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.

Did Welfare Reform Increase Upward Mobility?

by

“One possible force for greater upward mobility is the welfare reforms of the 1990s,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Scott Winship in Forbes. “Hear me out, because I think the case is stronger than is generally admitted. We probably won’t know the answer for a few more years, because the oldest children born in the 1990s are only 25 years old today, and the youngest are barely 15 years old.” Nonetheless, what’s his case?

To begin with, liberals tend to believe that parental income per se is important for upward mobility. If true, welfare reform was far more effective than the War on Poverty at expanding opportunity. Child poverty, according to a carefully constructed measure developed by a Columbia University research team, was 26 percent in the peak year of 1969 and 27 percent in 1990 (also a peak). It continued rising until 1993, the year after a presidential campaign in which the winner routinely pledged to “end welfare as we know it” and the year that the Earned Income Tax Credit was substantially expanded by the new president. Child poverty then fell from 28 percent to 17 percent by 2006. It rose during the Great Recession, but not by much; 19 percent of children were poor in 2012.

Economic growth deserves some of the credit for the decline in child poverty; even without taking federal taxes and transfers into account, poverty would have fallen between 1993 and 2000. However, economic growth might not have actually lowered child poverty much if not for the work incentives built into welfare reform. The 1990s expansion was the first one since 1960 in which poverty among single-mother families responded as much to falling unemployment as it did among married-parent families, and poverty fell by more among single-mother families than their married-parent counterparts from 1996 to 2000. The strong economy of the late 1990s was fortuitous, but child poverty declined slightly even after 2000, rising only very modestly, if at all, during the two recessions since then.

…Through 1990, taxes and transfers had essentially no impact on the poverty rate they estimated. To be sure, the safety net moved some families up from deep poverty to less-intense hardship. But the Columbia poverty levels are pretty much the same from 1967 to 1990 whether or not the safety net is taken into account. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, taxes and transfers began to reduce child poverty rates below the levels they would otherwise have attained. The safety net was only effective at reducing poverty once the national mood was strongly in favor of fundamental reform and once those reforms began.

But was there an even bigger reason for the decrease in poverty? According to Winship, the answer (suggested by the evidence) has to do with intact families and a decrease in out-of-wedlock births. Check it out.

A Catholic Daredevil

by

Having just finished the first season today, I was pleased to find this insightful piece at Slate on Netflix’s new series Marvel’s Daredevil. The article explains, “To really understand Daredevil—both the comic book and the new show—you need to understand his Catholicism.” And they are right. The show “tries to reconcile the lawyer who defends the law with the Daredevil who breaks it. Murdock’s brutal justice is more than his way of taking personal responsibility for the sins of others; it’s his way of atoning for his own. Murdock’s real superpower, and also his biggest foe, is his Catholicism.” The article concludes, “Daredevil is far from the perfect superhero. He makes mistakes. He doesn’t have “an iron suit or a magic hammer.” And his relentless sacrifice night after night, his ability to gain strength from his weaknesses, and his guilt over the terrible things he does to bring justice to Hell’s Kitchen may not make him the perfect Catholic either, but they do make his faith an ever greater superpower than his heightened senses.” While religious convictions or mere leanings tend to show up in passing in film[ref]For example, think of the ridiculous scene where Clark Kent randomly sees a priest following Zod’s threat in Man of Steel.[/ref] (unless it is portrayed negatively), their is a healthy dose of confession, the priest, and empty, post-Mass churches throughout the first season. There are frank questions about morality and spirituality between Murdock and the priest. And while it may not be earth-shattering, I sense a kind of metaphysical longing and pondering on Murdock’s part throughout the series. The show’s title sequence features a red liquid (wax or even blood?) that creates numerous images, which are linked to the three elements that shape Daredevil: (1) blind justice via the law, (2) his upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen, and (3) his Catholicism.

For me, the appearance of the cross and angel stir my own metaphysical ponderings.

Less Economic Freedom = More Income Inequality

by

At least that’s what Reason‘s science writer Ronald Bailey has concluded based on various studies. “For example,” Bailey writes,

according to a study comparing outcomes in all U.S. states in the January 2014 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy by Illinois State University economist Oguzhan Dincer and his colleagues finds that reducing economic freedom actually tends to increase inequality. “On average, as the size and scope of government increases, so does income inequality,” Dincer tells Reason.

The authors go on to establish “Granger causality.” Simplistically stated, this means they show a causal feedback loop, in which economic intervention produces economic inequality, which in turn leads to more economic intervention. Politicians often react to rising inequality with policies that, on average, end up making inequality worse—say, by increasing the minimum wage. (That is not to say that some policies, such as raising the top marginal tax rate, could decrease inequality. But taken as a whole, the effect moves in the other direction.)

Kuznets Freedom Income Curve…A 2013 study in The Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy by economists at Ohio University and Florida State University bolsters Dincer’s findings. That study, also using Fraser state economic freedom index data, identified a Kuznets curve relationship between increasing economic freedom and trends in income inequality.Their analysis “suggests that beginning from a low level of economic freedom, increases initially generate more inequality as the upper part of the income distribution benefits relatively more than the lower part; however, as enhancements of economic freedom continue, this reverses and the lower part of the distribution experiences larger relative income gains.”

In their study, Dincer and his colleagues report that their results “support previous studies which find a positive relationship between economic freedom and per capita income.” Last November, a National Bureau of Economic Research study by the Mississippi State University economist Travis Wiseman found, all things being equal, that a one-point increase on the Fraser Economic Freedom of North America index is associated with about an $8,156 increase in real average market incomes.

Check out the whole article and the studies in full.

Defending Saturday: An Easter Message

by

In a recent article in Christianity Today, pastor and professor A.J. Swoboda writes the following:

This is how it looked on Saturday.
This is how it looked on Saturday.

Christians defend certain days of the Holy Weekend. For instance, we’ll defend the idea that on Friday Jesus actually died on a cross to save the world from its sin. Then we’ll turn around and defend Easter Sunday as the day that Jesus actually rose from the grave, defeating the powers of evil running loose in the world.

But nobody defends Saturday. Nobody writes apologetics defending the belief that Jesus actually lay dead for one long, endless day two thousand years ago. What’s the defense for that? If you’ve got the power to rise from the grave, why would you wait one whole long day to do it? Why not just rise from the grave, like, just a little later Friday night?

Then, he offers this startling reminder:

So much of Christian faith is Saturday faith. I call it “awkward Saturday”: that holy day to sit, wait, hope—unsure of what’s to come tomorrow. Saturday is the day that Jesus, and all understanding, lay dead…So much of faith is living in the awkward Saturday, living in the dark mesh of twilight between the moments of hopelessness and utter blinding hope. At times, we are all like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus who were really close to Jesus but didn’t always know it. In Luke 24, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem, where they’d just seen their Lord and Master die on the cross. Leaving, dejected, upset, hopeless, and broken, to find the next stage in their lives and careers. Unbeknownst to them, Jesus had been resurrected and was actually walking alongside them on their way to Emmaus. The hope of Sunday hadn’t dawned on them yet. The Gospels tell us that, on their way to Emmaus, the disciples were “downcast.”

That experience is the kind of experience Saturday is all about.

This profound realization goes hand-in-hand with The Crucible of Doubt by Terryl and Fiona Givens. In our quest for certainty,[ref]Certainty and eternal learning has an especially paradoxical relationship within Mormonism.[/ref] we often stigmatize doubts, fear, and/or a lack of understanding. And sometimes all you can do in response is show up, like Joseph of Arimathea did:

According to John—after the crowds fled and the slowly muffled screams of the executed ceased—Joseph made the sorrowful journey to receive Jesus’ body as Friday drew to a close. Slowly, carefully, Joseph lowered the cross, pulled the large Roman nails from Jesus’ fragile hands and feet, and carried him in his arms.

Allow your imagination to paint the devastation of pulling those nails and along with them uprooting your greatest dreams and hopes…Years earlier, most likely, Joseph had left behind his life of predictability and safety to follow an unknown Savior, only to have his vision crushed the night before. Now Joseph held his dead dream in his arms. He hadn’t signed up for this. This wasn’t in the fine print. What a failure. What a waste.

But Joseph still showed up.

Joseph asked for Jesus’ body. It wasn’t forced upon him. He experienced the burden of it by his own choice…Who would ask for the heaviness of Christ?

…A Christ-follower does.

The feelings of pain and hopelessness that often come with the burdens of mortal life are not signs of weakness or lack of faith. They are the feelings of Christ’s disciples the day before his glorious return.

In anticipation of this Easter Sunday, perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on awkward Saturday.

Marriage & Family in the Work of Robert Putnam

by

Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has had an excellent article in The Washington Post a few days ago largely drawing on the work of Harvard’s Robert Putnam. Drawing from Putnam’s latest book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Wilcox writes,

One of the tragic tales told by Harvard scholar Robert Putnam…is that America’s churches have grown weakest in some of the communities that need them most: poor and working-class communities across the country. The way he puts it, our nation’s churches, synagogues and mosques give children a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose — in a word, hope — that allows them to steer clear of trouble, from drugs to delinquency, and toward a bright and better future, warmer family relationships and significantly higher odds of attending college…The picture of religion painted by Putnam, a political scientist and the foremost scholar of American civic life, is part of a broader canvass in his book showing that kid-friendly institutions — not just churches, but also strong families and strong schools — are withering, but almost entirely in less-affluent communities. 

While Putnam attributes some of this to the decline “in employment for less-educated men, divergent incomes for college-educated and less-educated men, and a “breathtaking increase in inequality”” in the 1970s, Wilcox notes that his research finds the “dramatic declines in religious attendance began in the 1960s, well before the economic factors stressed by Putnam kicked in a decade later.” “The timing of religious declines,” explains Wilcox, “paralleled and reinforced by the retreat from marriage that also began in the 1960s, leaving more and more kids in single-parent homes — suggests that America’s religious and familial capital was suffering well before the economic shocks of the 1970s.”

Wilcox continues to draw on Putnam’s work while adding fresh insights. The whole thing is worth reading. Check it out.

“You’re a Kite Dancing in a Hurricane, Mr. Bond”: SPECTRE Teaser Trailer

by

When the James Bond film Skyfall was coming out, I did a series of posts on the music of James Bond. That’s how obsessed I am with these films. I can’t express how excited I am that Sam Mendes (director of Skyfall) will be returning for the latest flick SPECTRE, especially given how incredible his first Bond film was.  The cast is equally impressive, including Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained), Monica Bellucci (Irreversible, Malena, The Matrix Reloaded), Andrew Scott (BBC’s Sherlock), and Dave Bautistia (Guardians of the Galaxy). The return of SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) is most welcome. It is a throwback to six of the first seven films. The oft-hidden, cat-stroking leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld (parodied brilliantly by Mike Myers in the Austin Powers films) seems to be making an appearance (perhaps in spirit if not in name) in the form of Waltz’s character (notice how his face is shadowed in the trailer below). And our first glimpse of it all was just released.

So without further ado, I give you the SPECTRE trailer.

Ed Sheeran’s “Bloodstream” feat. Ray Liotta

by

I don’t typically do music videos. I’m not even an Ed Sheeran fan. But his new video for “Bloodstream” features some great acting by a 60-year-old Ray Liotta. The performance is absolutely heartwrenching. Check it out below.

College Safe Spaces: Therapeutic or Intellectually Stifling?

by

The New York Times has a brand new article on “safe spaces” in college. Judith Shulevitz defines these spaces as “an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material…In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity.” While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, “the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.” And this brings us to the heart of the matter:

…while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?

Is this “safe” mentality on college campuses a good idea? Should students, say, be banned from participation due to controversial views? Check out the article and give it some thought.

Wealth’s Impact on Child Outcomes: Evidence from Sweden

by

Drawing on a large sample from Sweden, a new working paper suggests that wealth may not have much impact on child outcomes. From the abstract:

In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs…In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children’s outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.

These findings should give us pause. Perhaps we as citizens and policy makers should be looking at other factors that truly impact the long-term well-being of children.

2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference: “Labour…Is Their Religion”

by

I recently presented at the 2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference at the University of Virginia. As the website explains, “The Faith and Knowledge Conference was established in 2007 to bring together LDS graduate students in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the interactions between religious faith and scholarship. During the past four conferences, students have shared their experiences in the church and the academy and the new ideas that have emerged as a result. Papers and conversations provided thought-provoking historical, exegetical, and theoretical insights and compelling models of how to reconcile one’s discipleship with scholarly discipline.” The conference is typically for those in religious studies and “related disciplines (e.g., women’s studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, etc.),” so I was grateful to be a part of it as the lone MBA student. My presentation was titled “‘Labour…Is Their Religion’: Toward a Mormon Theology of Work.” The abstract is below:

Despite the Platonic ideal, ordinary people do not spend the majority of their time in the act of deep contemplation. Instead, they are performing the seemingly menial tasks of daily life. This largely consists of one’s form of employment. Finding meaning in the lone and dreary world of day-to-day work has been a point of increasing interest among management experts and organizational theorists. Their findings yield fruitful insights, especially given that one of Mormonism’s earliest forms of consecration was a business organization known as the United Firm. The “inspired fictionalization” of the United Firm revelations is an early example of Joseph Smith’s cosmological monism, transforming a business entity into the ancient “order of Enoch.” This sacralization of the mundane was further elaborated by Brigham Young and recognized by non-Mormons as an oddity of the Utahns. The metaphysical overlap of the temporal and spiritual realms can influence the way modern Mormons conduct their business, inspire “Zion-building” within organizations, and pave the way for a Mormon theology of work and eternal progression.

Check it out.