Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
My post to Times And Seasons this morning is called Thanking God’s Advocates, the Promoters of the Cause. A God’s advocate (also known as “Promoter of the Cause”) is the opposite of a Devil’s advocate (“Promoter of the Faith”). One quote that folks seem to like is this one:
It’s become something of a fashion these days to talk about doubt, and I believe that recognition of our uncertainties and limitations is of vital importance. But so is a willingness to risk being wrong in the interests of trying to say or do or believe something true. Doubt is a part of the larger experience of faith, but it is not the whole experience. Someone needs to play the role of promoter of the cause.
I’ve written before about the supposed conflict between religion and science. Spoiler alert: there isn’t one. Reasonable people, whether or not they are scientists and whether or not they are religious, see no particular need for religion and science to be opposed. The impression persists, however, because the vocal minorities on either end of the spectrum find it in their best interest to keep the issue alive and because of occasional surveys that appear, at first glance, to validate the divide.
Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University, caused a stir with a survey of 1,700 scientists at Harvard, MIT and other elite colleges. About a third were atheists (as opposed to fewer than one-in-20 ordinary Americans), just under a third were agnostics, and the rest reported varying degrees of belief.
Well, Ecklund is back with a newer and much bigger survey (more than 5x the size of the last one). The results? Quoting from The Economist again:
At the annual meeting of the AAAS in Chicago on February 16th Dr Ecklund unveiled the first results of a still-larger study into science and religion… This new survey sought out “rank-and-file” scientists: researchers in company labs, engineers, dentists and so on. To her surprise, Main Street scientists are only a bit less religious than the average American. Perhaps Ivy League scientists are ultra-secular because they are Ivy League, not because they are scientists?
I didn’t find any comprehensive guide to the results, and early press reports are just starting to come out a few days after the fact, but this article from Science and Religion Today had some initial findings. Among them:
27 percent of Americans feel that science and religion are in conflict—and of this group, 52 percent side with religion.
Nearly 20 percent of Americans perceive religion as hostile to science, while about 22 percent think scientists are hostile toward religion.
It makes me wonder, how much of these three groups (the 27 percent who see science and religion in conflict, the 20 percent who perceive religion as hostile to science, and the 22 percent who think scientists are hostile to religion) is overlap? At a guess, it looks like we really do just have too polar extremes (about 15% to a side) who are busy shouting at each other about some never-ending conflict between science and religion while the rest of us wish they would both just shut up.
The important thing, I think, is to remember that the crazies may have us surrounded, but we’ve got them outnumbered.
The article is by and large a tame restatement of the basic moral principles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as they relate to sex. These standards are pretty much identical to the basic moral principles of all traditional faiths. Quoting from the article:
The Lord’s standard of morality is not so much a list of do’s and don’ts as it is a principle, which can be expressed as follows: The procreative power is to be exercised in the marriage relationship for two key reasons: (1) to bind and strengthen ties between spouses and (2) to bring souls into the world. These uses have the blessing and endorsement of the Lord.
Despite the fact that the principle is more than “a list of do’s and don’t’s,” the article goes on to clearly stake out the practical implications of this principle in plain English: Don’t have sex outside of marriage, including homosexual sex at any time. Don’t try to get around the “no sex before marriage” on a technicality, i.e. don’t even fool around. Don’t masturbate. Don’t look at porn. Dress modestly. The ongoing controversy illustrates the necessity of these clarifications.
It’s no surprise that these standards would be ridiculed and dismissed by pop culture. If the world at large doesn’t hate you, then you’re doing something wrong.[ref]If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. John 15:18-19[/ref] There’s nothing new or noteworthy about the idea that religious fuddy-duddies and goody-goodies are silly in the eyes of the world. What’s surprising to me, however, is the amount of push-back coming from within the Church. The most problematic paragraph comes from the section about modesty, and reads as follows:
The dress of a woman has a powerful impact upon the minds and passions of men. If it is too low or too high or too tight, it may prompt improper thoughts, even in the mind of a young man who is striving to be pure.
The outrage comes from thinking that goes something like this: if you say that the way women dress controls how men think and feel, you are making women responsible for men’s actions. In fact, this is the very logic used to defend rape culture: women who dress immodestly are “asking for it”. Therefore, the Ensign is now perpetuating rape culture.
Let’s deconstruct this reasoning.
First, to say that “the dress of a woman has a powerful impact upon the minds and passions of men” is not the same as saying “women control men’s thoughts.” In every other human interaction, we’re perfectly capable of understanding that a person can influence you without controlling you.[ref]This is what the word “interaction” means: each person influences and is influenced by each other person they meet.[/ref] If someone cuts you off in traffic, they are going to have a “powerful impact” on your mood. That’s a fact. But your reaction to that provocation is still your decision and therefore your responsibility. That’s another fact. These two facts, (1) that someone can influence you and (2) that ultimately your behavior is still your own responsibility are two facts that people seem to have no problem accepting simultaneously until the discussion turns to modesty. Then suddenly we get this bizarre notion that we can’t say “women have an influence on men” without saying “everything men do as a result is a woman’s fault.” That bizarre notion makes no sense, and doesn’t appear (explicitly or implicitly) in the article.
This article doesn’t claim that women are responsible for men’s thoughts. That’s the accusation, and it is false. Men are still responsible for their own thoughts, but it would be nice if women would dress modestly to help them out. Just as people are responsible for keeping their tempers in control, but it’s generally considered common courtesy not to provoke people unnecessarily. Let me reiterate: if I say “Be nice, because it will help other people not lose their temper,” it doesn’t mean that I’m saying it’s your responsibility whether or not some random stranger loses his or her temper. Even though we interact with each other, we are ultimately responsible for our own behavior, and that’s it. The Ensign shouldn’t need to specifically call this out, because it’s right there in the 2nd Article of Faith: “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins.”[ref]Articles of Faith[/ref]
Lizzy Seeberg, who committed suicide after being harassed for reporting a Notre Dame football player for sexual assault. The connection between football culture and rape seems a lot stronger than the Ensign and rape, but one of these targets is easier to attack than the other.
Allow me to observe, at this point, that not only does the article not blame women for men’s mental purity, but it never even gets remotely close to discussing rape. That’s… not even in the ballpark. Let’s be really, really, really clear. An Ensign article making the entirely obvious observation that men respond to the way women dress is not “rape culture”. A young girl being brutally raped by football players and then being harassed when she appeals for justice until her family is driven out of town and their house is burned down, that is rape culture. CNN reporters who talk about what a tragedy it is for rapists to be found guilty of rape and deprived of their promising futures, that is rape culture. Everyone talking about the fictitious death of Manti Te’o’s non-existent girlfriend while totally ignoring the actual suicide of “Lizzy Seeberg… not long after being intimidated by Notre Dame football players for reporting a sexual assault by one of their teammates,” that is rape culture. Chris Brown being accepted back into polite society (with a few notable exceptions), that is rape culture. Roman Polanski being embraced by his peers after his crimes? That is rape culture. Woody Allen being defended after the very credible allegations of his crimes? That is rape culture. Ray Rice having a fine and dandy career after video emerges of him dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator (because he knocked her unconscious) that will be rape culture if that’s how the story ends. Even if you think the Ensign article is wrong and misguided, putting it in the same category as these (horrifically numerous) examples of rape culture is like comparing every bad thing that happens to the Holocaust. It trivializes real evil and makes you look like a fool.[ref]The fact that I could enumerate all of those examples of real rape culture off the top of my head shows how serious the problem is.[/ref]
I understand that there are more moderate criticisms as well, such as the fact that modesty standards often seem to be unequally applied to women vs. men. They appear to be unequally applied because they are unequally applied. They are unequally applied because of the fundamental reality that females are on the supply side and men on the demand side of the sex equation. That is common sense which everyone who is not motivated by politics can see, but it is also (in case you’re skeptical) scientific fact. Men and women approach sex differently[ref]There is also tons of individual variation.[/ref] but it is men who are primarily motivated by visual cues and also who want to have sex more frequently and more casually. (Once again, these aren’t just random assertions. There is data.) A gender-blind approach to sexuality would be no more reasonable than a gender-blind approach to professional sports. If the WNBA did not exist, how many women would make the cut to play pro basketball against men? Zero. Pretending gender differences do not exist when they do in fact exist may be politically expedient, but it does not actually serve the interests of equality.[ref]Also: lower the rim already.[/ref] If you’re looking for symmetry, this is where you will find it: women are encouraged to dress modestly (partially for their sake, partially for the sake of men) and men are encouraged[ref]actually: commanded[/ref] to stop watching porn (partially for their sake, partially for the sake of women). There is equality, but not sameness, in the Lord’s standards for sexual morality. Make no mistake: that is the core outrage which this article perpetuates in the minds of its critics. Mormonism espouses a view of humanity in which gender matters, and therefore believes that men and women owe certain obligations to each other in a complementary relationship. The modern world espouses a denialist political ideology in which gender has no deep or lasting significance that we do not create for ourselves.
It is also no great surprise to me that so much of the outrage at the article is coming from professional therapists. The article invites that response when it leads off with a bold statement that God, and therefore the Church, is the ultimate arbiter of sexual morality.
Some years ago my father, an attorney, was trying a lawsuit. For his authority, he cited only one case—a California Supreme Court case issued many years before. His opponent cited a number of lowercourt decisions of more recent vintage. The judge said to my father, “Mr. Callister, don’t you have a more recent case than this?” My father looked at the judge and replied, “Your Honor, may I remind you that when the supreme court speaks on a matter, it only needs to speak once.” The judge nodded with approval. He was reminded that the supreme court trumps all lowercourt decisions, how ever numerous or recent they may be.
So it is with God our Father—He needs to speak only once on the issue of morality, and that one declaration trumps all the opinions of the lower courts, whether uttered by psychologists, counselors, politicians, friends, parents, or would be moralists of the day. [emphasis added]
In fact, the reaffirmation that the Church has the final word on these matters may be the only truly novel claim made in the article. Everything else is a restatement of traditional beliefs. This one is hardly surprising, but it is fairly novel. So it’s natural that psychologists and counselors would lash out in response. It’s a turf war: who gets to define moral standards for sexuality? The Church? Or the APA?[ref]It reminds me of the especially harsh reviews of Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water which almost never mentioned the fact that Shyamalan put a very unlikeable movie critic in the movie as a character and then killed him.[/ref]
Let’s take a look at the claims made by one counselor in particular, as a representative of the apparent conflict between General Authorities and counselors. Natasha Helfer Parker, in her article Morality? We can do much better than this… has a bullet-list of issues with the Ensign article. She starts by claiming that the article leaves no room for personal revelation. This is obviously not true, as personal revelation is always necessary in addition to official pronouncements and even scripture. That is a fundamental and constant principle of Mormonism. It does not need to be restated in every article. However, in this particular case, I’m wondering precisely what revelation she has in mind. Is she suggesting that if you pray and ask, God might just tell you to go ahead and have sex outside of marriage? There are often shades of gray and complications with applying moral principles, but the “no sex outside of marriage” one is about as universal and clear as it gets.[ref]And you thought Joseph Smith had to be persistent to get permission to give Martin Harris the 116 pages…[/ref]
She next takes the article to task for calling masturbation “self-abuse” because “this is not an appropriate clinical term.” She may not have noticed, however, the Ensign is not a clinical journal. The inability of experts to understand that specialized terminology must give way to common vernacular in non-specialized contexts is faintly amusing. It reminds me of the time that an outraged medical doctor told my father (a professor of English) that it was unfair for PhDs to be referred to as “doctor” because medical doctors had to study harder and did so much more good. My dad smiled, and reminded him that hundreds of years ago when college professors were already using the term “doctor,” the medical professionals of that day were known as “leeches”. Perhaps if he wanted a unique title, he could try and resuscitate that one?[ref]Pro-tip, don’t badger an English professor about the meaning of words.[/ref]
Most of the rest of the bullet points rely on the same tired strawman approach of insisting on seeing a viewpoint you don’t like in its most crude and absolutist form. But the most sinister criticism she levels is the one that comes at the end of the bullet list, although it’s a sentiment that pervades the entire piece, and that is this: “The way that sexual standards are presented in this type of talk is unrealistic and sets people up for failure.”
Lowering standards cheapens Christ’s sacrifice. He did not drink the bitter cup for fun. If there was an easier way to save us, He would have taken it.
Well now, we wouldn’t want to set people up for failure, now would we? Contrast this sentiment with Paul’s simple statement that: ” all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”[ref]Romans 3:23[/ref]
If not all have sinned, than the Atonement is not necessary. If the Atonement is not necessary, then Christ is superfluous. If Christ is superfluous, then the Gospel is a joke. What good news? We have no need of a savior. We just lower moral standards to the lowest common denominator (or maybe pray for an exemption) and then everyone gets to heaven on their own merits. This well-intentioned call for lowered-standards is sadly anti-Christian. The entire message of Christianity–not just Mormonism, but all Christianity–is that none of us can live up to God’s impossible standards. She faults this Ensign article, but it was Jesus himself who said “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”[ref]Matthew 5:48[/ref] Maybe we ought to just hand Parker a copy of the New Testament and a red pen and let her tell us what Jesus should have said.
I will say at least this much for Parker: the fact that she couldn’t even get to the end of one article without cutting out the beating heart of Christian faith provides a very clear example of just how important it is that the business of articulating eternal standards stay in the hands of the General Authorities.
Applause for lost jobs and inefficient policy gimmicks!
Yesterday the CBO released an analysis of the President’s proposal to hike minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016, and it was more or less a political disaster for the Obama Administration. Why? Because the report indicated that approximately 500,000 jobs would likely be lost due to the impact of the minimum wage hike, leading to headlines like Minimum-wage hike would help alleviate poverty, but could kill jobs, CBO reports, truly bizarre defenses from Democrats that tried to spin job losses into a positive, and some furious push-back against the non-partisan CBO from the Obama Administration. The pushback is a problem in and of itself because the research the Obama Administration cites is primarily about (1) short run effects of (2) one-off minimum wage hikes. The proposed minimum wage hike would be tied to inflation and so the research on past hikes is probably not relevant even in the short-run, and then there’s the problem of longer-run effects…
But forget all that. Here’s the criticism the Obama Administration isn’t having to defend because the media has failed to bring it up even thought it’s right there in the report:
The increased earnings for low-wage workers resulting from the higher minimum wage would total $31 billion, by CBO’s estimate. However, those earnings would not go only to low-income families, because many low-wage workers are not members of low-income families. Just 19 percent of the $31 billion would accrue to families with earnings below the poverty threshold, whereas 29 percent would accrue to families earning more than three times the poverty threshold, CBO estimates. [emphasis added]
So, not only will the policy cost about a half-billion jobs, but only 20% of the additional earnings would go to families at or below the poverty line. A full 1/3 would go to families that already make at least 3x the poverty level. Current guidelines (for 2013) put the poverty level at $23,550 for a family of 4, so we’re talking about boosting the income for families that make at least $70,650. I’m not saying that’s a terrible idea or anything, but if this is President Obama’s idea of anti-poverty measure he needs a better one. Like, you know, the EITC which is (a) relatively popular with conservatives and (b) actually targeted at boosting the income of the working poor without costing jobs.
The only reasonable conclusion is that the push for minimum wage is a political gimmick rather than a sincere effort to improve the lot of America’s working poor. Better to pick a popular but stupid program than the GOP will oppose than a lesser known but smart program that the GOP would probably go along with. I guess if Americans have to suffer for the Democratic party to score political points, that’s just tough luck for them. Now that’s what I call empathy.
The other day I was working on an article about how Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is an awful lot like a reskinned version of Firefly when I realized I should probably check to see if other folks had written about that. They had.
That took the wind out of my sails, so I spent the rest of the evening delving into the site statistics for Difficult Run. I don’t generate any revenue from the site at all, but obviously you want more people to read what you’re writing as opposed to fewer, and I’m just sort of fascinated by the whole idea of publishing: what engages readers and builds an audience? To me, it’s an interesting question. So I always like it when folks like John Scalzi publish about their site statistics (like he did back in 2010 or more recently in January 2014). Also, as a blogger at Times And Seasons, I have access to their site stats as well[ref]I obviously can’t say anything about them ’cause it’s not my place, but I do enjoy having at least one site to compare with.[/ref].
Since I took the time to make some pretty charts and graphs, I thought I may as well write up what I learned and what I”m hoping to see happen for the year of 2014 as far as blog traffic goes.
So this is my total monthly traffic for every complete month that I’ve had the site running[ref]All stats come from the Jetpack plugin for WordPress. I also have Google Analytics running, but Jetpack is easier to get to so that’s what I used this time.[/ref]. (I launched it during the month of November 2012.) You can see a general upward trend (which is nice), along with a really big spike in June 2013 and a really low dip in December 2014. The spike is from the post Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance which got posted on Reddit and drew over 5,000 views in one day. The dip is because December 2014 was insane: there were holidays, I was moving my family, and I had some ridiculous projects at work. It was a truly awful month, and I basically stopped blogging. Those two months are pretty clearly outliers, I think, but the question is whether or not January 2014 is also an outlier. That’s the month my mum poster her article on whether or not Mormon women ought to receive the priesthood, and it became the second most popular post on the site. I’m inclined to think it’s not an outlier, but I’ll get to that later.
I also did some really basic linear projections to get a ball-park idea of what kind of traffic I can expect to get by the end of 2014. As you can see, it looks like I’d be getting about 12,000 views / month or about 7,000 visitors / month. More on that in a moment as well, but for now I thought it was interesting that the projections were diverging. That shows that ratio of views / visitor (e.g. how many pages a given visitor looks at) is changing. So I took a look at that as well.
The overall trend is negative, which means that as time goes on my audience reads fewer articles per person. I think that’s probably a natural function of my audience moving outside of the core friends and family who came to see what I had to say early on and towards strangers who come across the site because an article gets linked here of there.[ref]I don’t actually know if that is the kind of thing that happens with new blogs. If anyone reading this is an expert, feel free to weigh in.[/ref]
Tracking both visitors and views seemed a bit messy, so at this point I decided to pick just one metric to concentrate on. I think views is the standard (probably mostly because it’s easier to track), but I decided that I would just check out the variability of the two and pick whichever one was the most stable. I picked the coefficient of variation rather than variance because it’s dimensionless, and views (0.55) was a lot less volatile than visitors (0.70), so from here on out I just look at views instead of visitors.
So what I did in this chart was look at the impact of different scenarios on future growth. Here are the scenarios:
Scenario 1 – I took out the two highest months (June 2013 and January 2014) and left everything else in. This is the most pessimistic scenario.
Scenario 2 – I took out the two highest months (June 2013 and January 2014) and also took out the unusually low month (December 2013).
Scenario 3 – I took out the highest month (June 2013).
Scenario 4 – I took out the highest month (June 2013) and also the unusually low month (December 2013)
The first scenario, where I took out the two highest months but left everything else in, was unsurprisingly the most pessimistic. According to that scenario, the blog would just cross 10,000 monthly views by the end of this year. The second and third scenarios ended up being very similar, and both predict around 12,000 monthly views by the end of this year. Finally, the fourth scenario is the most optimistic and would predict almost 14,000 monthly views by the end of the year.
Up to now, however, I’ve assumed linear growth. That means that I add the same number of new views every month (usually in the range of 400 – 500 in these models). When you’re talking about populations, however, everything from birth rates to disease growth to adoption of new technologies usually follows exponential growth [ref]This is during the early phases when nothing is restricting growth. If you have a population that requires resources, or something, the logistic population model is probably your best bet. That’s my favorite one.[/ref]. With an exponential model you’re not adding the same number of views every month, but instead your adding the same percentage of views every month. (So it works just like compound interest.)
So, which model fits the data best? So far, does my model look more linear or more exponential?
Without getting into the technical details, the R-squared value is a measure of how good your model fits the data. In this case I used all the data (no throwing out outliers) and compared it with a linear model and an exponential model. The linear model got 0.4283 (which roughly means it explains 43% of the variance in the data) and the exponential model got 0.6063 (so it explains about 61% of the variation in the data). Based on this: the data looks exponential. That’s good news if you’re me, because an exponential model is going to yield a lot more growth down the road. But there’s a caveat: when I started taking out outliers, the difference between the exponential and linear models all but disappeared. With just a couple of those outliers gone, the r-squared values were above 0.9 for each. Even though the exponential model always did better, the advantage is tiny once you throw out a couple of outliers.
Still, what would growth look like based on an exponential model? This chart–the last of the bunch–shows the original data, some linear projects, and some exponential projections all at once so you can get an idea of the possibilities.
So this chart shows the actual data points (as points) along with two linear projections and three exponential projections. You can tell that up through the data that I have so far, it’s pretty hard to tell the two apart. But by the end of the year, the difference really matters. The lowest exponential projection has about 22,000 monthly views by December 2014, and the highest linear projection has less than 14,000. The optimistic exponential projection has close to 40,000 monthly views by year’s end!
So here’s the fun part: which do I think it’s going to be? I think that the exponential model is the best model of growth in general, but with one big caveat. It assumes that the underlying reason for the growth is constant. For example, you only get the joy (or suffering, depending on which side of the coin you’re on) of compounding interest if the interest rate stays the same. Difficult Run doesn’t have an interest rate. It has content. And so my guess is that we’ll continue to see exponential growth if the quality and quantity of the posts keep up with reader expectations. The posts have gotten better, the site layout has gotten better, and I’ve recruited some good editors and guest posters. All of those efforts have to continue, but if they do then I think when I look back with the 2014 data all in a spreadsheet, the growth will look exponential rather than linear.
And, just for fun, I’ll make a specific prediction: I expect to see 25,000 monthly views by the end of January 2015. That doesn’t mean there will be 25,000 views in that month. There could be more or less, but we’ll be in that range. Which sounds pretty awesome, until I realize that that would still be about 4% of the monthly traffic that John Scalzi averaged through 2013.
The crazy-sounding name actually comes from a Bible story found in Numbers 27.
For someone who writes about Mormonism an awful lot (and blogs at Mormon blog Times And Seasons), I’m actually surprisingly new to the “bloggernaccle“.[ref]Side not: it tickles me to no end that this entry actually exists in Wikipedia, even if it is technically for “Mormon blogosphere.”[/ref] Which means I’m not really very familiar with a lot of the big-name blogs, even if I’ve heard of them. Like Zelophehad’s Daughters. (Easier to remember than to spell!) I take it that my bloviating on issues related to gender roles and overall skepticism of feminism and all things socially left might get me into some pretty hot water over there, but that’s just a guess. I don’t actually know.
In any case, I happened upon this piece by Eve over there called Don’t Be My Ally, and I really liked it.
Her main point, which is that the relationship of “ally” is incredibly dehumanizing for ally and allied alike, is profound. To my mind, it’s basically a politer version of the “identity politics” criticism from the right-wing of American politics: reducing people to their categories is an awful thing to do to someone. She’s also unafraid to point out what I consider to be far and away the worst trait of Mormon feminism:
In recent years I’ve been unsettled to see how often Mormon feminism roots itself more deeply in in various secular feminisms than it does in Mormonism or in Christianity.
My own relationship with the term “feminism” is… complex. I go back and forth. But if Mormon feminism were really and truly distinct from secular feminism (i.e. the political dogma of the American left), I would be very excited and much more interested in engage and self-identifying as feminist. (I am concerned about women’s issues; I’m just leery of the baggage that comes with the word “feminism.”)
Lastly, she manages to get in some good digs at male allies that (1) I firmly believe need to be said and (2) made me chuckle:
Inevitably some allies tote their ally(ship? hood?) to enhance their own status and credibility, and some usurp the voices of those they ostensibly champion.
Yup. I like to refer to this as “White Knight Chauvinism,” although another variety (which I have yet to name) is basically a slightly better-disguised of nice-guy whining. You know, when “nice-guys” (which usually, at best, means “socially impotent”) complain that girls always date jerks as though they could sort of browbeat attractive ladies into dating them. It’s weird and creepy. And, as a guy, I can’t help but notice that more or less the same motive seems to operate for some allies who view their support as a way to ingratiate themselves with the ladies.
On top of being an article I really liked, it just made me happy to see such common sense coming from an outlet that I would be predisposed to view with skepticism. It’s always good to be reminded of the possible common ground between reasonable people no matter what their political home turf may be.
1. It is poorly targeted relative to alternative policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). And, yes, I am familiar with the argument that the minimum wage and the EITC are complements; what is thin on the ground, so far as I am aware, is evidence of the empirical importance of this argument.
2. As pointed out recently by Greg Mankiw, it distributes the costs of the increased minimum wage in a less attractive way than alternative policies such as the EITC, which implicitly come out of general tax revenue.
3. Most importantly, raising the minimum wage fails to address the underlying issue, which is that many workers do not bring very much in the way of skills to the labor market. Rather than having a discussion about raising the minimum wage, we should be having a discussion about how to decrease the number of minimum wage workers by increasing skills at the low-skill end of the labor market. This would, of course, mean challenging important interest groups. It is also a bigger challenge more broadly because it is less obvious how to do it. But that is the discussion we should be having because that is the one that will really help the poor in the long run, in contrast to a policy that feels good in the short run but only speeds the pace of capital-labor substitution in the long run.
None of these arguments are novel, and I’ve cited all of them in the past, but they are worth repeating. Minimum wage: the best you can say is that it’s a really inept and obsolete policy.
Adam Greenwood has a pretty insightful look at one of the commonly confused aspects of arguing about gay marriage over at Junior Ganymede.
A lot of time gets wasted in arguments that are really about what the proper unit of analysis is, without any of the participants quite realizing that is what their argument is about.
Let’s take gay marriage, for example. Defenders of the traditional definition of marriage believe that marriage is fundamentally tied to procreation. Proponents of gay marriage pooh-pooh the suggestion. The defenders, they point out, do not try to prevent old or infertile couples from getting married, nor do they try to prevent couples who have decided not to have children from getting married.
Read the rest for his resolution of this problem, which is really helpful in bringing some clarity to the debate.
There was an initial wave of angry condemnation when The Triple Package was first released, and my problem with that reactionary wave was just that: It was reactionary. It’s been over a month since those first-pass criticisms were unleashed, and over at Slate Daria Roithmayr has had time to formulate a more nuanced and sophisticated response. Or, as turns out to be the case, not. Instead, her response shows the twin perils of (A) putting politics ahead of reality and (B) espousing historical theories without consulting Wikipedia first[ref]I’m not saying Wikipedia is the final word on research, but if you don’t at least start there…[/ref].
According to Roithmayr, the real reason that different cultural groups perform differently is that they start out with unequal resources. Otherwise: we are all exactly the same. The problem is that Roithmayr pretends it’s a conclusion of her research when quite obviously it is pure political dogma. She explains the success of each of the seven cultural groups identified by Chua in their turn. I’m not a historian, so I’m not qualified to analyze all of them, but in the case of her hypothesis about what makes Mormons successful, her explanation is so bad that you don’t have to be. Even the most superficial familiarity with our history[ref]Again: Wikipedia[/ref] shows that she has no idea what she’s writing about. Consider:
It’s not just that Mormons have developed a “pioneer spirit” or that they believe that they can receive divine revelations, as Triple Package would have us believe. It’s more that the first Mormons started with enough money to buy a great deal of land in Missouri and Illinois. They then migrated to Utah, where Brigham Young and his followers essentially stole land from the Shoshone and Ute tribes, refusing to pay what the tribes demanded, and petitioning for the government to remove them. Beyond thousands of acres of free land, early political control over Utah was helpful.
So here’s the true story of Mormonism: a bunch of really wealthy families just decided to buy a bunch of land in New York, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and so forth. Why did they keep moving around and buying new land? Oh, you know, just because. They were fickle like that. Then they thought it would be fun to move to Utah because, you know, the land by the Great Salt Lake is legendary for being so fertile. That’s what everyone says when they drive through Utah, right?
Look how green everything is!
In case you can’t detect all the sarcasm, the reality is that the Mormons were poor and marginalized from the start and that they moved from one state to the other at the point of a gun, suffering murders, rapes, and theft along the way. When they managed to build the city of Nauvoo up to one of the largest American cities at the time, well, that was about the time Joseph Smith was murdered and they were surrounded by thousands of armed men with, you know, cannons and then forced out of their homes without compensation in the middle of winter.[ref]They were able to walk across the Mississippi on their way out.[/ref] The land they stole in Utah was only marginally fit for agriculture and the reason they were there in the first place was simply to get away from constant oppression, but that ended up not working so well when the United States sent the largest federal expeditionary force of its history (to that point) to subjugate those wacky religious nuts, resulting in the low-grade Utah War of 1857[ref]Not to be confused with the Mormon War of 1838 in Missouri or the Mormon War of 1844-1848 in Illinois. In case it isn’t clear: Mormons lost those wars. Or, as Roithmayr puts, it, we “migrated”.[/ref]
Since Roithmayr says “For many groups, like Cubans and Mormons, the early wave was a select group endowed with some significant material or nonmaterial resources—wealth, education, or maybe a government resettlement package,” and since Mormons were by and large quite poor[ref]Definitely after all the pillaging and running for their lives if not before.[/ref] the only reasonable conclusion is that she can’t tell the difference between a resettlement package and an armed invasion.
The Haun’s Mill Massacre where a mob of over 200 killed about 20 Mormon men and boys and were never prosecuted. Or, as Roithmayr describes it, the “Haun’s Mill Polite Conversation.”
She mentions Mormons one more time, writing:
The most recent (newly converted) Mormons hail from Africa and Latin America, and many of them have migrated to the U.S. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has also begun outreach to U.S.-born blacks (African-Americans have only been allowed in the Mormon church priesthood since 1978). Black Mormon trajectories look nothing like the white Mormons at the center of The Triple Package’s argument.
Keen observers might point out the obvious fact that “recent” converts are probably not the best indication of the long-run effects of a culture.
Again: I’m still skeptical of Chua’s points. I haven’t read the book and I don’t subscribe to the thesis. I’m also not nearly as familiar with the history of the other cultures described. I do know that in general there’s a serious selection problem when you’re comparing immigrants (often those with the wealth and education to be mobile) with their home population (sometimes slanted towards those unable to get away). I think Roithmayr could probably have made a serious, convincing counter-argument if she’d been willing to put history ahead of ideological wish-fulfillment. As it stands, she’s making the case against Triple Package look worse, and she’s not doing much for the either the credibility of either Slate or the discipline of critical race theory.
Yesterday I decided to poke a hornet’s nest again and write about gender roles at Times And Seasons once more. Some folks are emailing me to tell me how much they like it (which doesn’t happen very often). Other folks are describing it as “the most excruciating pseudo-intellectual, and self-contradicting drivel I’ve read in recent years.” [ref]This is my favorite thing that anyone has ever said about anything I’ve ever written. I’m so pleased.[/ref] ByCommonConsent provided their own insightful commentary, which you can see below:
Not gonna lie: I laughed. Then I wished I had some rolls.
For what it’s worth, one of the main reasons I write about this issue is because lots of other folks (some of whom could certainly do better than me) won’t touch it. I respect that. It’s sort of like running for political office: you have to question them motives of anyone who voluntarily does it, but you also have to wish that more normal human beings would. I think these hot-button issues are really important, and I hope that I can make a case for a basically socially conservative position that will enhance the discussion.
With that goal in mind, I’m planning on one more post on this topic. This one took 3 from-scratch attempts, though, were most of my blog posts are done in one.[ref]With revisions, mind you![/ref] So it will probably take another 2-4 weeks before I come out with the next one.
