inclusive when ruling elites take a little pressure off the boot they’ve got on people’s backs (which they do mainly when cornered by effective collective action from below) and allow economic and political rights to expand. Deirdre McCloskey says the Great Enrichment came about from a shift in beliefs and moral norms that finally lent dignity and esteem to the commercial classes, their “bourgeois” virtues, and the tasks of trade and betterment. This revaluation of values was the advent of what has come to be known as “liberalism.”
Each of these views is part of the truth. The debate is mainly a matter of how beliefs and norms, institutions and incentives, scientific knowledge and technical innovation all fit together. Which are the causes and which are the effects? There’s no way to adequately summarize the involuted nuance of the debate. But it’s not wrong to sum it up bluntly like this: humans rather suddenly got immensely better at cooperating and now a lot of us are really rich.
But you know what’s also nutty?
What’s nuts is that nobody kicks off a discussion of justice, distributive or social, with the fact of the Great Enrichment. Because the upshot of our best accounts of the most important thing that has ever happened to the human race seems to be that equalizing the distribution of rights and liberties, powers and prerogatives, respect and esteem led to an increase in the scope and productivity of cooperation, generating hugely enriching surpluses.
And these gains spurred further demands for and advances in inclusion and dignity—that is to say advances in giving people what they’re morally due, in virtue of being people—which led in turn to broader, more intensive, more creative cooperation, producing yet more enrichment, and so on. There appears to be a very happy relationship of mutual reinforcement between what is very naturally called “social justice” and the sort of enrichment that is known to produce longer, healthier, happier, human lives.
How come? Why doesn’t this mass improvement in the lives of millions get mentioned much?
The 20th century socialist-leaning left misdiagnosed the sources of the economic growth. The Great Enrichment was rooted in the exploitation of labor and the depredations of colonialism, while ongoing post-capitalist production was largely a matter of technology and rational state management. Poverty is toxic and the effects of widespread wealth are beneficial. But wealth in excess of potential-realizing sufficiency isn’t improving. Stable equality is improving, and brings out the best in us. Continuously rising market-led prosperity, on the other hand, encourages uncivic avidity and generates inequalities that undermine the amiable stability of egalitarian social justice.
The left-leaning 20th century literature on the distributive aspects of social justice as often as not treated wealth like manna from heaven. It’s as if the astonishing bounty of the Great Enrichment was something we’d just stumbled upon, like a cave full of naturally-occurring, neatly-stacked gold ingots in a newly-discovered cave beneath the village square. How do we divide up the gold among the villagers? Equal shares seems fair!
Or else wealth was something workers produced automatically by working only to have it stolen by the idle rich, who control the state’s goons. Or wealth was something that mechanical and social engineers could get together to produce with the right combination of workers and machines. Since it was no problem whatsoever producing more than enough for everybody (our best men are on top of it!), there was no good reason for anybody to have more than everybody else.
Wilkinson takes a swipe at both Rawlsian leftists and Hayekian libertarians, but especially the latter for their rejection of the concept of social justice. He concludes,
[M]any advocates of economic liberty…reflexively badmouth the welfare state with little regard for the possibility that the welfare state is an efficiency-enhancing institution that helps maintain popular support for relatively free markets by ensuring they more or less benefit everyone. Meanwhile, people who like social insurance, and worry about bad luck and the human costs of capitalist creative destruction—that is to say, mostpeople—turn away in contempt or bemusement from what’s advertised to them as the politics of freedom.
More importantly, and more disastrously, rejecting the very idea of social justice, letting it harden into principle, hobbled classical liberalism’s ability to make the argument it has always been making, in less attractive terms, all along: that social justice is, first and foremost, a supply-side concept; that social justice is about the moral equality, respect, and rights that call forth cooperation and foster the creativity and cultivation of potential that generates ever larger surpluses, which, once they’ve been created, we can worry about divvying up; that social justice is a cause and effect of the Great Enrichment; that increasing social justice will make us greater and more greatly enriched.
It’s a potent and beguiling argument. It is an important argument. I’m convinced that it is, in broad strokes, a sound argument. The failure of our forebears to make it shouldn’t stop us from making it now.
The site for the Greater Good Science Center at the UC Berkeley has an intriguing article examining a study on the motivations behind acts of kindness. Based on a statistical analysis called exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the researchers came up with four categories of human kindness:
Genuine kindness (benevolence)
Strategic kindness (maximizing gain and avoiding cost or loss)
The upshot? We’re all inclined towards genuine kindness to different degrees, partly as a function of how we generally feel—and perhaps surprisingly, how smart we are. Beyond genuine kindness, other kinds of kindness are influenced by age, sex, income—and whether or not we have children. By the way, their analyses do not reveal whether one person is more or less kind than another. Rather, they tell a story about where people’s kindness—however scant or abundant—is coming from.
The research indicates that how we “generally feel—that is, whether we’d characterize ourselves as having more positive or negative feelings in life—influences our tendency towards genuine kindness. For example, having a lower tendency to experience negative emotions is associated with more genuine kindness. In other words, if you’re not often in a bad mood, you’re more likely to behave kindly in an unrequited way.” Furthermore, those “who scored higher on a battery of cognitive, attention, and IQ tests also tended to be more genuinely kind—but no more, or less, likely to exhibit kindness based on strategic or norm-motivated concerns. Nor did they describe themselves as more kind.” Finally, demographics matter. “As people get older, genuine kindness falls. So does norm-motivated kindness. This doesn’t mean that older people are chronically less kind. It just suggests that they may be less concerned with reciprocity, fairness, and reputation—and their kindness hinges more on considering costs and benefits. The researchers observed a similar pattern for monthly income: As income increased, genuine kindness fell, which is consistent with a growing literature on the harmful effects on inequality on the privileged.” Perhaps surprisingly, “people who were parents also scored lower on genuine kindness, while showing no differences on any of the other kindness factors.” And while “women scored higher in self-reported kindness,” this “did not play out for genuinely kind behavior, which was actually more common in men.”
In short, the “study is important because it begins to systematically chart out the mental and behavioral underpinnings and contextual parameters of human kindness, to provide a theoretical blueprint for the growing community of research converging on age-old issues concerning human goodness and survival.”
Is the TSA worth the cost? According to Vox, the answer is likely ‘no’. “The TSA’s inefficiency isn’t just aggravating and unnecessary;” writes Dylan Matthews, “by pushing people to drive instead of fly, it’s actively dangerous and costing lives. Less invasive private scanning would be considerably better. The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it’s attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren’t that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it hard to judge if the TSA is working properly — if no one tries to do a liquid-based attack, then we don’t know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks.”
In order to test the TSA’s effectiveness, Homeland Security officials “pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times. And 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA’s lengthy screening process. That’s a success rate of more than 95 percent.” Granted, the point of the security measures is “to make terrorists change their plans” rather than catch them at the airport. In short, “there’s basically zero evidence the agency has prevented any attacks”:
The TSA claims it won’t provide examples of such cases due to national security, but given its history of bragging about lesser successes, that’s a little tough to believe. For instance, the agency bragged plenty about catching Kevin Brown, an Army vet who tried to check pipe bomb-making materials. Brown wasn’t going to blow up the plane — the unfinished materials were in his checked luggage — but if the TSA publicized that, why wouldn’t it publicize catching someone who was trying to blow up the plane?
The Government Accountability Office is also skeptical that the TSA is stopping terrorists. It concluded in 2013 that there’s no evidence the agency’s SPOT program, which employed 2,800 as of the study and attempts to scan passengers for suspicious behavior, is at all effective. Only 14 percent of passenger flaggings by TSA officers led to a referral to law enforcement. Only 0.6 percent of TSA flaggings led to an arrest. None of those arrests were designated as terrorism-related.
What about the most loathed TSA rules: the shoe removal requirement, and the ban on all but the tiniest containers of liquids? There’s never been any evidence that these are effective. Remember: We caught the people who tried to attack with their shoes and with liquid explosives, without these rules in place. Europe is gradually phasing out the liquid ban.
Beyond the lack of evidence in favor of the TSA, the agency may actually be leading to more deaths:
One paper by economists Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel Simon found that, controlling for other factors like weather and traffic, 9/11 provoked such a large decrease in air traffic and increase in driving that 327 more people died every month from road accidents. The effect dissipated over time, but the total death toll (up to 2,300) rivals that of the attacks themselves.
Another paper by the same authors found that one post-9/11 security measure — increased checked baggage screening — reduced passenger volume by about 6 percent. Combine the two papers, and you get a disturbing conclusion: In their words, over the course of three months, “approximately 129 individuals died in automobile accidents which resulted from travelers substituting driving for flying in response to inconvenience associated with baggage screening.”
This isn’t just one set of studies; there’s other evidence that 9/11 led to an increase in driving, which cost at least a thousand lives. The 129 deaths per quarter-year figure is, as Nate Silver notes, “the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.”
You can dispute the precise figures here; these are regression analyses, which are hardly perfect. But it stands to reason that having to get to the airport two or three hours before a flight reduces demand for flights relative to a world where you only have to arrive 30 minutes beforehand — particularly for flights on routes where a two- to three-hour wait dramatically increases travel time relative to driving, like New York to Washington, DC, or Boston to New York. That means more driving. That means more death.
That might be worth it for a system that we know for a fact prevents attacks. But there’s no evidence the TSA does…The solution is clear: Airports should kick out the TSA, hire (well-paid and unionized) private screeners, and simply ask people to go through normal metal detectors with their shoes on, their laptops in their bags, and all the liquids they desire. The increased risk would be negligible — and if it gets people to stop driving and start flying, it could save lives.
Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin’s Eve after the Fall. (MicheleLovesArt – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen CC BY-SA 2.0)
At Walker’s encouragement, I’ve been reading Brené Brown recently. Brown is a shame researcher, and she defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”[ref]From her website.[/ref]
Not everything Brown says resonates with me. I don’t like the route she takes, but I do like the destination she’s aiming for. For example, above she says that shame involves “believe that we are flawed.” Well, we are flawed, so we have a pretty good reason for that belief! She also has an affirmation she repeats a lot: “I am enough.” I think that’s nonsense. She’s not enough, I’m not enough, no one is enough.
On the other hand, the rest of her quote is that, because we are flawed, we are “therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” And that, I agree, is a soul-destroying lie. Similarly, I don’t like the phrase “I am enough,” but I do like a very similar phrase that I think gets to Brown’s point: “I am a child of God.” Or, in the lyrics of my favorite band Thrice:
We’re more than carbon and chemicals
Free will is ours and we can’t let go
We can’t allow this, the quiet cull
So we sing out this, our canticle
We are the image of the invisible
We all were lost now we are found
No one can stop us or slow us down
We are all named and we are all known
We know that we’ll never walk alone
We’re more than static and dial tone
We’re emblematic of the unknown
Raise up the banner, bend back your bows
Remove the cancer, take back your souls
We are the image of the invisible
Though all the world may hate us, we are named
Though shadow overtake us, we are known
The theology is a little confused from a Mormon standpoint, but the sentiment is one we embrace. Because we are the offspring of God, we are worthy regardless of whether or not we’re flawed and regardless of whether or not we’re enough. That’s my only beef with Brown, really. I don’t like people trying to tell me that I’m good enough to love. What does “good enough” have to do with anything? I don’t have to earn the love of my Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. That’s sort of the whole point.
King Benjamin told his people that “Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth” and that—no matter how hard we try to obey God—we are “unprofitable servants.”[ref]Mosiah 2:21, 25[/ref] On the other hand, the Lord said, “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.”[ref]D&C 18:10[/ref]
This isn’t really a contradiction, in my eyes, and anyone who has had children can see how. The rugrats are useless, slimy, stinky, sleep-depriving monster who will as soon vomit or defecate on you as smile at you. And we love and cherish them with all our hearts. Children, especially very young children, are supremely “unprofitable.” They are little black holes that suck away our time and energy and youth. And they fill our lives with meaning.
So, this has been a long, long digression. Sorry, folks! Should have saved it for the book review!
The reason for this digression is that, although he never uses the term, Elder Hales’ talk We Can’t Do It Alone is all about shame. Because here’s the thing, the part about Brown’s definition that is in some ways the most important is the very end: shame “makes us [fee] unworthy of connection.”[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref] That’s what it all comes down to. As humans, we have a deep need to belong. And what shame does is convince us to abandon the attempt and settle for being broken and alone.
But, as Elder Hales says, “we did not come to this life to live it alone.” On the contrary, “the true nature of the gospel plan is the interdependence we have upon one another.” And what stops us? Shame. Again, he doesn’t use the word, but the concept is clearly identical to Brown. For example:
When we are marred spiritually or physically, our first reaction is to withdraw into the dark shadows of depression, to blot out hope and joy—the light of life which comes from knowing we are living the commandments of our Father in heaven. This withdrawal will ultimately lead us to rebellion against those who would like to be our friends, those who can help us most, even our family. But worst of all, we finally reject ourselves.
The heart of the Gospel, as we understand it, is the atonement. It’s unity. Shame, which is not the same as guilt[ref]Guilt, according to both the scriptures and also Brown, is a useful response to our own mistakes that encourages us to improve and do better in the future.[/ref], is the wedge shaped to break that unity, the lure that holds us back from the atonement, and we need to be—as Brown puts it—“shame resilient” in order to prevent it from stopping us or turning us aside from our mission to improve ourselves individually and collectively during our mortal sojourn.
Oh, and now for the brave, here’s Thrice’s song that I quoted earlier. Be warned, the message is fantastic but the rock is hard.
This is a common rallying cry among Americans (e.g., Bernie Sanders) who are disturbed by income inequality in the U.S. and the supposed excesses of capitalism. So what can the United States learn from Sweden? Swedish author Johan Norberg writes,
As a native of Sweden, I must admit this makes me Feel the Bern a bit. Sanders is right: America would benefit hugely from modeling her economic and social policies after her Scandinavian sisters. But Sanders should be careful what he wishes for. When he asks for “trade policies that work for the working families of our nation and not just the CEOs of large, multi-national corporations,” Social Democrats in Sweden would take this to mean trade liberalization—which would have the benefit of exposing monopolist fat cats to competition—not the protectionism that Sanders favors.
In fact, when President Barack Obama visited Sweden in 2013, the three big Swedish trade unions sent him a letter requesting a meeting. Their agenda: a discussion of “how to promote free trade.” The chairman of the largest Social Democratic trade union scolded the American president for his insufficient commitment to the free flow of goods.
Norberg acknowledges that Sweden is “still-high public spending and high taxes, at least compared to the U.S….The governments provide the citizens with health care, child care, free colleges, and subsidized parental and medical leave. We Scandinavians have our quarrels with these systems and how they function, but at least they have not ruined our societies; indicators of living standards and health are impressive.” So how come this amount of government services doesn’t cripple the economy? Norberg explains,
One reason is that we compensate for them with a more open economy than others. In the summary Fraser Institute rankings, Sweden and Denmark are more economically free than the United States when it comes to legal structure and property rights, sound money, free trade, business regulation, and credit market regulations. We don’t have the multitude of occupational licensing laws that block competition in the United States.
We also pay for the welfare state in a fairly brutal way, but one that doesn’t hurt production as much: by squeezing the poor and the middle class. Unlike the rich, poor and middle-class people don’t flee or dodge when they’re taxed aggressively.
The Social Democrats knew all along that they couldn’t fund such a generous government by taking from the rich and the businesses—there are too few of them, and the economy depends on them too much. So Sweden and Denmark take in lots of revenue via highly regressive value-added taxes at a normal rate of 25 percent of sales—the only tax where the rich and poor pay exactly the same amount in kronor. On the other hand, the corporate tax is just 22 and 23.5 percent respectively, compared to the U.S. rate of 35 percent.[ref]Check out this analysis of the Scandinavian tax systems at the Tax Foundation.[/ref]
In fact, rich people in Sweden enjoy several economic advantages not offered to their lower-class counterparts. Sweden always admitted very generous tax deductions for capital costs. Labor regulations are tailored to benefit big companies. To attract highly educated specialists from abroad, Sweden now has a beneficial “expert tax” for them, which shields 25 percent of their wages from taxation for a three-year period. “Sure, it is unfair, but we have no better solution,” the Social Democratic minister of finance said in 2000, when he implemented special tax exemptions for individuals and families who owned a large share of a listed company.
Unlike Sanders, Scandinavian socialists have concluded that you can have a big government or you can make the rich pay for it all, but you can’t do both.
The shape of welfare state also has roots in Swedish culture:
Two Scandinavian economists, Andreas Bergh and Christian Bjørnskov, have documented that a high degree of trust is an old legacy, and that descendants of those who emigrated from Scandinavia 100 years before the welfare state are also more trusting. Their conclusion is that trust in others and social cohesion creates the welfare state rather than the other way around, since it is more tempting to give power to politicians and money to strangers if you believe that they are decent people who would never cheat the system.
Scandinavians have always frowned on those who take money they are not entitled to. Sweden is, after all, the country where the leading candidate for prime minister in 1995 had to resign because it was revealed that she had used her official credit card to pay for some small private expenses, even though she always, every month, paid the credit card debt herself.
When asked, “Under what circumstances is one justified in accepting government benefits to which one is not entitled?” in 1991 and 1998, the Nordics led the world in saying “never.” (Only Malta says it is more upstanding, and a brief canvass of Maltese of my acquaintance suggests that they are rather likely to have lied on the survey.) Oh, and the United States is 16th, lower on the list than even the Italians.
Unfortunately, Sweden has recently seen “increased unemployment among immigrants. Now the employment gap between natives and foreign-born in Sweden is twice the European Union average, even though we express less racist and discriminatory attitudes than others. In response, Swedish politicians have recently decided to abandon liberal immigration policies and do whatever they can to scare people away. It was easier to have a one-size-fits-all approach when we were all alike, from the same background, with the same faith and attitude and a similar education. We need a more flexible model now that we are becoming a little bit more like…well, the United States.”
What explains Sweden’s high level of income equality?
What were the causes of Sweden’s problems from 1970 to 1995?
How is it possible that Sweden, since the crisis of the early 1990s, is growing faster than most EU countries despite its high taxes and generous welfare state?
His conclusions?
In many aspects, Sweden is not very different from other countries. The accelerating economic growth in Sweden around 1870 was most likely largely a result of liberalizations and well-functioning capitalist institutions. In this respect, there is no Swedish exceptionalism.
When it comes to equality, the most important conclusion is that most of the decrease in income inequality in Sweden occurred before the expansion of the welfare state. A number of seemingly unrelated reforms, such as land reforms, school reforms and the occurrence of unions and centralized wage bargaining, are likely explanations. Interestingly, at least parts of gender equality in Sweden seem to be an unintended consequence of the need to increase labor supply by using women in the workforce.
Thus, when it comes to the roots of prosperity and equality, the lessons from Sweden are not very different compared to the lessons from mainstream institutional economics: Well-functioning capitalist institutions, especially property rights and a non-corrupt state sector, promotes prosperity. Primary schooling, risk sharing social insurance schemes and labor unions contribute to a more equal distribution of income (pg. 21).
He notes that Sweden’s lagging economy between 1970 and 1995 was due to a
combination of unsuccessful macro-economic policies and a very generous welfare state…During the period of lagging behind, excessive state interventionism hampered structural adjustment and economic development in general. The economy was much less capitalist, rules were unstable, policy unpredictable, and work incentives were weakened by the design of taxes and benefits. This leads to the conclusion that to successfully combine a large welfare state with economic growth, macroeconomic factors are crucial and a high degree of economic openness may actually foster policies that promote competitiveness. Analyzing the fact that Sweden was ranked the second most competitive country in the world according to the Global Competitiveness Index 2010–2011 (just slightly behind Switzerland). Eklund et al. (2011) emphasize the role of market deregulations, inflation control and stricter budget rules – but also some lowering of taxes and benefit levels. The upshot is that the policy implications from the case of Sweden are hard to classify along a simple right-left scale: the welfare state seems to survive because it coexists with high levels of economic freedom and well-functioning capitalist institutions (pg. 22).[ref]You can read about the Swedish reforms since the 1990s here.[/ref]
So, be like Sweden. But be like it in the right ways.
There’s a piece I’ve been meaning to write for months about the end of Pax Americana. This is not the post, but it is a prelude.
Traveling in Turkey last week, American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that “longer-term status of President [Bashar] Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” This may not sound shocking, but it’s a thinly-veiled euphemism (similar to ones employed by long-time Assad ally Vladimir Putin) for a shift in American policy away from overthrowing the Assad regime and towards allowing Assad to finish suppressing the Syrian rebels and retain power.
Within a few days of that, Assad’s forces apparently launched a chemical weapon attack that killed at least 69 civilians, including women and children. It’s not hard to draw a line from the first event to the second. Although Obama infamously and catastrophically failed to back up his “red line” threat, global disapproval is the key feature that has kept the Assad regime from repeating the chemical weapons attacks of 2013. In signalling the shift in American policy, Tillerson effectively handed the Assad regime a blank check. They cashed it.
What’s fascinating to me is the reaction by American isolationists to this fairly mundane and predictable series of events. If the implacable foe of a murderous, WMD-deploying dictator suddenly decides that they’re placcable after all, it shouldn’t shock us when that murderous, WMD-deploying dictator uses his suddenly longer leash to go out and use those WMDs to murder his enemies. That is what murderous, WMD-deploying dictators do. And so this is what American non-intervention looks like.
But the isolationists–led by Ron Paul–can’t face that reality because they have been telling Americans for literally decades that the real source of all the violence in the Middle East is American meddling. If only America would back off, they say, the level of violence would diminish. In order to preserve that narrative, we suddenly get outlandish conspiracy theories about how the attack was a false flag operation at the behest of American neocons. Yes, according to Ron Paul (and a lot of his followers), it is more plausible that John McCain, the CIA, and Syrian rebels are in a conspiracy to frame Assad for using chemical weapons than that Assad himself used chemical weapons.
This is not the post where I present my full case for continued American participation on the global stage. That will come soon, I hope. This is the post where I remind everyone that extremism is almost always a symptom of absolutism. Absolutism is a natural reaction to a tragic world in which tradeoffs, ambiguity, and complexity are unavoidable. Humans hate all of these things at a visceral level. We would much rather live in a simple, black-and-white world with easy answers to all of our toughest problems.
When I was a little kid, I was viscerally upset about the Chinese crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests.[ref]Yes, that’s the kind of thing that really bothered 8-year old Nathaniel.[/ref] I fantasized about the US sending F-15s to blow up the bad guys and save the student protesters. Real life doesn’t work that way, and it seems that some of the loudest voices calling for us to “do something” in Syria never learned that lesson. As though it was self-evident that anything we did would have a net-positive impact. That’s one kind of extremism. The other is the kind that says if the US just packs up and goes home, vicious dictators won’t take advantage of that power vacuum to drop chemical weapons on unarmed families. As though it was self-evident that anything we did would have a net-negative impact.
So let me be clear: this isn’t an argument for more or for less intervention in Syria. I don’t know the best strategy for us to take there. This is simply an argument against oversimplification and the vilification that inevitably follows. Why does oversimplification lead to vilification? Because if the world is simple and the answers are easy, then you have to come up with an explanation for why all our problems still exist. The only plausible answer is that there are really bad people who just want everyone to suffer and somehow they are in control. That is why belief in a fundamentally simplistic world leads directly to belief in astonishingly ornate conspiracy theories and cartoonish supervillains. It’s just the cost of sustaining the illusion that the world is orderly, predictable, and comprehensible.
No matter what we do in Syria, there will be costs, they will be high, and they will be borne by the most vulnerable. I hope we can try to debate with a little more good faith and sobriety what–if anything–we can do as a nation. It might not seem like the emotionally appropriate response to tragedy, but it’s the only responsible one.
It depends on how you measure it. According to a recent NBER paper by Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote, most estimates use the CPI-U as a price deflator. Sacerdote instead
calculate[s] real wages using either the Fed’s preferred inflation measure of PCE (Personal Consumption Expenditures) or using simple adjustments to CPI using magnitudes suggested by the Boskin commission (Boskin et al 1996) and Costa (2001). This adjustment reverses the finding of wage stagnation. Using the PCE to deflate nominal wages suggests real wage growth of 24 percent from 1975-2015 or about .54% growth in real wages per year. Importantly that growth is significantly less than the 1.18% annual growth in real wages (using PCE inflation) seen in the earlier decade 1964-1975 and is significantly less than GDP per capita growth of 1.8 percent over the 1975-2015 period. But 24 percent growth over the 1975-2015 is substantially better than zero growth and the PCE inflation could itself still contain upward bias. Adjusting for the Hamilton (1998) and Costa (2001) estimates of CPI bias implies real wage growth of 1 percent per year during 1975-2015 and GDP per capita growth of 2.7 percent per year.
In short, “PCE adjusted wages appear to have grown at .5% per year during 1975-2015 while the de-biased CPI adjusted wages grew at 1% per year over the same time period.”
So why do so many Americans feel worse off? Sacerdote hypothesizes,
First, I am only examining consumption within very large sections of the income distribution and there may be specific groups (for example less than high school educated men) for whom consumption is actually falling. Second, it’s possible that the quality of some services such as public education or health care could be falling for some groups. Third, the rise in income inequality coupled with increased information flow about other people’s consumption may be making Americans feel worse off in a relative sense even if their material goods consumption is rising. Fourth, changes in family structure (e.g. the rise of single parent households) , increases in the prison population, or increases in substance addiction could make people worse off even in the face of rising material wealth. A deep future research agenda would be to understand how America has lost its sense of optimism about living standards and whether the problem is one of consumption, relative consumption (relative to other people) or something entirely different.
On top of this, Harvard’s Martin Feldstein points out that innovation and new products are often ignored when measuring economic growth and the state of living standards:
Ignoring the introduction of new products is therefore a serious further source of understating the real growth of output, incomes, and productivity. New products and services are potentially valuable in themselves and are also valued by consumers because they add to the variety of available options. In an economy in which new goods and services are continually created, their omission in the current method of valuing aggregate real output makes the existing measure of real output even more deficient and more of a continually increasing underestimate of true output. Hulten (2015) summarizes decades of research on dealing with new products done by the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth with the conclusion that “the current practice for incorporating new goods are complicated but may miss much of the value of these innovations.” …[T]he official statistics ignore the very substantial direct benefit to consumers when new products and services become available, causing an underestimate of the rate of increase in real output and an overestimate of the corresponding price index…The failure to take new products into account in a way that reflects their value to consumers may be an even greater distortion in the estimate of real growth than the failure to reflect changes in the quality of goods and services. There is no way to know (pgs. 11-12, 14).
Feldstein has made this argument before in more popular writing. A good number of economists agree. While growth in real wages could be better, it seems to be inaccurate to say that they have stagnated.
Whenever General Conference rolls around, we suspend the ordinary General Conference Odyssey schedule to pay attention to the current conference, and that’s what we did this past weekend as well. There were a lot of great talks from this session, but I don’t really want to go into them in great detail until I can read the text.
Instead, I just want to make a general observation.
During talks by Elders Uchtdorf and Renlund, which touched on themes that tend to be near to the heart of left-leaning Mormons (e.g. love, tolerance, refugees), there was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. This turned to consternation when Elder Christofferson spoke, however, especially when he pulled from conservative thinkers David Brooks and Ross Douthat. I couldn’t resist joking about that on Facebook, because I knew perfectly well the effect it would have.[ref]Read through the comments if you’re curious.[/ref]
Really, though, my motivation wasn’t so much immature “neener neener” and more genuine excitement. The Douthat article in particular is one of the most important op-eds I’ve ever read, and it has had a really significant impact on my thinking. I was thrilled to hear the ideas from it over the pulpit in General Conference.
This can be dangerous, of course. One of my friends sardonically:
I go into every General Conference with faith that I’ll be provided the authoritative ammo from a commonly accepted authority so I can combat Mormons who disagree with me.
It’s really important to remember that the fundamental role of prophets is to warn. That means, pretty much by definition, that when we like to hear the least is what we need to hear the most.
I had one other thought that I wanted to share when it comes to the supposed Uchtdorf vs. Christofferson divide, and that is that our job as members is to listen to the General Authorities as a body. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have your favorites—the ones who seem to speak directly to you—but the possibility of fandom turning into factionalism is anathema to the unity of the Church.
Trying to convey complicated ideas to a large crowd is like herding sheep, in that you need at least two people coming from opposite sides to keep the sheep inline.
If you have some sheep veering off to the west (I’m trying to avoid left/right), then placing someone over to the west will fix that problem, but it might actually exacerbate the problem of sheep who were already headed off to far to the east. And vice-versa. So what you need is one guy on the west herding in and another guy on the east hearing in and–taken together–you can actually keep your flock together and where they’re supposed to be.
In particular, Christofferson’s talk exists so that people don’t get a little too carried away with their interpretation of Renlund’s, Holland’s, and Uchtdorf’s talk. And Renlund, Holland, and Uchtdorf’s talks exist so that people (like me) don’t get too comfortable with a talk like Christofferson’s.
We need them both.
All in all, I thought it was a great General Conference.
That being said, next week we’re going to be right back on our usual schedule with the October 1975 General Conference.
I’ve written about global income inequality inseveralpastposts. As Nathaniel and I wrote in SquareTwo a few years ago,
[W]ith the continual rise of the poor out of destitute poverty, it seems logical that global inequality would also be declining. Happily, recent evidence seems to supports the logic. As former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic put it, “[P]erhaps for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, there may be a decline in global inequality…For the first time in almost two hundred years—after a long period during which global inequality rose and then reached a very high plateau—it may be setting on a downward path.” Though cautious in his conclusions, Milanovic nevertheless finds that when population is factored into the data, the evidence demonstrates that the world became a “much better (“more convergent” or more equal) place” between 1980 and 2011. When country price levels (used to determine purchasing power) are factored in, a decline in global inequality can be seen over the past decade.
Several studies over the past few years have found that as the world poverty rates plummeted, so did global inequality. As one pair of researchers explains,
We can compute not only the world poverty rates and the poverty rates of any country or region, but also other statistics related to the distribution of income. For instance, we can compute the world gini coefficient, a measure of world inequality, for every year between 1970 and 2006. We show that world inequality measured by the gini fell from 67.6 to 61.2 (Figure 3), and similar declines in inequality can be shown for other inequality statistics, such as the mean logarithmic deviation, the Theil Index, and the Atkinson family of inequality indices.
While inequality is still high and increasing within countries, global inequality (between countries) has seen an unprecedented decline. “Even though the bulk of this decline is due to the performance of China and other Asian countries,” evidence shows “that a (weaker) declining trend survives even when these countries are excluded from the analysis.” Economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek noted that “after rapid progress has continued for some time, the cumulative advantage for those who follow is great enough to enable them to move faster than those who lead and that, in consequence, the long-drawn-out column of human progress tends to close up…[O]nce the rise in the position of the lower classes gathers speed, catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed toward the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it.”
The above describes relative inequality. However, a more recent study shows that absolute inequality has increased.
As one of the researchers explains,
[T]ake the case of two people in Vietnam in 1986. One person had an income of US$1 a day and the other person had an income of $10 a day. With the kind of economic growth that Vietnam has seen over the past 30 years, the first person would now in 2016 have $8 a day, while the second person would have $80 a day. So if we focus on ‘absolute’ differences, inequality has gone up, while a focus on ‘relative’ differences suggests that inequality between these two people has remained the same.
Relative inequality indicators have been by far the most widely used in empirical economic analysis, but, based on economic theory and empirical evidence, it is far from clear that we should favour relative over absolute notions of inequality. The evidence suggests that many people do perceive absolute differences in incomes as being an important aspect of inequality (Amiel and Cowell 1992, 1999).
However, the authors concede,
Over the past 40 years, over one billion people around the world have been lifted out of poverty, driven largely by substantial growth in income in developing countries. While this growth has been accompanied by a striking rise in absolute inequality, it has also improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It is difficult to imagine how in practice such growth, and the associated poverty reduction, could have occurred without an increase in absolute inequality. There would be huge implications for the fight against global poverty if attempts were made to halt economic growth in order to appease absolute inequality. Instead, the policy emphasis should be on creating more inclusive growth with falling ‘relative’ inequality – these two goals are complementary.
Is it true, though, that it’s “far from clear that we should favour relative over absolute notions of inequality”? For example, most studies favor absolute poverty over relative poverty. Could the same case be made for absolute inequality? I’m not so sure. Branko Milanovic, one of the leading scholars on income inequality, provides the following reasons for preferring relative measurements in regards to inequality:
Conservatism: “[R]elative income measures are conservative because they show no change in in equality in cases where absolute measures would show an increase (when all incomes go up by the same percentage) or a decrease (when they all go down by the same percentage). On in equality, which is a topic of considerable moral and political importance, and at times a very inflammatory topic indeed, we do not want to err in the direction of inflaming it further. Conservatism (in terms of measurement, not necessarily in terms of policy) is to be preferred.”[ref]Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 27.[/ref]
Precision: “Think of the distribution as a balloon. As the balloon expands, the absolute distance between the points on the balloon increases. Focus on absolute distances presents the disadvantage that practically every increase in the mean (blowing up the balloon) could be judged to be pro-inequality. We would lose the sharpness with which we can currently distinguish between pro-poor and pro-rich growth episodes.”[ref]Ibid.[/ref]
Relative Growth: “Growth is simply the relative increase in the first moment, and in equality is the relative increase in the second moment. The measures that we use to assess success or failure in economic development (relative change in GDP per capita) should be related to the measures we use to assess success or failure in distribution of resources (relative change in a measure of inequality). Focus on the absolutes in growth, as in inequality, would lead us to nearly always find that growth in rich countries, however small in percentage terms, would be greater than growth in poor countries, however huge. If the United States grew by 0.1 percent per capita annually, that growth would increase the absolute GDP per capita of each American by about $500, which is more than the GDP per capita of many African nations. Should we then deem Congo, in any given year, to have been as successful as the United States only if it doubles its per capita income— a feat that no human community has ever achieved in recorded history? So the logic of relativity that applies to growth should also apply to inequality.”[ref]Ibid., 28.[/ref]
Personal Utility: “[F]or a person whose income is $10,000 to experience the same increase in welfare as a person whose income is $1,000, the absolute income gain ought to be ten times greater. In other words, one additional dollar will yield less utility, or seem less important, to a rich person than to a poor person. If we think that this is a reasonable assumption, we can then also interpret the data given in the growth incidence curve as changes in utility: an 80 percent income increase around the global median adds to the utility of people there more than a 5 to 10 percent increase in real income adds to the utility of the lower middle classes in rich countries (even if the absolute dollar gains of the latter may be larger). By this route too, we come to the conclusion that relative income changes are a more reasonable metric than absolute income changes.”[ref]Ibid., 29.[/ref]
While absolute measures in inequality may have their use, relative measures do a better job of complementing analyses of growth and poverty. In short, relative inequality provides a better framework by which to gauge standards of living.
