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 Slow Hunch: February – July 2015

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Apparently I’m not very good at self-promotion. I said before that I would provide monthly recaps of my personal blog The Slow Hunch, but I’ve failed to do so the last…5 months.

So here I am again to provide all three readers of my blog with a lengthy list of posts you probably missed:

Enjoy.

Want to Be More Productive? Turn Your Phone Off

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Or at least the notifications. That seems to be what a recent blog post at the Harvard Business Review suggests:

Multitasking…imposes a heavy cognitive load and hurts performance on a task, because our mental resources are finite and have to be allotted to discrete tasks. That’s why you’re not supposed to talk on the phone or text while you’re driving, and why many campaigns urge drivers to wait to respond until they’re no longer behind the wheel.

In an experiment with over 200 undergrads, researchers gave the participants a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). This consisted of a 10-minute exercise during which the students pressed a key whenever a number flashed onscreen (unless it was the number “3”). Eventually, one-third of the students received notifications, another phone calls, and another nothing at all (see the article for more detail). The results?

When the researchers looked at the relationship between block and group, they found that the percent change between blocks was greater for participants who received notifications, compared to participants who didn’t, and this was statistically significant at the 0.05 level. However, they didn’t find any significant difference in errors between people who received phone calls and people who received texts.

So basically, just having your phone near you can distract you and negatively affect your work performance. And this distraction-by-notification might even be comparable to interacting with your phone. Stothart said that in terms of effect size, their results were consistent with those of the distracted driving literature, which has looked at the effects of texting or talking on the phone (interacting) while driving.

Probably why I can’t get anything done.

The Culprit Behind Rising Tuition: Student Aid

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Image result for milton friedman
Milton Friedman

The link between student loans and rising tuition has been debated for years, but a brand new study from the New York Federal Reserve lends support to the claim that it is indeed subsidized loans that are driving up tuition. As The Week reports,

When subsidized federal loans have the effect of “relaxing students’ funding constraints,” universities respond by raising tuition to collect the newly available cash.

The resultant tuition hikes can be substantial: The researchers found that each additional dollar of Pell Grant or subsidized student loan money translates to a tuition jump of 55 or 65 cents, respectively. Of course, the higher tuition also applies to students who don’t receive federal aid, making college less affordable across the board.

The report also found that subsidized federal loans do not appear to increase enrollment.

That’s disappointing.

 

2015 Richard Johnson Lecture: “The End of Faith: Has Science Made Religion Redundant?”

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Peter Harrison

This past month was the second ever Richard Johnson Lecture put on by the Australia-based Centre for Public Christianity. This year’s speaker was historian Peter Harrison of the University of Queensland and former Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. I’ve followed (and bought)[ref]The books I own by him include The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2010). His most recent book The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015) seems to draw on his 2011 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.[/ref] Harrison’s work ever since I listened to his interviews with CPX years ago and include him among great historians of science and religion like Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg. This lecture is divided into four parts:

  1. Science and Religion as Competing Belief Systems
  2. Modern Science and Patterns of Belief: Sociology
  3. The Rise of Science and the Decline of Religion: History
  4. Origins of the Conflict Thesis

For those interested in the history of science and religion, I strongly recommend giving the lecture and Q&A a listen.

Middle-Class Salary: You’re Better Off Than You Think

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The above comes from the University of Chicago’s IGM Forum, featuring numerous economists of diverse ideological views. Since our political discussions revolving around stagnant wages and upward mobility largely focus on income only, the absolute nature of wealth is often ignored. This is what a recent article in The Washington Post points out:

But even if we have less money, you know what we do have that we didn’t 15 years ago? Smartphones and social networks, Netflix and HD TVs, apps and whatever other technology you prefer to waste time on. Now, it’s true, you can’t eat an iPad, but it’s also true that these things make our lives better in ways that are hard to measure. Economists try to, but because it’s so uncertain, they’re pretty conservative with their estimates. Specifically, they try to adjust for the quality of a good when they calculate how much its price has changed. If you paid $400 for an HD TV today, for example, and $400 for a regular TV 10 years ago, did you really pay the same price? Technically, yes. But the fact remains that you got something better for the same amount of money than you would have before. And that’s even trickier when you’re talking about things that didn’t even exist back then, like smartphones, that are really every electronic device from the 1990s rolled into one pocket-sized piece. Or as economist Austan Goolsbee puts it, “so much of day is spent doing things that didn’t exist [in 1980] that it’s hard to believe the numbers fully account for new products.”

Then, the clincher:

Try this thought experiment. Adjusted for inflation, would you rather make $50,000 in today’s world or $100,000 in 1980’s? In other words, is an extra $50,000 enough to get you to give up the internet and TV and computer that you have now? The answer isn’t obvious. And if $100,000 isn’t enough, what would be? $200,000? More? This might be the best way to get a sense of how much better technology has made our lives—not to mention the fact that people are living longer—the past 35 years, but the problem is it’s particular to you and your tastes. It’s not easy to generalize.

I’ll stay right where I’m at, thank you.

On the Supreme Court Ruling

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Carlos McKnight of Washington waves a flag in support of same-sex marriage outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, June 26. <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-ruling/index.html">The Supreme Court ruled 5-4</a> Friday that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, handing gay rights advocates their biggest victory yet. See photos from states that approved same-sex marriage before the nationwide ruling:

The New York Times has an interactive article titled “How We Changed Our Thinking on Gay Marriage.” It features interviews with a Republican Congresswoman, a Baptist pastor, and even the president of the Institute for American Values and former Proposition 8 witness. Given the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday on same-sex marriage nationwide, I thought I’d post a piece from a couple years back that helped me formulate my own outlook on gay marriage. The essay is by William & Mary law professor Nate Oman.[ref]I’ve cited it before.[/ref] When it boils down to it, I ultimately share his view: “I am neither entirely joyful about gay marriage nor entirely pessimistic. Rather, I am worried. I think that gay marriage has the potential to be a positive social phenomena, as well as having the potential to be destructive. I don’t purport to know what its ultimate effects will be, and I suspect that they will be mixed.”

Nate Oman

Instead of virtually reposting Nate’s whole paper (which you really should take the time to read) by means of huge quotes, I’ve highlighted a few main points that really stand out to me:

  • Function vs. Equality: As much as I love the rhetoric of liberty and equality, such rhetoric may miss the point. “I do not think that marriage is primarily about equality,” writes Oman. “I do not think that it is a special status conferred on heterosexuals as a reward for being heterosexual, one from which homosexuals are excluded in order to convey a message of social inferiority. Rather, I think that is an institution that does certain things, serves certain functions.” Oman’s approach to the institution by means of processes and functions instead of abstract principles resonates with me.[ref]Reminds me of Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions.[/ref] Marriage’s functions as identified by Oman include
    • Bonding couples together via legal commitment and social pressures/norms, resulting, on average, in more productive and resilient people.
    • Legitimating sexual activity and cutting down on the emotional, physical, and social risks of illicit sex.
    • Providing a context for child rearing and shielding their vulnerability.
  • Ideals vs. Reality: My unease over same-sex marriage was largely due to my religious upbringing and later research on family structure. I think the social science (including economics) is very supportive of the notion that family structure matters for a child’s economic, emotional, and educational well-being, with biological parents in a low-conflict marriage being the ideal.[ref]There is far too much literature to cite in a blog post, but here are a few recent books on the subject of marriage and children: Mitch Pearlstein’s From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Consequences of Family Fragmentation, Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, Isabel Sawhill’s Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, and the Columbia University-published Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives.[/ref] Yet, this same research suggests that stable, low-conflict same-sex marriages may be a healthy alternative to high-conflict heterosexual marriages, divorce, cohabitation, and single parent households. Even Mark Regnerus’ controversial research on child outcomes of same-sex parenting points to instability as the main culprit behind the negative results he found.[ref]However, he also argues that instability is an endemic characteristic of same-sex relationships according to the data.[/ref] If marriage became more of a norm and ideal in the gay community, it’s possible that this instability would decrease. Which leads to the next point.
  • Traditional Values vs. Hedonism: “Gay marriage,” Nate writes, “is potentially most powerful as a conservative retrenchment, an effort to impose a more traditional model on the unruly riot of family structures that already dominate the lives of many children.” Furthermore, he thinks “that one of the greatest potential benefits of gay marriage is that it makes possible gay chastity.” Swedish economist Andreas Bergh once described Sweden has heading in a more market-oriented direction, while the U.S. tends to move in a more socialist direction. I think of the two communities in similar ways. Broadly speaking, it seems that heterosexual relationships are becoming increasingly fragile and fragmented, while homosexual relationships are moving in a more stable, domestic direction.

Nate concludes,

To homosexuals who are now going to get married, I say congratulations. I hope that you have happy and fulfilling lives.[ref]I couldn’t help, but get a little emotional when I read about the first same-sex marriage in Dallas County: after 54 years together, Jack Evans (85) and George Harris (82) were married.[/ref] I hope that your marriages are strong, and I hope that they become an example that will discipline and orient the lives of others. To the advocates of gay marriage, I hope that you will stop talking so much about freedom and equality and will start talking about marriage, about how it should organize people’s sexual lives and give structure to their families. I hope that your new found enthusiasm for marriage translates into the revival of some of the informal social pressures and expectations that signal to everyone that marriage is not simply a choice or a right but a preferred way of life…I don’t expect the language of liberty and equality around gay marriage to recede from the public stage but having lost the political battle on gay marriage, social conservatives should embrace the rhetorical and social possibilities it provides for talking about the good of marriage as opposed to its alternatives. A focus on gay marriages as a superior structures for gay families rather than on gay marriage as a marker of social equality strikes me as the best road going forward. In the end, I don’t know what will happen. I think that marriage will be good for gay families. I am less sanguine about the effects of the gay marriage debate on our shared public understanding of marriage. I fear it has reinforced ideas that are destructive to marriage at the margins. The good news is that I may be wrong, which would make me happy.

Yep.

New Project: The Essential Hayek

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The Canada-based Fraser Institute has a new project titled The Essential Hayek. As the website explains,

Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek (1899 – 1992) is one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and his work still resonates with economists and scholars around the world today. Two decades after Hayek’s death, his ideas are increasingly relevant in an era where governments grow ever larger and more interventionist. Essential Hayek is a project of the Fraser Institute, comprised of a book, this website, and several videos, that aim to explain Hayek’s ideas in common, every-day language. It is a resource for all who value liberty.

A book of the same name can be downloaded for free. It summarizes Hayek’s key insights and is handy for both novices and those already familiar with his work. The website also features a number of useful videos on various Hayekian points, such as the importance of price in relaying dispersed information.

Check it out.

 

The Black Church as an American Symbol

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Historian Benjamin Park has an excellent post on the Charleston shooting and its connection to the history of white violence against black churches. After relaying a brief history of the suppressed slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, the convictions and executions that followed, and the building of the Citadel “as a way to protect whites from the type of racial threats the AME Church posed,” Park writes,

Black churches became a central recruitment point for soldiers and a prominent pedestal for emancipation messages during the Civil War, yet they were also frequently targeted by Confederate forces. They were primary locations for mobilization during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr. even used the Emanuel Church in Charleston for meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—but also venues for violent backlash, as seen with the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Sadly, these attacks continue to appear in staggering numbers today. If one were to find a central crossing point for racial conflict in America, it would be hard not to choose a church.

It is an incredible essay. Check it out.

Six Policies to Improve Social Mobility

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A recent event panel at the Brookings Institution looked at a number of possible policy solutions to improve social mobility for children across the nation. Take notice that most deal with on-the-ground local issues:

  1. Target housing vouchers more effectively.
  2. Build public housing in low-poverty areas, instead of high-poverty areas.
  3. Reform exclusionary zoning laws.
  4. Better enforcement of fair housing rules by HUD.
  5. Invest in infrastructure.
  6. Promote school choice.

Check out the link to see the discussion.

Is There a Difference Between Red State/Blue State Families?

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The outcomes of “red states” and “blue states” are often used to demonstrate the superiority/inferiority of whichever political ideology. But the following report on state-by-state family structures in The New York Times demonstrates the importance of proper analysis:

In the blue-state model, Americans get more education and earn higher income — and more educated, higher-earning people tend to marry and stay married. In Minnesota, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least 51 percent of teenagers are being raised by both biological parents, among the highest rates in the nation. (That figure excludes families in which the two parents are together without being married; such arrangements are still rare — and less likely to last than marriages.)

The lowest rates of two-parent families tend to be in states that don’t fit either model: red states with the lowest levels of education or blue states with only average levels of education.

The entire article is worth reading and is full of useful information and links on family structure and child outcomes. Check it out.