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.

The Origins of Mass Incarceration

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Brown University professor Daniel D’Amico has a staggering essay in the latest issue of Cato Unbound on the origins of mass incarceration in the U.S. titled “Why Nations Jail.” The common proposals for decreasing incarceration are “controls against racial bias, better social programs for the poor, drug decriminalization, and less punitive policing.” While D’Amico acknowledges that these elements matter, they do not account for global or historic patterns in prison growth. While economic factors like “unemployment, welfare spending, and union power correlate with cross-country imprisonment rates,” multiple studies fail to confirm a “consistent relationship between more liberal market economies – or higher economic performance – and larger prison populations.”[ref]He notes that more economically free countries actually have less homicide, yet have better crime reporting.[/ref] After continually demonstrating that the common narratives fall short when one examines the data, D’Amico offers a more compelling explanation: organizational structures of institutions. He uses the example of the American “war on drugs” to make his point:

Most countries prohibit drugs, but only America launches an ominously but fittingly titled “war on drugs.” It is not so much that we prohibit drugs, but rather how we finance and manage that prohibition, which sets us apart. I believe that America’s drug war, American criminal justice services more generally in recent decades, and those criminal justice systems that have behaved similarly, are all united by how much more power they afford to the national as opposed to local levels in criminal justice decisionmaking. And the result is mass incarceration.

Theory shows that more hierarchical organizations commit more errors of overidentification. Increases in criminal legislation, arrest rates, convictions, and sentence lengths would all seem to be relevant manifestations. Similarly, many public choice scholars have noticed that by concentrating perceived deterrent benefits while dispersing costs, democratic politics rewards the expansive spending, employment, and voter appeasement accomplished through criminalization and prison growth.

As D’Amico continues, he provides evidence that heavily hierarchical institutions and centralized power lead to higher incarceration rates. For those in support of prison reform, this essay and the research behind it are important.

Futurism’s Cultural Blindspot

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There’s a thought-provoking article in the recent issue of Nautilus on futurism’s blindspot: culture. The author argues that our “innovation-obsessed present” conditions us

to overstate the impact of technology not only in the future, but also the present. We tend to imagine we are living in a world that could scarcely have been imagined a few decades ago. It is not uncommon to read assertions like: “Someone would have been unable at the beginning of the 20th century to even dream of what transportation would look like a half a century later.” And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive predecessors?

…We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.

I think this point about technology is debatable. However, the main thesis is that “Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect:

…Why is cultural change so hard to predict? For one, we have long tended to forget that itdoes change. Status quo bias reigns. “Until recently, culture explained why things stayed the same, not why they changed,” notes the sociologist Kieran Healy. “Understood as a monolithic block of passively internalized norms transmitted by socialization and canonized by tradition, culture was normally seen as inhibiting individuals.”

In other words, “when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love?”

Predicting the behaviors and ideas of the future are far more difficult than predicting the technology.

The Moral Psychology of Microaggressions

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has an engrossing outline of a fairly new study on what are known as microaggressions. The study examines our transition into a moral culture of victimhood. The 18th and 19th centuries saw a shift from cultures of honor to cultures of dignity. Honor-based cultures tend to lack strong legal authority and institutions, thus socializing individuals to rely on their own bravery and capabilities to avenge insults and consequently earn honorable reputations. Dignity-based cultures see the worth of individuals as inherent rather than bestowed by public opinion. This moral paradigm is reinforced by the reliance on third parties (i.e., police or courts) for egregious offenses, though frivolous use of authority is often condemned and a general “thick-skinned” approach to insult is the standard. This emerging culture of victimhood combines the sensitivity to insult of honor-based cultures with the reliance on third parties from dignity-based cultures. Sympathy is preferred to honor and victimization is emphasized rather than inner strength and worth. The status of the “virtuous victim” has risen to the point of creating competition for the coveted title of most oppressed. This leads to the reporting (and fabrication) of slight offenses toward marginalized groups (i.e., microaggressions). Yet, this publicizing of microaggressions often takes place in already highly egalitarian, diverse, and affluent pockets of society with strong administrative bodies (such as university campuses). As progress is made toward increased equality and diversity, the standard for offense paradoxically drops. In other words, the richest, most equal, most diverse societies in the world will make the loudest denunciations for the smallest possible offense (whether actual or not).

It’s an absolutely fascinating read and an incredible insight into our current culture.

Why Plenty of Psychology Studies Are Crap

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“Crap” may be a bit strong, but The New York Times nonetheless has an important–if not disturbing–article on a new analysis called the Reproducibility Project, which attempts to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals. The conclusions were recently published in Science. Tillburg University’s Jelte Wicherts said, “I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented.”

The project began in 2011, when a University of Virginia psychologist decided to find out whether suspect science was a widespread problem. He and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified the 100 studies published in 2008, and rigorously redid the experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.

…Dr. John Ioannidis, a director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, who once estimated that about half of published results across medicine were inflated or wrong, noted the proportion in psychology was even larger than he had thought. He said the problem could be even worse in other fields, including cell biology, economics, neuroscience, clinical medicine, and animal research.

The report appears at a time when the number of retractions of published papers is rising sharply in a wide variety of disciplines. Scientists have pointed to a hypercompetitive culture across science that favors novel, sexy results and provides little incentive for researchers to replicate the findings of others, or for journals to publish studies that fail to find a splashy result.

This is a much-needed study.

Renowned Neurologist Oliver Sacks Dies

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Earlier this year, I shared famed neurologist Oliver Sacks’ farewell piece he wrote in The New York Times. Unfortunately on Sunday night, he passed away at the age of 82. The NYT has a wonderful obituary that reviews his life and work. I highly recommend reading it. However, I also recommend reading a piece written by Sacks just this last month simply titled “Sabbath.” After describing his Orthodox Jewish upbringing and relaying a rather heartbreaking incident between him and his mother over his homosexuality (Sacks was celibate later in life), he begins to dwell on the concept of the Sabbath. Quoting Nobel economist Robert John Aumann, he states, “The observance of the Sabbath is extremely beautiful and is impossible without being religious. It is not even a question of improving society — it is about improving one’s own quality of life.” Now Sacks has described himself as an “old Jewish atheist,” but he ends the piece with the following:

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

Some of the final lines from the film Awakenings–adapted from Sacks’ book of the same title and with Robin Williams’ character based on Sacks himself–go hand-in-hand with this reflection.

May you rest in peace, Dr. Sacks.

Walmart as Hero: 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

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Today is the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina‘s destructive collision with the Gulf Coast. “The surge and battering waves smashed into levees, which collapsed, causing extensive flooding throughout the New Orleans region. Ultimately, 80 percent of New Orleans and large portions of nearby parishes became flooded, and the floodwaters did not recede for weeks. The National Guard was called in to help with evacuations. Thousands sought refuge in the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome, which were overwhelmed. It was one of the largest displacements of a population since the Great Depression, according to the NOAA.” The federal government’s response became highly politicized due to its multiple day response and lack of preparation. What is often overlooked is the response from the private sector. A case in point is Walmart. Though often maligned as nothing more than a greedy corporation, the incentives and preparation of Walmart allowed it to respond quickly and effectively to the Katrina disaster. As we reflect on the lessons learned from that day 10 years ago, we should attempt to learn the right lessons. Economist Steven Horwitz provides some of those below.

The Costs of Health Insurance Coverage

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There’s an oft-expressed view that getting all those people covered could actually save the health system money. The argument goes something like this: Once people have insurance, they’ll go to the doctor instead of an expensive emergency room. Or: Prevention costs far less than a serious illness down the road.

…This argument for the cost savings from universal health coverage makes some intuitive sense, but it’s wrong. There’s strong evidence from a variety of sources that people who have health insurance spend more on medical care than people who don’t. It also turns out that almost all preventive health care costs more than it saves.

So begins an informative New York Times article by Margot Sanger-Katz. She points out that the actuaries in 2014 “estimated that health spending that year jumped by 5.5 percent, a bigger rise than the country had experienced in five years. That’s actually not a huge increase by historical standards…But it still marks the end of an era of record-low spending growth in the system.”[ref]The author is careful to note, “Those facts don’t mean that giving people health insurance is a waste of money, since those dollars spent may improve their health and financial security. But there are only a few situations in which giving someone more health care will actually end up saving money.” People of good faith can argue over whether the increased costs are worth it.[/ref] There were three main reasons for this increase:

  1. Aging of the population and the sickness that comes with age.
  2. “[T]he improving economy, which will enable more people to afford medical care — or the time off from work it might take to attend to their health needs.”
  3. Obamacare’s expansive coverage.

It’s the third point that Sanger-Katz spends the article explaining:

There’s evidence about the link between insurance status and health spending from many sources. A famous randomized study of health insurance, started in the 1970s by the RAND Corporation, was designed to answer this exact question. It found that the less expensive you made it for people to obtain medical care, the more of it they used. That follows the pattern for nearly every other good in the economy, including food, clothing and electronics. The cheaper they are for people, the more they are likely to buy.

That finding was echoed recently by researchers who conducted another randomized controlled trial — this one of uninsured low-income people in Oregon. Low-income Oregonians who wanted to sign up for the state’s Medicaid program were placed in a lottery. Only some got the insurance, but the researchers tracked both groups. In the first year, they found that the lottery entrants who were given Medicaid spent more on health care than those who remained uninsured.

This is virtually what Nathaniel laid out over two years ago in his comparison of health insurance to a hypothetical food insurance. This is because the situation is, as noted above, basic economics:

One of the reasons for the political popularity of price controls in general is that part of their costs are concealed…Price controls are therefore particularly appealing to those who do not think beyond stage one…Artificially lower prices, created by government order rather than by supply and demand, encourage more use of goods or services, while discouraging the production of those same goods and services. Increased consumption and reduced production means a shortage…Quality deterioration often accompanies reduced production…Quality declines because the incentives to maintaining quality are lessened by price control. Sellers in general maintain the quality of their products or services for fear of losing customers otherwise. But, when price controls create a…shortage-fear of losing customers is no longer a strong incentive.[ref]Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 54-55.[/ref]

The Long-Term Effects of the Minimum Wage

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Here at Difficult Run, we just can’t get enough of the minimum wage. Yet, that seems to be because there is so much good stuff to post about it. The Economist, for example, has a recent article that looks at three different studies regarding the long-term effects of the minimum wage:

  • In the first Isaac Sorkin of the University of Michigan argues that firms may well substitute machines for people in response to minimum wages, but slowly…Mr Sorkin crunches the numbers, using a model of the American restaurant industry in which companies choose between employees and machines. He investigates the effect of a permanent (ie, inflation-linked) increase in the minimum wage and shows that the tiny short-run effects on employment normally seen are fully consistent with a long-run response over 100 times larger. The lack of evidence for a big impact on employment in the short term does not rule out a much larger long-term effect.

  • In a second paper, written with Daniel Aaronson of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Eric French of University College London, Mr Sorkin goes further, offering empirical evidence that higher minimum wages nudge firms away from people and towards machines. The authors look at the type of restaurants that close down and start up after a minimum-wage rise. An increase in the minimum wage seems to push some restaurants out of business. The eateries that replace them are more likely to be chains, which are more reliant on machines (and therefore offer fewer jobs) than the independent outlets they replace. This effect has not been picked up before because the restaurants which continue to operate do not change their employment levels, so the jobs total does not shift much in the short run.

  • The third cautionary paper is from Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M University and Jeremy West of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…Their results suggest that a 10% increase in the minimum wage, made permanent by linking it to inflation, could cut job growth by 0.3 percentage points a year. Over a long period, this could amount to a very large difference indeed, though the authors stress that such long-run extrapolations are difficult given the limited experience of such permanent changes. Worryingly, the effects on jobs growth they see are concentrated among people under 25, and those without a degree. These are vulnerable groups who risk being locked out of the labour force for good.

Give them a read.

On Being Pacifist

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I’ve never identified as a pacifist. However, I think this is due to my view of pacifism being tainted by the American expression of it. As economist Bryan Caplan explains,

I’m a pacifist, but I’ve never been intellectually impressed with the U.S. peace movement.  The sound argument against war, in my view, combines (a) the common-sense moral view that, “You shouldn’t kill innocent people unless you know with high certainty that the long-run benefits heavily outweigh the short-run costs” with (b) the empirical fact that predictions about war’s long-run benefits are extremely inaccurate.  U.S. peace activists’ typical arguments against war are both too weak and too strong: Too weak because they focus on the badness of particular leaders and regimes rather than the murderous essence of modern war, too strong because they make overconfident, overblown predictions about the long-run effects of wars they oppose.  Worse still, U.S. peace activists have a ghastly tendency to side with despicable totalitarians and bloodthirsty nationalists.

Even more frustrating is the fact that “Democrats’ war policies were very similar so those of their Republican predecessors, but the antiwar movement…durably dissolved once the Democrats gained power.” All one has to look at is the data (drawn from a recent book by political scientist Michael Heaney and sociologist Fabio Rojas) on antiwar protest size, media coverage, and partisan breakdown:

The sad fact is “Democrats energized the antiwar movement, then dropped it as soon as their side regained power.  “We observe demobilization not in response to a policy victory, but in response to a party victory.”  Why?  Because Democrats’ real target was not war, but Republicans…Though they’re too polite to come out and say it, Heaney and Rojas’ book shows that the good cause of peace was not merely ineptly defended, but insincerely defended.  While the peace movement no doubt includes some honest-to-goodness pacifists, they’re honorable outliers.  The peace movement was not about peace.”

Middle-Class Income: Still Not Stagnating

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Last month, I posted a few links on why today’s middle-class salary may actually be better than we often think. Harvard professor and president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research Martin Feldstein adds more food-for-thought on the subject:

…[I]t is frequently said that the average household income has risen only slightly, or not at all, for the past few decades. Some US Census figures seem to support that conclusion. But more accurate government statistics imply that the real incomes of those at the middle of the income distribution have increased about 50% since 1980. And a more appropriate adjustment for changes in the cost of living implies a substantially greater gain.

The US Census Bureau estimates the money income that households receive from all sources and identifies the income level that divides the top and bottom halves of the distribution. This is the median household income. To compare median household incomes over time, the authorities divide these annual dollar values by the consumer price index to create annual real median household incomes. The resulting numbers imply that the cumulative increase from 1984 through 2013 was less than 10%, equivalent to less than 0.3% per year.

Any adult who was alive in the US during these three decades realizes that this number grossly understates the gains of the typical household. One indication that something is wrong with this figure is that the government also estimates that real hourly compensation of employees in the non-farm business sector rose 39% from 1985 to 2015.

The official Census estimate suffers from three important problems. For starters, it fails to recognize the changing composition of the population; the household of today is quite different from the household of 30 years ago. Moreover, the Census Bureau’s estimate of income is too narrow, given that middle-income families have received increasing government transfers while benefiting from lower income-tax rates. Finally, the price index used by the Census Bureau fails to capture the important contributions of new products and product improvements to Americans’ standard of living.

Worth a read.