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.

New Manhattan Institute Report on Inequality

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Inequality expert Scott Winship
Inequality expert Scott Winship

Scott Winship at the Manhattan Institute has a new study[ref]A summary can be found here.[/ref] out on inequality and prosperity. His key findings are:

1. Across the developed world, countries with more inequality tend to have, if anything, higher living standards. The exception is that countries with higher income concentration tend to have poorer low-income populations.

2.  However, when changes in income concentration and living standards are considered across countries—a more rigorous approach to assessing causality—larger increases in inequality correspond with sharper rises in living standards for the middle class and the poor alike.

3.  In developed nations, greater inequality tends to accompany stronger economic growth. This stronger growth may explain how it is that when the top gets a bigger share of the economic pie, the amount of pie received by  the middle class and the poor is nevertheless greater than it otherwise would have been. Greater inequality can increase the size of the pie.

4. Below the top 1 percent of households—and prior to government redistribution—developed nations display levels of inequality squarely in the middle ranks of nations globally. American income inequality below the top 1 percent is of the same magnitude as that of our rich-country peers in continental Europe and the Anglosphere.

5. In the English-speaking world, income concentration at the top is higher than in most of continental Europe; in the U.S., income concentration is higher than in the rest of the Anglosphere.

6. Yet—with the exception of small countries that are oil-rich, international financial centers, or vacation destinations for the affluent—America’s middle class enjoys living standards as high as, or higher than, any other nation.

7.  America’s poor have higher living standards than their counterparts across much of Europe and the Anglosphere, while faring worse than poor residents of Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Canada.

 

Check it out.

Drive and Prudence

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The Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution released a new report titled The Character Factor: Measures and Impact of Drive and Prudence. Using the Behavior Problems Index (BPI) hyperactivity scale in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the researchers found that character traits such as drive[ref]Defined as “the ability to apply oneself to a task and stick with it” (pg. 6).[/ref] and prudence[ref]Defined as “the ability to defer gratification and look to the future” (pg. 6).[/ref] are related to educational attainment in similar fashion to that of cognitive skills. Or, as the graph below demonstrates, character matters as much as book smarts.

 

Check out the entire report and see why economic historian Deirdre McCloskey praises prudence as a virtue:

…Prudence is a virtue. We have been inclined for some centuries now in the West to relegate prudence to an amoral world of “mere” self-interest. This has been a catastrophe for our dear economics. Only a disposition to take care of others is construed as “virtue,” and then for its intentions rather than for its practical effect. Having good intentions in one’s heart is said to be virtuous, even if the intentions when carried out (such as high-rise public housing along the Dan Ryan Expressway or the war on drugs brought onto the streets of Watts and East LA) do not quite deliver as intended. And surely, as we in European culture have been saying for a long while, knowing how to take care of oneself is hardly a virtue?

Yes, it is. And so is the correlated carefulness in “helping” others: the Love or Justice moving us to help others is a vice, not a virtue, when unalloyed with Prudence. Knowing that one must put out a candle before leaving the house is a good thing, even if you didn’t mean to burn the place down, even if your intentions were pure, even if it was your own house to dispose of.

Imagine a community filled with imprudent people, Mary Tudors in bulk, and you’ll see the virtuousness of prudence. Such a community is not difficult to imagine-a community of small children would fit the bill, as in The Lord of the Flies…We labor to teach our children and adolescents and our dogs and, yes, ourselves the practical wisdom that keeps them and us from injuring or impoverishing themselves and others and ourselves. An imprudent person, someone who does not know the value of money and how to keep accounts, for example, is a menace to his friends and family, and to his fuller self. He may be chivalrous in some sense, courageous and temperate and just, even great-souled, as Aristotle wished, or loving, as did St. Paul, yet a fool, and not virtuous as a whole, tragically-or comically-flawed, as most of us are, short of King Arthur or Cardinal Pole. Thus for example Don Quixote.

Drug War’s Impact on Black America

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As the arrest data above shows (provided by Jonathan Rothwell at the Brookings Institution), arrests of blacks for violent and property crimes have dropped since 1980. However, arrests for drug related crimes have spiked dramatically. Yet,

whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.

Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).

As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students.

Incarcerations wreak havoc on family stability, employment prospects, and future income. While there are other important factors that negatively impact black social mobility, an unnecessary War on Drugs is one we can easily address.

The Racist History of Disease, Africa, and Immigrants

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I tend to react to the Ebola scare with the following:

A recent article from The Washington Post provides further reasons to react in such a way:

The long history of associating immigrants and disease in America and the problematic impact that has on attitudes toward immigrants should make us sensitive to the impact of “othering” African immigrants to the United States in the midst of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Scare-mongering about infinitesimally small risks in one context serves no purpose to the greater good of trying to curb disease transmission and relieve people’s suffering in another context.

The article is full of links to various studies on colonial history, political history of immigration, Ebola breakouts, etc.

An excellent read. Check it out.

Economic Freedom of the World Report 2014

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The Economic Freedom of the World: 2014 Annual Report has been published by the Fraser Institute. I blogged about the 2013 report last September and Nathaniel and I made use of its data in our SquareTwo article earlier this year. The following can be considered an update of what I deem to be some of the most important graphs in the whole report (descriptions are at the bottom of the graphs):

 

Economic Growth

 

 Per Capita Income

Income of Poorest 10%

Life Expectancy at Birth

 

TED: Economist on the Global Impact of Remittances

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Economist Dilip Ratha gave a fascinating TED talk this month on the global impact of money sent by migrants to their native countries. It is hard to imagine how this subject gets overlooked when Ratha points out that the amount of money sent home by migrants in 2013 was three times that of development aid. Or that remittances make up 42% of Tajikistan’s GDP. Or that monthly remittances to Somalia exceed the average per capita income of $250 per year. What especially struck me was the following line by Ratha in his discussion of Somalia:

“Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations.”

Sometimes the most conventional method of helping the poor isn’t the most effective.

The Atlantic on “The Illusion of the Natural”

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“What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.”

So says an article in The Atlantic titled “The Illusion of ‘Natural’.” It begins with the following:

It is difficult to read any historical account of smallpox without encountering the word filth. In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor…Filth theory was eventually replaced by germ theory, a superior understanding of the nature of contagion, but filth theory was not entirely wrong or useless. Raw sewage running in the streets can certainly spread diseases, although smallpox is not one of them, and the sanitation reforms inspired by filth theory dramatically reduced the incidence of cholera, typhus, and plague.

The author draws a parallel between the 19th-century fear of filth with today’s fear of toxins:

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified—like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers—but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this means a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century. A passion for bodily purity drove the eugenics movement that led to the sterilization of women who were blind, black, or poor. Concerns for bodily purity were behind miscegenation laws that persisted for more than a century after the abolition of slavery, and behind sodomy laws that were only recently declared unconstitutional. Quite a bit of human solidarity has been sacrificed in pursuit of preserving some kind of imagined purity.

This kind of thinking pervades anti-vaccine movements and alternative medicine.[ref]Also food puritans and some environmentalists.[/ref] I’m always taken back by the view of technology or medicine as somehow “unclean” and the nostalgic pining for the “natural” world. Because when people were left with all things “natural” in the past, their lives were cut short:

Cronyism in Hong Kong

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With the Hong Kong protests still raging–protests that were possibly inspired by the Occupy movement in the U.S.–I was reminded of the “crony-capitalism index” put out by The Economist earier this year. Check out who tops the chart:

Now, the methodology of the index is admittedly crude (even recognized by The Economist itself), especially since it concentrates on rich individuals and “rent-heavy” industries. But worth thinking about.

“Son, Men Don’t Get Raped”

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The documentary The Invisible War made waves a couple years ago by tackling the subject of sexual assault within the U.S. military, largely focusing on female victims. A recent issue of GQ has a disturbing and heartbreaking article focused solely on male victims:

Sexual assault is alarmingly common in the U.S. military, and more than half of the victims are men. According to the Pentagon, thirty-eight military men are sexually assaulted every single day. These are the stories you never hear–because the culprits almost always go free, the survivors rarely speak, and no one in the military or Congress has done enough to stop it.

…The moment a man enlists in the United States armed forces, his chances of being sexually assaulted increase by a factor of ten. Women, of course, are much more likely to be victims of military sexual trauma (MST), but far fewer of them enlist. In fact, more military men are assaulted than women—nearly 14,000 in 2012 alone. Prior to the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2011, male-on-male-rape victims could actually be discharged for having engaged in homosexual conduct. That’s no longer the case—but the numbers show that men are still afraid to report being sexually assaulted.

Military culture is built upon a tenuous balance of aggression and obedience. The potential for sexual violence exists whenever there is too much of either. New recruits, stripped of their free will, cannot question authority. A certain kind of officer demands sex from underlings in the same way he demands they pick up his laundry. A certain kind of recruit rapes his peer in a sick mimicry of the power structure: I own you totally.“One of the myths is that the perpetrators identify as gay, which is by and large not the case,” says James Asbrand, a psychologist with the Salt Lake City VA’s PTSD clinical team. “It’s not about the sex. It’s about power and control.”[ref]I think this is an excellent companion piece to Hanna Rosin’s Slate piece on male rape earlier this year.[/ref]

The title of the article captures this brutal reality: “Son, Men Don’t Get Raped.”

World Competitiveness Rankings 2014

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The IMD World Competitiveness Center released their 2014 rankings earlier this year. The top ten countries are:

  1. USA
  2. Switzerland
  3. Singapore
  4. Hong Kong
  5. Sweden
  6. Germany
  7. Canada
  8. UAE
  9. Denmark
  10. Norway

These rankings are based on four main factors (which are further divided):

  • Economic Performance
  • Government Efficiency
  • Business Efficiency
  • Infrastructure

 

Worth checking out (if you’re into that kind of thing).