Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013.
He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.
My cynicism toward voting began a few years ago. After standing in line a mere 10 minutes at early voting back in 2012, I impatiently mentioned to my wife that we could leave and the state would still remain Red (as it has since 1980). While this Republican coloring may not always be the case due to the increasing Latino population (though they would have to increase their voter turnout), it was the case that time around. Why the sudden surge in pessimism? Boredom, for one, but also the growing realization that we do not live in a swing state (not that my vote’s instrumental value would increase much even in a swing state). The Romney/Ryan ticket was going to carry Texasdespite my vote, not because of it. After teasing my mother via text about this unavoidable fact (she was a bit more zealous about her Republican vote than I was), I finally made it to the voting booth. I sat there for a minute, staring at the names of the presidential candidates. I suddenly felt the urge to vote for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former Republican Governor of New Mexico and founder of Big J Enterprises (one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico when he sold it in 1999). This made sense considering I am more libertarian in my views than Romney and that my vote would not really change the outcome of my state (The Onion got it right). Nonetheless, having prepped myself to vote for Romney ever since he gained the Republican nomination, I followed through. However, I remained extremely skeptical of my so-called “duty to vote.”
Philosopher Jason Brennan’s Princeton-published The Ethics of Voting tackles the folk theory that says we have a duty to vote. Not only is the instrumental value of a single vote vanishingly small, but most voters are ignorant when it comes to politics: both of the candidates’ policy positions and the social science behind those policies. And this ignorance means most people should not vote. One may not have a duty to vote, but if one does vote, then that person has a duty to vote well.
You can see some of these ideas discussed in Brennan’s lecture below:
is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world. Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings, like the spirits that Greek families believed were guarding over their fates.
In 1757, a revolution in our understanding of awe began thanks to Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke detailed how we feel the sublime (awe) not just during religious ritual or in communion with God, but in everyday perceptual experiences: hearing thunder, being moved by music, seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark. Awe was to be found in daily life.
Studies indicate that the experience of awe inspires cooperation and “embeds the individual self in a social identity.” It provokes kindness and a diminished sense of entitlement and self-importance. But why did we develop a sense of awe? Keltner answers,
In the course of our evolution, we became a most social species. We defended ourselves, hunted, reproduced, raised vulnerable offspring, slept, fought, and played in social collectives. This shift to more collective living required a new balancing act between the gratification of self-interest and an orientation toward supporting the welfare of others. Experiencing awe might have helped us make this shift. Brief experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective and orient our actions toward the interests of others.
A second answer to the question of “Why awe?” is of the proximal kind: What does awe do for you in the present moment? And here, the science is proving to be clear: Momentary experiences of awe stimulate wonder and curiosity.
Most positive emotions are arousing, engaging the “fight-flight” sympathetic nervous system to help us actively pursue our goals. Awe has the opposite effect, reducing sympathetic influence on the heart and keeping us still—which suggests that awe’s function does not center on moving toward the material objects or people we desire.
So far, the clues suggest that awe’s function may lie in how it makes us think. Awe involves a sense of uncertainty that we are compelled to try to resolve. Studies from my lab, conducted in collaboration with Vladas Griskevicius and Samantha Neufeld, suggest that we deal with that uncertainty through careful, detail-oriented processing of information from the environment.
…We still have a great deal to learn about awe, and only a few clues, but these and other studies support a tentative theory of its function. More than any other species on Earth, humans are profoundly dependent on knowledge. We have a unique ability to store vast amounts of information, in the form of elaborate conceptual networks that allow us to map our environment, remember the past, and predict the outcomes of future actions, all within the scope of human imagination. The emotion we call awe—our capacity for deep pleasure in facing the incredible and trying to take it all in—may reflect a basic need to understand the world in which we live. Of course, this theory generates lots of new questions, as any good theory should.
So, want one way to increase your well-being? Try to increase your daily dose of awe.
A few weeks ago, I received an unexpected but most welcome Facebook message from Laura Harris Hales asking if I still blogged at Times & Seasons. After a brief exchange, a copy of her newly published A Reason For Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History was on its way to my house for reviewing. You can read my entire review (which was quoted in The Salt Lake Tribune) at Times & Seasons, but my view of the book overall is that
it must be recognized how huge all of this truly is: a book published through a Church imprint is talking about Freemasonry, Deutero-Isaiah, etc. It should be considered a welcome addition to the growing list of Mormon pastoral works. Heavy readers of Mormon Studies may not find anything new or surprising in its pages, but they are not the book’s intended audience. It is meant as a primer; a springboard for those unacquainted with this type of information. It’s meant for the 18 or 19-year-old who just put in his/her papers. It’s meant as a tool for Family Home Evening. As Hales explains in the introduction, the purpose of the book is
to create a safe environment for exploration within a faithful framework. Even so, these discussions may generate thoughts and questions that might be surprising or even bothersome as existing beliefs are stretched. In fact, readers may grieve at the loss of perceptions held dear. Yet they can be consoled by the realization that their expanded understanding is based upon accurate teachings. The information in these essays can begin an exciting process of discovery for readers…When gospel questions arise, the antidote for uncertainty is more knowledge and more contemplation, which takes time–“even by study and also by faith.” It is the continual search for truth, both secular and spiritual, that will give us a reason for faith (pgs. xiii-xiv).
Given this mission, I think the book is a success.
You can see Laura joined by several of the book’s contributors below in their presentation at Benchmark Books:
“Figuring out what causes crime could be the key to reducing it,” says a recent post over at the Institute for Family Studies blog. However, the question of crime causality
has still proven tricky to answer. Some blame culture; others blame poverty or inequality; still others blame a lack of good government. A new study looks at the question through a different lens: Maybe crime is one manifestation of a “fast life-history strategy”—a bundle of traits, unified by a wide-ranging evolutionary theory, that also includes adolescent fertility and low paternal investment. The results suggest that, indeed, nations with young mothers and absent fathers also tend to have high crime, even after other potential causes have been accounted for.
While there are nuances and caveats to be made, it is interesting that “the strongest correlation is between crime and paternal presence, which I was able to chart because the authors kindly provided me their dataset”:
The study’s findings are, of course, far more complicated, but the paper nonetheless “buttresses the argument for stable marriages and delayed childbearing, and it suggests that policymakers should familiarize themselves with the details of life-history strategies so that they might think about how to change them.”
So preached Joseph Smith in 1843. Years earlier, when asked how Mormons differed from other Christians, Joseph answered, “We believe the Bible and they do not.”[ref]Ibid.: 37.[/ref] Yet, within the same month as the friendship quote above–and after many theological innovations that put more distance between Mormonism and traditional Christianity–Joseph answered the same question with: “In reality & essence we do not differ so far in our religious views but that we could all drink into one principle of love.”[ref]Ibid.[/ref] By the end of his life, Joseph had, in the words of Mormon historian Philip Barlow, found
broken or incomplete virtually every essential dimension of how humans related to one another: their rudderless sectarian religion, their baseless sources of authority, their social classes which no longer cohered, and their politics and economies. He made bold assertions about how people may know what they know, what they in essence are, their connection to God, their means and understanding of “salvation,” and their entrapment by the great barrier of death. It was not merely that the Prophet inhabited a time of “rapid social change” and consequent “social dislocation,” which various historians have used to explain the Smith phenomenon. It was rather that the universe of relations and conceptions itself was splintered, which included but cannot be reduced to social dislocation. All of this required repair, and the worldly philosophers and sectarian preachers, Smith thought, could not put Humpty-Dumpty together again. The prophet aspired to mend a fractured reality.
The year following his declaration of friendship as the essence of Mormonism, Joseph taught in his now famous King Follett Discourse, “You have got to learn how to make yourselves Gods in order to save yourselves and be kings and priests to God the same as all Gods have done–by going from a small capacity to a great capacity from a small degree to another from grace to grace until the resurrection of the dead from exaltation to exaltation–till you are able to sit in everlasting burnings and everlasting power and glory as those who have gone before sit enthroned” (pg. 201). It seems that friendship and progression had become fused in the Prophet’s mind late in life, even to the point of mending intergenerational relations: “And now, my dearly beloved brethren and sisters, let me assure you that these are principles in relation to the dead and the living that cannot be lightly passed over, as pertaining to our salvation. For their salvation is necessary and essential to our salvation, as Paul says concerning the fathers—that they without us cannot be made perfect—neither can we without our dead be made perfect” (D&C 128:15).
This fusion of friendship and progression seems to be at the heart of Marvin J. Ashton’s October 1972 talk:
Acts of a friend should result in self-improvement, better attitudes, self-reliance, comfort, consolation, self-respect, and better welfare. Certainly the word friend is misused if it is identified with a person who contributes to our delinquency, misery, and heartaches. When we make a man feel he is wanted, his whole attitude changes. Our friendship will be recognizable if our actions and attitudes result in improvement and independence.
It takes courage to be a real friend. Some of us endanger the valued classification of friend because of our unwillingness to be one under all circumstances. Fear can deprive us of friendship. Some of us identify our closest friends as those with the courage to remain and share themselves with us under all circumstances. A friend is a person who will suggest and render the best for us regardless of the immediate consequences.
He relates this concept to James 1:27 and “pure religion”: “Our responsibility to the widow and the fatherless is to accept them as we find them, but to not leave them without improvement.” A true friend, in Ashton’s mind, “is a person who is willing to take me the way I am but who is willing and able to leave me better than he found me.”
A friend should not just fill a social need. A friend should better us as well.
Class disruptions are known to worsen educational achievement in the short run, but new research demonstrates that being exposed to disruptive peers can even lead to worse adult outcomes:
Results indicate that there are persistent effects on both test scores and educational attainment. We estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school is associated with a 0.02 standard deviation reduction in test scores during high school, and nearly a one percentage point reduction in the likelihood of receiving a college degree. This suggests that the impact of disruptive peers does persist with respect to educational outcomes years afterward.
…Figure 1 shows that while individuals who have idiosyncratically low exposure to disruptive peers (those on the left-hand side) tend to earn more than predicted, those with idiosyncratically high exposure tend to earn somewhat less than predicted. Specifically, we estimate that exposure to one disruptive peer in a class of 25 throughout elementary school reduces earnings by 3–4%, with effects being driven by exposure to disruptive boys.
The researchers conclude,
Our findings…speak to the extent to which differential exposure to disruptive students can lead to income inequality later in life. We calculate that the increased exposure to disruptive peers by students from low-income families can explain 5–6% of the earnings gap between adults who grew up in low versus high-income households. This is significant given that we have only one particular measure of disruptive peers in our sample, and it highlights the extent to which sorting into schools can lead to the persistence of long-term income inequality across households.
While the researchers look specifically at children in families exposed to domestic violence, their findings have broader implications about family breakdown, behavioral problems, and income inequality. As Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan and Harvard’s Christopher Jencks explain, family breakdown can lead to more behavioral problems in children:
[A] father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule breaking, delinquency, and illegal drug use. These antisocial behaviors affect high school completion independent of a child’s verbal and math scores. Thus it appears that a father’s absence lowers children’s educational attainment not by altering their scores on cognitive tests but by disrupting their social and emotional adjustment and reducing their ability or willingness to exercise self-control. The effects of growing up without both parents on aggression, rule breaking, and delinquency are also larger for boys than for girls. Since these traits predict both college attendance and graduation, the spread of single-parent families over the past few decades may have contributed to the growing gender gap in college attendance and graduation. The gender gap in college completion is much more pronounced among children raised by single mothers than among children raised in two-parent families.
This new research suggests that the retreat from marriage has a spill-over effect: the behavioral problems of children from broken families not only negatively affect their own educational and financial outcomes, but the outcomes of their peers. When we consider that marriage tends to decrease the chances of children being exposed to both domestic violence (the study’s selection of choice as mentioned above) and violent crimes within neighborhoods, the importance of healthy, stable marriages becomes all the more clear.
Intact families are necessary for the flourishing of children and the adults they will eventually become.
Is alcohol good for you? According to The Economist, the debate rages on:
Pro-oenological forces point to a large body of evidence demonstrating wine’s positive effect on both the cardiovascular system and longevity. This viewpoint was given additional support this week by a new study in mBio led by Ming-liang Chen and Man-tian Mi of the Third Military Medical University in China. Using mice, the team showed that resveratrol, a molecule found in grapes and berries, reduced the formation of plaques in arteries—a cardiovascular condition known as atherosclerosis that limits blood flow and can trigger heart attacks and strokes.
…But anti-alcohol advocates can claim a victory of their own in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Tim Stockwell of the University of Victoria in Canada and Tanya Chikritzhs of the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University in Australia carried out a meta-analysis of 87 epidemiological investigations. They concluded that so-called moderate drinkers do not benefit from a reduction in mortality compared to abstainers. This finding strikes a blow at the very heart of the imbibers’ claim.
Why is the science of public health so fraught with mixed messages? The article concludes,
First, the statistically significant results reported in journals are often not biologically relevant, because a measurable outcome may be so small that it has no meaningful effect on patients. Second, animals are imperfect models for humans. Third, findings from the laboratory, for reasons not always fully understood, often do not translate to the field. The difficulty of reconciling multiple conflicting lines of evidence means the alcohol debate will rage on. Cheers!
the increasingly “separate and unequal” character of family life in the United States is fueling economic, racial, and gender inequality. How is family life “separate and unequal”? First, Americans exhibit a growing class divide in marriage where the college-educated are more likely to enjoy high-quality, stable marriages than the less-educated. For instance, since the divorce revolution of the 1970s, divorce has fallen among college-educated Americans, while remaining comparatively common among Americans without college degrees.
Furthermore, the timing of these trends provides “strong evidence that family change preceded growing economic inequality. Specifically, the rise of nonmarital childbearing and divorce date back to the 1960s, well before economic inequality began growing in the late 1970s.”
The authors find that “scholarly research demonstrates that America’s growing marriage divide has helped to fuel three forms of economic and social inequality”:
“First and foremost is inequality in Americans’ family income, which has risen since the 1970s.”
“The retreat from marriage also looms large in another form of economic inequality in America: racial inequality.”
“Third, the growing marriage divide is fueling a historically unusual type of gender inequality in low-income communities…”
There’s much more. The research is both compelling and important. Check out the full post.
A new report in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest provides “a comprehensive review of the scientific research on sexual orientation.” Based on the latest research, the researchers draw several conclusions:
Across cultures, a “small but nontrivial” percentage of people have non-heterosexual feelings. The specific expression of sexual orientation varies widely according to cultural norms and traditions, but research suggests that individuals’ sexual feelings are likely to develop in similar ways around the world.
Men’s and women’s sexual orientations manifest in different ways: Men’s sexual orientation is more closely linked to their patterns of sexual arousal than women’s sexual orientation is.
Various biological factors—including prenatal hormones and specific genetic profiles—are likely to contribute to sexual orientation, though they are not the sole cause. Scientific evidence suggests that biological and non-social environmental factors jointly influence sexual orientation.
Scientific findings do not support the notion that sexual orientation can be taught or learned through social means. And there is little evidence to suggest that non-heterosexual orientations become more common with increased social tolerance.
Lead author J. Michael Bailey argues, “Sexual orientation is an important human trait, and we should study it without fear, and without political constraint. The more controversial a topic, the more we should invest in acquiring unbiased knowledge and science is the best way to acquire unbiased knowledge.”
A recent study out of George Mason University concludes that “[b]y altering investment decisions and disrupting the innovation that comes from investment in knowledge creation, regulations have a cumulative and detrimental effect on economic growth—and, over time, have a real impact on American families and workers.” The key findings:
If regulation had been held constant at levels observed in 1980, the US economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it actually was as of 2012.
This means that in 2012, the economy was $4 trillion smaller than it would have been in the absence of regulatory growth since 1980.
This amounts to a loss of approximately $13,000 per capita, a significant amount of money for most American workers.
My cynicism toward voting began a few years ago. After standing in line a mere 10 minutes at early voting back in 2012, I impatiently mentioned to my wife that we could leave and the state would still remain Red (as it has since 1980). While this Republican coloring may not always be the case due to the increasing Latino population (though they would have to increase their voter turnout), it was the case that time around. Why the sudden surge in pessimism? Boredom, for one, but also the growing realization that we do not live in a swing state (not that my vote’s instrumental value would increase much even in a swing state). The Romney/Ryan ticket was going to carry Texas despite my vote, not because of it. After teasing my mother via text about this unavoidable fact (she was a bit more zealous about her Republican vote than I was), I finally made it to the voting booth. I sat there for a minute, staring at the names of the presidential candidates. I suddenly felt the urge to vote for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, former Republican Governor of New Mexico and founder of Big J Enterprises (one of the largest construction companies in New Mexico when he sold it in 1999). This made sense considering I am more libertarian in my views than Romney and that my vote would not really change the outcome of my state (The Onion got it right). Nonetheless, having prepped myself to vote for Romney ever since he gained the Republican nomination, I followed through. However, I remained extremely skeptical of my so-called “duty to vote.”
A 