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.

Reason.com: Video Game Nation

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The libertarian website Reason.com has a special collection of articles and videos on video games coinciding with the June 2014 issue of their magazine. I’ve never been a huge gamer, mainly because I wasn’t allowed to have a video game system growing up. But I’ve always loved them when I had the chance to play. I especially became interested in their impact on people after reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. I even recently bought Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit. I don’t see them as the “waste of time” that I was often told they were.

Reason‘s collection looks at the interaction of gaming and society from various angles. Check it out.

BYU: Bastion of Liberalism

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Damon Linker has an interesting article in The Week relaying his teaching experience at Brigham Young University:

The combination of crusading moral indignation and hypersensitive self-protectiveness has the potential to stamp out genuine liberalism at some schools, transforming them into institutions devoted to insulating students from provocation and free thinking rather than to exposing them to it.

…In my experience, liberalism in the classical sense often thrives where many scholars and academics would least expect to find it — in institutions of higher learning that are unlikely to get swept up in the illiberal currents currently washing over so many of the nation’s campuses. I’m talking about schools with deep, serious religious commitments.

I happened to spend two years in the late 1990s teaching at one of these schools — Brigham Young University, wholly owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and it was a clarifying experience.

Check out the full article for his admittedly surprising (even to this active Mormon) experience.

Americans Don’t Know Global Poverty Has Declined

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Americans are missing out on one of the greatest stories in the history of mankind:

According to a recent Barna Group survey…more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has  [decreased by more than half in the past 30 years]. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.

Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.

Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it’s possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.

It turns out that practicing Christians are more likely to believe it’s possible to end extreme global poverty in the next 25 years: “Practicing Christians under 40 are the most optimistic at nearly half (48%), with practicing Christians over 40 slightly higher than the general population (37%) compared to 32% of all adults).” But people are hesitant to give more for reasons ranging from belief in the inevitability of poverty’s existence to distrust in corrupt foreign governments. [ref]Unfortunately, the Barna Group doesn’t even mention the impact of liberalized markets and globalization on extreme poverty. This is exactly what Nathaniel and I cover in our SquareTwo article.[/ref]

Check out the full article.

The Inequality Illusion?

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Economists Wojciech Kopczuk and Allison Schrager have a Foreign Affairs article with the eye-catching title “The Inequality Illusion.” The two argue that “imposing a tax on wealth is a terrible way to promote equality. It actually benefits the super wealthy the most.” They continue:

What is not widely understood is that the growth in income inequality [in the U.S.] has been driven almost entirely by earned income, that is, what people are paid for their work rather than what they earn on their investments. 

Wealth inequality refers to the stock of people’s assets. It represents the accumulation of saved income and returns on investments over the years. Some wealth inequality is inevitable, even desirable, because wealth represents a lifetime of saving and not just luck or opportunity. Extreme income inequality can beget extreme wealth inequality because people with a lot of income, if they save, can amass large fortunes and pass them on to their children. But over time, such wealth can also dissipate as people leave it to multiple children, get married and divorced, develop expensive lifestyles, contribute to charities, or make poor investment decisions. Whereas income inequality has clearly worsened, the recent evidence about wealth inequality is much less convincing.

After reviewing a number of sources, they declare, “Taken together, then, the economic evidence points to increased earnings inequality but to a much more benign picture of changes in wealth inequality. Increasing inequality has been driven by income earners not necessarily by the entrenched wealth holders.”

Given the recent controversy over errors in Thomas Piketty’s data (errors that may or may not undermine his argument),[ref]The FT analysis is likely the most famous (update: Financial Times has a follow-up post), but others have found some major errors as well. For example, former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor Diana Furchtgott-Roth has pointed out Piketty’s errors in the history of the U.S. minimum wage. Economist Randall Holcombe has written on the “fundamental problems with the way [Piketty] depicts capital.” Inequality expert Scott Winship has two articles in Forbes that are also quite critical of Piketty. Economist Robert Murphy disputes Piketty’s tax history. In response to a recent Spectator article contrasting Deirdre McCloskey and Piketty, GMU economist Don Boudreaux writes, “[I]ndispensable to our modern prosperity is not only the innovative creation of capital but also the continual destruction of capital that such successful innovation entails…What is destroyed is not only some jobs (e.g., t.v. repairman) and the value of some consumer goods (e.g., crutches for polio victims) and services (e.g., postal delivery), but also the value of capital. Capitalism’s nature is not, contrary to Piketty’s claim, to forever protect and augment existing capital.  Central to capitalism’s nature is what McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation.”  And this innovation inevitably destroys the value of older, less-productive capital that is in competition with with it – in competition with the new capital, the new goods, the new production and consumption processes, and the new knowledge that innovative entrepreneurs create.” Update: A brand new paper out of Yale disputes Piketty’s “second law of capitalism.”[/ref] the above article is quite timely.

Check it out.

The Slow Hunch: Gratitude and Grace at Work

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Gratitude and grace are subjects I’ve written on before, but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly connected it with work. My latest post at The Slow Hunch does just this. It was disheartening to learn (based on a survey by the John Templeton Foundation) that work is the place at which people are least likely to express or feel gratitude. But business organizations are human institutions and thus have the potential to be islands of human meaning and progress. There is plenty to be grateful for in one’s employment. Expressing it not only benefits individuals, but the organization as a whole.

Check out the post to see how.

Marriage, Parenthood, and Public Policy

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Ron Haskins of the Brooking Institution has an excellent piece in the Spring 2014 issue of National Affairs. He begins by reviewing the current state of marriage and the rising rate of single parenthood in the United States. Furthermore, he looks at the impact single parenthood has on children, including the increased risk of poverty.

He then looks at the four major policies used to combat this social problem:

  • Reducing non-marital births
  • Boosting marriage
  • Helping young men become more marriageable
  • Helping single mothers improve their and their children’s lives

Haskins provides a balanced overview of the empirical outcomes of these policies, both successes and failures. He concludes,

If we want to address the challenges of income inequality and immobility, we must address one of their main causes — non-marital births and single parenting. Maybe stable, married-couple families will never again be the dominant norm, but if so the children who are raised by such traditional families will continue to have yet another advantage over their peers who have minimal contact with their fathers, live in chaotic households, and are exposed to instability at home as their mothers change partners.

Our society and culture will no doubt continue to change, but our children will continue to pay the price for adult decisions about family composition. Public policies cannot ultimately solve this problem, but those that prove themselves capable of ameliorating some of the damage are surely worth pursuing.

Worth the read.

More Hugs in China

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Hugs are on the rise in China. The physically reserved Chinese culture is apparently changing “due to exposure to the West, especially huggy North America,” reports The New York Times. Sixty schools in the Liuhe District in Nanjing now have emotional intelligence classes. “The third graders’ homework: Hug your parents tonight.” It turns out that “other Asian nations — even formal Japan — may also be involved, according to a recent article in China Daily headlined ‘‘Students Use Hugs to Ease Tensions.” It described ‘‘hugging activities’’ between a group of Japanese studying in Beijing and Chinese passers-by, in which the students hugged about 200 Chinese in an effort to warm feelings between people of the two nations sparring over territory in the East China Sea.”

An interesting shift in culture. Check it out.

Havana: The Last Communist City

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Journalist Michael Totten has a disturbing article in the Spring edition of City Journal on the effects of communism in Cuba’s Havana. Using the recent film Elysium to paint a picture of life in Havana, Totten documents how he lied to get into the country and what he witnesses. “Outside its small tourist sector,” he explains, “the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami.” While the goals of the Marxist leaders “were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”” Furthermore, “Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.)” This maximum wage is defended by the government, which argues “that life’s necessities are either free or so deeply subsidized in Cuba that citizens don’t need very much money. (Che Guevara and his sophomoric hangers-on hoped to rid Cuba of money entirely, but couldn’t quite pull it off.) The free and subsidized goods and services, though, are as dismal as everything else on the island.” This includes their supposedly wonderful health care system that Michael Moore was raving about years back. This “free” health care requires patients “to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage.”

There’s much more. Check it out.

James F. McGrath on Science Fiction and Religion

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What does science fiction have in common with the Bible? More than we might expect. Both grapple with profundities. Both ask, among other key questions: How did we come to be? Where are we headed? How should we conduct ourselves? Where do we put our faith? The answers are not necessarily agreed upon…Thus, science-fiction fandom, with its canons, debates, and conundrums, has intriguing and instructive overlaps with the domain of religion.

So says biblical scholar James F. McGrath in an interesting article in the Spring 2014 issue of Phi Kappa Phi Forum.[ref]He actually co-edited the volume Religion & Doctor Who: Time and Relative Dimensions of Faith.[/ref] I’d actually considered writing a post on this topic given my more recent choice of entertainment, including The Dresden Files and Doctor Who.[ref]Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley tackled this same subject in his Temple & Cosmos. Atheist author Jason Colavito has argued that H.P. Lovecraft’s tales paved the way for the “ancient astronaut” theories found on the History Channel.[/ref]McGrath discusses TV shows like Lost, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, making for a fun read. In the end, he concludes, “Bottom line, science fiction is less about the future or past and more about our reflections on them. This type of speculation can be fascinating and meaningful, not merely diverting or academic…[S]cience fiction is a wonderful window into how humans perceive religion in the present.”

Check it out.

 

Mercatus Center and Regulations

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Several new studies out of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University this month cover the impact of regulations on the economy:

Check them out.