Walker

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.

Time(ly) Insights from Doctor Who

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See what I did in the title? Clever, I know.

The Doctor Who episode “The Zygon Inversion” provided some timely social commentary given some of the recent attacks in Paris, Beirut, and elsewhere. The second part to “The Zygon Invasion,” the story focuses on a splinter group of a shape-shifting alien race known as the Zygons.  The episode revisits the characters and storyline of the 50th anniversary episode, in which a peace treaty was negotiated–thanks in no small part to the Doctor’s use of a memory wipe[ref]For those who doubt how cool this can be, just listen to the music that accompanies the Doctor(s)’s (yeah, there’s three of them in this episode…) entrance into the peace negotiation[/ref]–between humans and the attacking Zygons (whose home planet had been destroyed in the Last Great Time War). The Zygons were allowed to stay and live out their lives in peace disguised as humans. Yet, a Zygon revolution takes place, eventually leading to the Black Archives in London. There, UNIT leader Kate Stewart and the Zygon splinter group leader “Bonnie” (now disguised as the Doctor’s companion Clara) face off over the Osgood Box(es): devices that contain two buttons each. The buttons in Kate’s box could either set off a nuclear device beneath London or release Z-67 gas into Earth’s atmosphere, killing the Zygons alone (Kate’s preference). On the other hand, Bonnie’s box could either permanently change all disguised Zygons back into their original form (Bonnie’s preference) or permanently keep them in their chosen disguise.

The standoff results in one of the best Doctor Who speeches of the rebooted series and certainly one of Peter Capaldi’s highlights. The speech skewers both radicalism and the war hawks’ responses to it. It also briefly reflects the trauma that lingers long after the war has stopped.[ref]The Ninth Doctor often suffered from survivor’s guilt and a hatred of the Daleks, which was potent in the episode “Dalek.” The Tenth Doctor described the war as “hell.” The Eleventh Doctor described his war incarnation as “the one who broke the promise [of the Doctor’s name]” and thus was his dark “secret.”[/ref]

It’s great stuff. Check it out below.

The “Model Minority” Facing Discrimination

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Image result for asian family

The Economist has a fascinating and potentially infuriating piece on Asian-Americans. In short, Asian-Americans find themselves being discriminated against (particularly in academia) because of their success. The history of Asian immigrants has not been a happy one: “The largest mass lynching in American history, in 1871, in which 17 Chinese were murdered; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration; the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in the second world war, when relatively few German- or Italian-Americans were interned: all were symptoms of a racism that was reserved not just for African-Americans.” Despite these earlier disadvantages, Asian-Americans on average

are unusually well educated, prosperous, married, satisfied with their lot and willing to believe in the American dream: 69% of Asians, compared with 58% of the general public, think that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.”” It is their educational outperformance that is most remarkable: 49% of Asian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28% of the general population. Whereas Asian-Americans make up 5.6% of the population of the United States, according to the complaint to the Department of Education they make up more than 30% of the recent American maths and physics Olympiad teams and Presidential Scholars, and 25-30% of National Merit Scholarships.

Recent research suggests that “Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work” rather than innate differences or socioeconomic status:

[Amy] Hsin and [Yu] Xie’s study showed a sizeable gap in effort between Asian and white children, which grew during their school careers. When the researchers asked the children about their attitudes to work, two differences emerged between Asian and white children. The Asians were likelier to believe that mathematical ability is learned, not innate; and Asian parents expected more of their children than white ones did. The notion that A- is an “Asian F” is widespread. Another study, by Zurishaddai Garcia of the University of Utah, shows that Asian-American parents are a lot likelier to spend at least 20 minutes a day helping their children with their homework than any other ethnic group.

Despite their hard work and incredible performance, research finds that

Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points[ref]”Yet in California,” the article reports, “where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were.”[/ref]…Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited. Since the Ivies will not stop giving places to the privileged, because their finances depend on the generosity of the rich, the argument homes in on affirmative action.[ref]Yet, surprisingly, “the Asian-American community is unwilling on the whole to oppose affirmative action. It tends to vote Democratic, and many of its members recall the years when they were a despised, not a model, minority. So those who dislike the way the system works tend to argue for it to be adjusted, not abolished; and some say that Asians should actually support it.”[/ref]

There is much more. Worth reading the entire thing.

Inequality: More How Nots

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I shared a post by AEI’s James Pethokoukis last month on how not to reduce inequality. In a recent post, he provides more reasons to be wary of the usual “solutions” provided by the hardcore anti-income inequality crowd. These include:

  • “[C]ompanies that are best able to navigate the globalized, technologically intensive modern are more profitable and pay their workers better than those who can’t.”
  • “A new study on preschool finds that kids who attended Tennessee’s pre-K program were worse off by the end of first grade than kids who didn’t. And a new study on Quebec’s universal childcare program finds that “children’s outcomes have worsened since the program was introduced along a variety of behavioral and health dimensions.”
  • “Economist Alan Krueger, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, cautions that a national $15 an hour minimum wage “is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive.””
  • ““What Is the Case for Paid Maternity Leave? by Gordon Dahl, Katrine Løken, Magne Mogstad, and Kari Vea Salvanes  looked at a series of policy reforms in Norway which expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks and found that “the expansions had little effect on a wide variety of outcomes, including children’s school outcomes, parental earnings and participation in the labor market in the short or long run, completed fertility, marriage or divorce.””

In other words, income inequality is in part driven by inequality between companies, pre-K schooling doesn’t help and might actually make kids worse off, minimum wage hikes won’t do the trick, and neither will paid maternity leave.

He ends, “I dunno, maybe there needs to be a bit more humility, more skepticism — particularly from the media— as we hurtle forward toward IKEAmerica.“

World Bank: End Extreme Poverty by 2030

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The World Bank reported last month that for the first time in world history, extreme poverty will likely fall below 10% of the global population this year. This is encouraging and provides strong evidence that the goal of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030 is achievable. World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said,

This is the best story in the world today — these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty…This new forecast of poverty falling into the single digits should give us new momentum and help us focus even more clearly on the most effective strategies to end extreme poverty. It will be extraordinarily hard, especially in a period of slower global growth, volatile financial markets, conflicts, high youth unemployment, and the growing impact of climate change. But it remains within our grasp, as long as our high aspirations are matched by country-led plans that help the still millions of people living in extreme poverty.

Poverty continues to be concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, yet both have seen reductions in poverty: South Asia dropped from 18.8% in 2012 to 13.5% in 2015 and Sub-Saharan Africa dropped from 42.6% in 2012 to 35.2% in 2015.

This is one of the greatest stories never told.

China Ends One-Child Policy

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China ended its one-child policy this week, changing instead to a two-child policy. I don’t have much to say about it. A horrific, gendercidal attempt at social engineering that has led to immense human suffering has been softened. Yet, it is not enough. Sadly, as The Economist notes, many of those who wanted a second child have already been sterilized. I’m going to control myself and not lash out in anger over the lack of attention on my Facebook news feed or what seems to be actual support for the one-child policy in one form or another. Instead, I’ll just do what I usually do and post data:

Based on the now debunked threat of overpopulation that was popularized by Stanford University scholar Paul Ehrlich, the communist government subjected the Chinese people to forced sterilizations and abortions. Many newborn babies were either killed or left to die. Today, the Chinese population suffers from a dangerous gender imbalance that favors boys over girls at a ratio of 117:100, and a demographic implosion that threatens future economic growth and prosperity. In fact, as Human Progress advisory board member Matt Ridley shows in his book The Rational Optimist, population growth and economic expansion go hand in hand. The horrific consequences of the Chinese one-child policy are a reminder of what happens when governments are allowed to interfere in the deeply personal decisions of individual citizens and their families.

The claims of overpopulation doomsdayers were wrong. But those claims brought about immense misery. Let’s be grateful that we’re moving in a better direction.

The Secret to Danish Happiness: Vulnerable Family Time

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A recent article from the Greater Good Science Center looked at research analyzing one of the main sources behind the high levels of happiness among the Danes: hygge. Hygge, the article explains,

is essentially drama-free togetherness time…Try to imagine going to a drama-free family gathering. There are no divisive discussions about politics, family issues, or Aunt Jenny’s dysfunctional kids. No snide comments, complaining, or heavy negativity. Everyone helps out, so that not one person gets stuck doing all the work. No one brags, attacks anyone, or competes with another. It is a light-hearted, balanced interaction that is focused on enjoying the moment, the food, and the company. In short, a shelter from the outside world.

The article also points out that high levels of inequality lead to unhappiness and that, according to one study, “rich Americans and Danes were equally happy,” but “low-income Danes were much, much happier than their American counterparts.” This could be interpreted as support for Danish models of social democracy. However, it is worth pointing out that family breakdown plays a major role in the lack of economic mobility among lower-income Americans, while wealth overall can have little effect.

Focusing on family and social ties is truly the key to happiness.

Balancing the Evidence on Family Structure

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Economist Steven Horwitz has a recent post that is well-balanced in its approach to the social science on family structure. Responding specifically to W. Bradford Wilcox’s latest National Review piece, Horwitz brings up some excellent points that should be considered:

  • “[T]here are differences among single-parent households formed through: 1) the choice to have and raise a child by oneself; 2) death of a spouse; and 3) divorce. Each of these presents a different set of circumstances and tradeoffs that we might wish to consider when we think about the role of family structure.”
  • “The empirical evidence under discussion has to be understood with an “all else equal” condition. A healthy marriage will indeed produce better outcomes than, say, single motherhood. But there is equally strong social scientific evidence about the harm done to children who are raised in high-conflict households. Those children may well be better off if their parents get divorced and they are raised in two single-parent households with less conflict.”
  • “[T]o say that married parents create “better” outcomes for kids does not mean that other family forms don’t produce “acceptable” outcomes for kids. It’s not as if every child raised by a single mother, whether through divorce, widowhood, or simply not marrying the father, is condemned to poverty or a life of crime. Averages are averages.”
  • “[P]arents matter too…That parents matter too is most obvious with divorce, where leaving a bad marriage may be extremely valuable for mom and/or dad, even if it leads to worse outcomes for the kids. The evidence from Stevenson and Wolfers that no-fault divorce has led to a decline in intimate partner violence as well as suicides of married women makes the importance of this point clear. We can acknowledge that higher divorce rates have not been good for kids, but we can’t do single-entry moral bookkeeping. We have to include the effects of divorce on the married couple, because adults matter too.”

Definitely worth chewing on.

The Capitalist Conscience

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The above graph comes from the World Values Survey Database. As you can see, the vertical line moves from traditional values (religion, ritual, hierarchy, authority) to secular values, while the horizontal line moves from survival values (economic and physical security) to those of self-expression. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt provides this helpful explanation:

The best way to understand the graph is to consider that nearly all societies used to be agricultural societies. Pre-industrial farming cultures generally have traditional and survival values (they cluster in the bottom left quadrant of the map). Life is hard and unpredictable, so you should do your duty, pray to the gods, and cling to your extended family for protection.

But as countries industrialize and people leave the land and enter factories, wealth rises and values shift.  Interestingly, countries don’t just move diagonally, from the poor quadrant (currently occupied by the Islamic and African nations) to the rich quadrant (anchored by Scandinavia, in the upper right). Rather, there is a two-step process. First, countries move upward, from traditional/survival values to secular/survival values. When money comes from fitting yourself into the routines of factory production, there’s little time or room for religious ritual. People express materialistic values in this quadrant—they want money, not just for security, but for the social prestige it can buy.

…Societies [then] transition to more service-based jobs, which require (and foster) very different skills and values compared to factory jobs. Also, as societies get wealthier, life generally gets safer, not just due to reductions in disease, starvation, and vulnerability to natural disasters, but also due to reductions in political brutalization. People get rights. The net effect of rising security is to transform people’s values in ways that the modern political left should love.

Haidt’s conclusion? “Capitalism changes conscience.”

Strong Families, Prosperous States

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A brand new AEI study looks at the connection between marriage and family structure and the performance of state economies. The researchers found:

  • Higher levels of marriage, and especially higher levels of married-parent families, are strongly associated with more economic growth, more economic mobility, less child poverty, and higher median family income at the state level in the United States.
  • The share of parents in a state who are married is one of the top predictors of the economic outcomes studied in this report. In fact, this family factor is generally a stronger predictor of economic mobility, child poverty, and median family income in the American states than are the educational, racial, and age compositions of the states.
  • The state-level link between marriage and economic growth is stronger for younger adults (ages 25–35) than for older adults (36–59), suggesting that marriage plays a particularly important role in fostering a positive labor market orientation among young men.
  • Violent crime is much less common in states with larger shares of families headed by married parents, even after controlling for a range of socio-demographic factors at the state level.

Important stuff. Check it out.

 

The Future of Children: Marriage & Child Wellbeing Revisited

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Image result for future of childrenReaders of Difficult Run likely know that family structure and child well-being is a subject that I have spent quite a bit of time studying and reporting. It is this reason that I was excited to see this very subject revisited by the Princeton-Brookings collaboration The Future of Children in their October 2015 issue. According to the introduction article, this issue has a number of interesting points:

  • While many of marriage’s mechanisms “could be bolstered by public programs that substitute for parental resources—greater cash assistance, more generous health insurance, better housing, more help for caregivers, etc.—studies of child wellbeing that attempt to control for the indirect effects of these mechanisms typically find that a direct positive association remains between child wellbeing and marriage, strongly suggesting that marriage is more than the sum of these particular parts. Thus…the advantages of marriage for children are likely to be hard to replicate through policy interventions other than those that bolster marriage itself” (pg. 6).
  • “Cohabitation…is associated with several factors that have the potential to reduce children’s wellbeing, including lower levels of parental education and fewer legal protections. Most importantly, cohabitation is often a marker of family instability, which is strongly associated with poorer outcomes for children. Children born to cohabiting parents see their parents break up more often than do children born to married parents; in this way, being born into a cohabiting parent family sets the stage for later instability. On the other hand, stable cohabiting families with two biological parents seem to offer many of the same health, cognitive, and behavioral benefits that stable married biological parent families provide” (pg. 6).
  • Social science evidence indicates that “same-sex couples are as good at parenting as their different-sex counterparts. Any differences in the wellbeing of children raised in same-sex and different-sex families can be explained not by their parents’ gender composition but by the fact that children being raised by same-sex couples have, on average, experienced more family instability, because most children being raised by same-sex couples were born to heterosexual parents, one of whom is now in a same-sex relationship” (pg. 6-7).[ref]Which is actually something the controversial sociologist Mark Regnerus has stressed.[/ref]
  • “Race continues to be associated with economic disadvantage, and thus as economic factors have become more relevant to marriage and marital stability, the racial gap in marriage has grown” (pg. 7).
  • Causes of the retreat of marriage “include growing individualism and the waning of a family-oriented ethos, the rise of a “capstone” model of marriage, and the decline of civil society. The authors argue that these cultural and civic trends have been especially consequential for poor and working-class American families. Yet if we take into account cultural factors like adolescent attitudes toward single parenthood and the structure of the family in which they grew up, the authors find, the class divide in nonmarital childbearing among U.S. young women is reduced by about one-fifth” (pg. 7).

Check it out.