Nathaniel

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.

More About How Dumb Minimum Wage Hikes Are

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Greg Mankiw tipped me off to a report by David R. Henderson about where the benefits of minimum wage go. Highlights?

  • Only 11.3 percent of workers who would gain from the increase live in households officially defined as poor.
  • A whopping 63.2 percent of workers who would gain were second or even third earners living in households with incomes equal to twice the poverty line or more.
  • Some 42.3 percent of workers who would gain were second or even third earners who live in households that have incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more.

At an aggregate level:

  • The net increase in wage income to households containing low-wage workers would be $4.03 billion per month.
  • The net increase in wages to poor households containing low-wage workers would be only $439 million per month.

Now here’s the tricky question: do middle class voters know that this policy is going to benefit them by a roughly 10:1 ratio? I’m skeptical that they are that well-informed, but you can’t argue that a program like the Earned Income Tax Credit would actually do a lot more good for the people who need it most, and yet President Obama chooses to go with minimum wages and all my gullible left-leaning friends[ref]Sorry, guys.[/ref] go right on along with it.

I think the old rule probably applies[ref]Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity[/ref], but I also have a hunch there’s got to be more to it. The middle class capture of welfare programs (to the detriment of their intended recipients) seems too comprehensive to be chalked up to random chance. Maybe the problem is simply that what you can understand enough to support you can also understand enough to co-opt? It’s depressing no matter how you look at it.

2014-01-18 Minimum Wage

Zach King’s Hilarious Vine Compilation

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI-MIhsx1xg

Zach King’s amateur vines[ref]Those are 6-second videos, if you’re unfamiliar with the term.[/ref] are pretty amazing. The effects aren’t really new, but the quality is pretty incredible for an amateur and the results are really fun to watch.

(If you’re getting this on the email list: videos don’t come through. Follow the link back to the post to watch.)

The Simpsons’ Tribute to Miyazaki

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2014-01-16 NausicaaposterI love the works of Hayao Miyazaki[ref]My two favorites are  Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and My Neighbor Totoro[/ref]. Sadly, as we covered back in September 2013, Miyazaki has retired. Perhaps that was the impetus behind the lovely tribute from the Simpsons in the video above. If you don’t catch all the references, and I didn’t get all of them myself, have no fear. Slate has an annotated version that tells you where they all come from.

Maybe This Explains Conservative Anti-Intellectualism

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2014-01-13 W F Buckley Jr

The stereotype is that conservatives are dumb. Anti-science. Anti-intellectual.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing. (Wall Street Journal)

 

Well if this is intellectualism, it’s cyanide for our society, and the only reasonable course when you have swallowed poison is to vomit it out again. Thus: the repugnance with which the Ivory Tower has come to be seen by large swathes of the American people is justified. They are right. The intellectuals, if this is any benchmark, are wrong. This is less directly applicable outside the humanities, but the politicization of the sciences means that they are not immune either.

Fight the New Drug, The New Anti-Porn Movement

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys2n8NpKo6s

I’m impressed with the evidence and the citations that FightTheNewDrug.org provides in their exposé of pornography. In this section, called Porn’s Dirty Little Secret, they document the connection between pornography and violence and sex trafficking. It’s an uphill battle because, perversely, a large section of the feminist movement itself sees porn as empowering for women. This is another example of how feminists in America risk taking their own privilege for granted. Porn might be a choice for a woman who is in a position of power because of her race, class, and age but that’s an exceptional case. Not the rule.

2014-01-16 Fight the New Drug

I think some of the most persuasive arguments from the site are those that explicitly try to take down the myth that there’s good porn and bad porn by showing how blurry the line between violent aggression and corporate porn can be.

Part of the lie porn producers want customers to buy into is that porn is legitimate entertainment made by glamorous people who are doing it because it’s what they want; it’s OK for the user to enjoy it because the people they’re watching seem to be enjoying it. What they don’t say is that some of those people look like they’re having a good time because behind the scenes they have a gun pointed at their head. And if they stop smiling, it will go off.

Obviously, human trafficking is an underground business, making firm statistics hard to come by. But the facts in cases that come to light are chilling. For example, in 2011, two Miami men were found guilty of spending five years luring women into a human trafficking trap. They would advertise modeling roles, then when women came to try out, they would drug them, kidnap them, rape them, videotape the violence, and sell it to pornography stores and businesses across the country.

That same year a couple in Missouri was charged with forcing a mentally handicapped girl to produce porn for them by beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocuting, drowning, mutilating, and choking her until she agreed. One of the photos they forced her to make ended up on the front cover of a porn publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group.

I haven’t even finished reading everything, but the information is solid, the arguments are good, and even the presentation is really powerful. (You can download sections of the website as nicely formatted .pdf’s, for example.)

I know it’s a ridiculously uphill battle, especially in the geek culture that I’m a part of, and that’s why I’m happy to see such a great new resource.

Female Tech CEO: Lean In Doesn’t Cut It

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2014-01-14 Sabrina ParsonsSheryl Sandberg’s Lean In takes a lot of flack for being a privileged woman’s guide to becoming CEO. My own take is that a privileged woman’s guide is much better than no guide. I’m a fan of Sandberg, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to the story of how women can get ahead in business. This article at Business Insider has another very interesting perspective. Sabrina Parsons (CEO of Palo Alto Software) writes:

What needs to change is how and when women work. Being told to “lean in” by itself is not useful. Instead, women need to come together and demand that we are given the flexibility to excel in our jobs; to admit that we have kids and not hide that fact in fear that it will stunt our career opportunities; to occasionally bring a child into the office to quietly do homework on a day when school is out or daycare is unavailable.

Let’s demand that corporate America’s norms change to accommodate women — those who want to have families and realize that having a family does NOT make us work less or achieve less.

I’m still leery of these arguments because I don’t like the rationale that we ought to try and legislate until we reach the arbitrary goal of equal pay without consideration of individual preference and choice. That’s bad policy.

But you know what else is bad policy? Continuing to push the same antiquated practices for business that have been around since the Industrial Revolution. I think that for most white collar knowledge-based workers you would get far more productivity per day if you got 4 hours (or even 2 or 3) of really concentrated effort then you do out of the 8 hours of procrastination and avoidance that is common today. Fewer hours would be beneficial for employers directly, and also indirectly by making your employees hate work a little less. (In my experience at several large companies in a variety of industries: everyone in a cubicle hates their job and everyone in an office hates their job too, but lies about it better.)

Formal regulation is probably not the answer, but I sure would love to live in a world where, when both parents worked, they were doing offset, flexible 6-hour days. And, while we’re at it, it would be nice if people didn’t expect for me to foist off all family obligations on my wife because (1) she’s just as busy as I am and (2) I actually want to be an involved father. When I reschedule business to go to my daughter’s drop-in day at school it’s not a chore. It’s what matters most to me. When I can’t be with my kids for something they are doing it isn’t because I love my career, it’s because I have to balance my desire to be with them with our need to eat.

The Conservative Mormon View on Female Ordination

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I had big plans to not write a post for Times And Seasons this Monday ’cause trying to write a really good post every week is actually getting tricky with all the other things I’ve got going on. But apparently the 6 months or so of weekly posting have ingrained the habit so deeply I can’t stop even when I want to. Or, in other words, I got all fired up by a discussion on the T&S backlist (an email list for the permanent bloggers) and just had to write a post. So, I did.

The interesting thing is that after finishing this long, drawn-out analysis of female ordination someone posted this article that made me wonder what all the fuss is about. It’s an article from the Pew Research Center from back in October 2013 that’s actually delving into data from a 2011 survey of over 1,000 Mormons that found (among many other things) that support for female ordination is really low.

2014-01-13 Female Ordination Poll

I have to admit that after seeing that I thought (1) why did I just waste so much time and effort over what is apparently a non-issue outside the bloggernaccle and (2) wow, blogging can really skew your perspective.

There are some proponents of female ordination who think that these numbers are disproportionately low because faithful Mormons won’t support something that the leaders haven’t approved. As Alison Moore Smith wrote on the comments to my post at Times And Seasons:

If/when the priesthood ban on women is lifted, I expect to find a few curmudgeons who just can’t believe the heresy of it all while everyone else is rejoicing in the street and “suddenly” embracing the the new policy.

I understand where she’s coming from, but I don’t really agree. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for a faithful Mormon to answer “yes” to the question despite supporting their leaders who are saying “no” thus far. The whole premise of the Ordain Women movement, after all, is that members can faithfully agitate for change. And that’s what 4% of the high religious commitment folks are doing. I really don’t think there’s a significant proportion f the 95% of high religious commitment folks who are just waiting for leaders to lift the “ban” (I don’t agree with that term) to run out and celebrate in the streets.

That doesn’t make me feel any sense of smugness, by the way. It makes me feel really sad for the folks out there who are really hurting over this issue. I think female ordination is a bad idea, but I really empathize with some of those who look to it as a solution to genuine problems and genuine heartache.

Can Time Guess Your Politics?

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Time gave it their best shot, but it didn’t turn out so well.

2014-01-10 Times Politics
Ummm…. no.

Not really their fault. I’ve often observed that in terms of temperament I’m much more like liberals than conservatives. So I wasn’t surprised that they were wrong. I could even easily tell, question-by-question, which ones would get me nudged in which direction or the other. Here are the specific results, by the way:

2014-01-10Time Politics Detailed

No big surprise, some of them some contradictory. Example “You wish there were no countries,” vs. “You’re proud of your country’s history.” Yeah: I’d love to live in one, giant, happy global community. Apparently humans tend to need an adversary (a “them”) to define a community (an “us”), but I’ve always hoped that a communal endeavor–something like exploring the Solar System–could unite us without the need for an enemy. I’d love to live in that world. We just don’t. Yet.

So… how does Time’s prediction work out for you guys?

New Movie Challenges Pro-Choice Narrative on Pregnancy Centers

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There’s a new movie coming out called Gimme Shelter staring Vanessa Hudgens that includes some pretty strong pro-life themes and questions the pro-choice attacks on crisis pregnancy centers while it’s at it. The trailer is pretty intense.

Most of what I know about the movie comes from this Secular Pro-Life piece, but I’m definitely intrigued. I hope I have a chance to check it out and, if I do, I’ll review it here.

Sacrifice is OK for Principle, not People

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Noah Smith, a recently minted econ PhD with some fame as a blogger, argues in a piece for The Atlantic that the Seattle Protests of 1999 were right about everything. (Actually, he said “on nearly every count.”) It’s an interesting piece, because it highlights the unexpected callousness of bleeding hearts. Consider:

The clearest example is competition from foreign workers, which really has slammed the American working class. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson did very careful empirical work and found that competition from China lowered wages and increased unemployment for American workers who were in competition with Chinese imports.

I don’t question the science here. I question the values. While American workers in direct competition with Chinese workers are doing worse, Chinese workers in direct competition with American workers are doing better. This is jingoism wrapping itself in the flag of humanitarianism. Later in the post, Smith says that he cares about the health of Chinese workers when it comes to pollution, but apparently his empathy is politically convenient. When it suits him for the welfare of Chinese workers to be irrelevant it gets ignored. When it suits him to be relevant, it goes on prominent display.

It reminds me of the way the American left frequently talks about our need to sacrifice by lowering our standard of living in order to reduce energy consumption and decrease carbon pollution. OK, so we’re willing to lower American standards of living to decrease carbon emissions, but not to raise the standard of living in the developing world?

2014-01-07 Battle in Seattle

Of course, Smith doesn’t address the issue of whether or not the widespread violence and vandalism was one of the “nearly every counts” on which the protests were right. Anarchists are so cute and cuddly when they’re smashing someone else’s windows, right?