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.

Giving Back to Society

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Drawing on data from the Congressional Budget Office, economist Mark Perry provides the following two charts:

“As the data show in the top chart,” writes Perry,

the shares of pre-tax income for the four lower income groups was greater than their shares of federal taxes paid in 2010. In contrast, the highest quintile earned about half (51.9%) of all income in 2010 but paid more than two-third (68.8%) of all federal taxes collected. The top 1% earned 14.9% of pre-tax income in 2010 but paid 24.2% of all federal taxes collected…The federal tax system is highly progressive (higher income households shoulder an increasingly greater tax burden), especially for federal income taxes, as the bottom chart shows. The top income quintile paid almost all federal income taxes in 2010 (94.1%), and the top 1% paid almost 39% of all income taxes. In contrast, the bottom two income quintiles actually had negative shares of income taxes in 2010 and were in fact “net tax receivers” because their refundable tax credits exceeded the income tax otherwise owed.

Not only do the top earners pay the highest amount of taxes, but it tends to be their innovations that benefit society as a whole. Yale economist William Nordhaus’ 2004 paper “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement” found that innovators only capture 2.2% of the total present value of social returns. As GMU economist Don Boudreaux pointed out, “The smallness of this figure is astounding. If it is anywhere close to being an accurate estimate, the implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.”

The rich may be evil and all that, but they sure do pay for it.

The Greatest Period in American History

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Being pregnant 100 years ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer is today.

So states an article over at The Motley Fool. The author goes on to list 50 reasons why we are living in the greatest period in American history. Below were some of my favorites:

  • U.S. life expectancy at birth was 39 years in 1800, 49 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950, and 79 years today. The average newborn today can expect to live an entire generation longer than his great-grandparents could.
  • A flu pandemic in 1918 infected 500 million people and killed as many as 100 million. In his book The Great Influenza, John Barry describes the illness as if “someone were hammering a wedge into your skull just behind the eyes, and body aches so intense they felt like bones breaking.” Today, you can go to Safeway and get a flu shot. It costs 15 bucks. You might feel a little poke.
  • The average American now retires at age 62. One hundred years ago, the average American died at age 51. Enjoy your golden years — your ancestors didn’t get any of them.
  • In his 1770s book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: “It is not uncommon in the highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne 20 children not to have 2 alive.” Infant mortality in America has dropped from 58 per 1,000 births in 1933 to less than six per 1,000 births in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. There are about 11,000 births in America each day, so this improvement means more than 200,000 infants now survive each year who wouldn’t have 80 years ago. That’s like adding a city the size of Boise, Idaho, every year.
  • Two percent of American homes had electricity in 1900. J.P Morgan (the man) was one of the first to install electricity in his home, and it required a private power plant on his property. Even by 1950, close to 30% of American homes didn’t have electricity. It wasn’t until the 1970s that virtually all homes were powered. Adjusted for wage growth, electricity cost more than 10 times as much in 1900 as it does today, according to professor Julian Simon.
  • According to the Federal Reserve, the number of lifetime years spent in leisure — retirement plus time off during your working years — rose from 11 years in 1870 to 35 years by 1990. Given the rise in life expectancy, it’s probably close to 40 years today. Which is amazing: The average American spends nearly half his life in leisure. If you had told this to the average American 100 years ago, that person would have considered you wealthy beyond imagination.
  • You need an annual income of $34,000 a year to be in the richest 1% of the world, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic’s 2010 book The Haves and the Have-Nots. To be in the top half of the globe you need to earn just $1,225 a year. For the top 20%, it’s $5,000 per year. Enter the top 10% with $12,000 a year. To be included in the top 0.1% requires an annual income of $70,000. America’s poorest are some of the world’s richest.
  • In 1900, 44% of all American jobs were in farming. Today, around 2% are. We’ve become so efficient at the basic need of feeding ourselves that nearly half the population can now work on other stuff.

And much, much more. Check it out.

Startup Cities

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Over the last year or so, I’ve become somewhat fascinated with cities and urban studies. The video below, featuring Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell, is one reason why. In his lecture, Bell discusses ZEDEs: zones of economic development. These “startup cities” could potentially bring on new forms of governance. This is likely a good introduction to his forthcoming article in Social Philosophy & Policy titled “What Can Corporations Teach Governments About Democratic Equality?” The abstract reads,

Democracies place great faith in the principle of one-person/one-vote. Business corporations and other private entities, in contrast, typically operate under the one- share/one-vote rule, allocating control in proportion to ownership. Why the difference? In times past, we might have cited the differing ends of public and private institutions. Whereas public democracies aim at promoting the general welfare of an entire political community, private entities aim at more specific goals, such as generating profits or managing a cooperative residence. As business entities have grown in size and in the range of services they provide, however, the distinction between public and private governance has grown blurry. Soon, entire “startup cities” may join residential cooperatives and homeowners associations in drawing their governing principles from private sources. How can private communities affirm the principles of democratic equality? By affording full protection to all rights holders, individuals and owners alike. The one-person/one-vote approach popular in political contexts works best at protecting the individual personal rights—freedoms of conscience, speech, and innumerable others—to which each of us has an equal claim. Corporate law’s one-share/one-vote rule works best at protecting the property rights of those who invest in a commonly owned community. This paper explains why a polity should offer both corrective and constructive democracy. Residents exercise corrective democracy in defense of their individual rights by submitting officials and laws to popular veto. Shareholders exercise constructive democracy in defense of their investments, choosing directors and managing polity governance. The result: a double democracy that combines the best features of public and private governance to give equal treatment to both the personal rights of individual residents and the property rights of shareholder owners. Respect for democratic equality demands nothing less.

I’m excited to see how these ideas develop further.

The Babylonian Ark

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The Biblical Archaeology Review has a write-up on a newly-translated Old Babylonian (1900-1700 B.C.E.) tablet. The tablet’s translator Irving Finkel sees the tablet as “an ark builder’s how-to guide.” But what is really interesting is the way the ark is described in the tablet:

The most remarkable feature provided by the Ark Tablet is that the lifeboat built by Atra-hasıs— the Noah-like hero who receives his instructions from the god Enki—was definitely, unambiguously round. “Draw out the boat that you will make,” he is instructed, “on a circular plan.”

Check it out.

Ratzinger Prize to Richard Burridge

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Pope Francis (right) presenting Richard Burridge (left) with the 2013 Ratzinger Prize
Pope Francis (right) presenting Richard Burridge (left) with the 2013 Ratzinger Prize

First Things has an excellent article in the January issue dedicated to biblical scholar Richard Burridge, who recently became the first non-Roman Catholic to receive the Ratzinger Prize (virtually the Nobel Prize in Theology). The article is a fantastic tribute to Burridge and covers his impact on New Testament scholarship in a brief, but highly informative way. In the 1980s, biblical scholars typically saw the Gospels as legends or mythology (perhaps midrash or something of that nature). But Burridge’s book What Are the Gospels?: A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography turned the tide, demonstrating that the Gospels fit the genre of ancient Greco-Roman “Lives” i.e. biographies. In these ancient biographies, 15-25% of the narrative focused on “the hero’s attitude to his death and his final acts or words” (the Gospels range from 15-30%). Furthermore, 25-30% of verbs in ancient biographies “have the hero as the subject, and an additional 15 to 30 percent of the verbs are found in the hero’s sayings, speeches, or quotations. This concentration of verbs is found in no other genre of ancient literature. The gospels have the same concentration of verbs” (pg. 22-23). In later work, Burridge explained that “Greco-Roman biography is an invitation to imitate,” therefore “both what Jesus says and what Jesus does are important” (pg. 23).

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig does a fine job in the video below explaining the contemporary take on the literary genre of the Gospels. And we have Burridge to thank for it.

Middle Eastern Christians: No One Cares

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In Egypt, a 17-year-old boy is choked by his teacher and then beaten to death by his classmates for defiantly displaying his cross necklace. A rumored relationship between a Muslim girl and a Christian boy leads “to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population.” In June 2013, “a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed” in Syria and “of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh… no more than 10 people remain.” In Iraq between 2004 and 2011, “the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000.” So reports The Week, which goes on to note “the clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes.” While “Western activists and media have focused considerable outrage at Russia’s laws against “homosexual propaganda” in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics,” they fail to “protest (or at the very least notice) laws that punish people with death for converting to Christianity.” As journalist Ed West, “citing the French philosopher Regis Debray,” puts it: “The victims are ‘too Christian’ to excite the Left, and ‘too foreign’ to excite the Right.”

Who Is More Rawlsian: Mormons or Swedes?

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The Nordic countries (particularly Sweden) have been held up by many as the utopias of the future. But journalist Michael Booth has a recent piece in The Guardian demonstrating that the praise may be overdone. For example, the OECD reports that Danes work fewer hours per year than most of Europe while having the highest level of private debt in the world. They even have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world (higher than the US). But if you ask the Danes, “they will tell you that the Norwegians are the most insular and xenophobic of all the Scandinavians, and it is true that since they came into a bit of money in the 1970s the Norwegians have become increasingly Scrooge-like, hoarding their gold, fearful of outsiders.” Booth describes Sweden as having a “distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north. Youth unemployment is higher than the UK’s and higher than the EU average” and “integration is an ongoing challenge.” Perhaps this is why the Nordic countries have been cutting back their welfare states (which helped end Sweden’s depression in the 1990s). The market has been taking over Sweden’s health care system, with Swedes increasingly purchasing private health insurance.

I’m curious as to whether the U.S. should be looking across the pond for a Rawlsian utopia or if the answer can be found in some of its own metropolitan areas. As sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox points out,

According to a recent study from Harvard and UC-Berkeley, out of the largest 100 metropolitan regions in the country, the Salt Lake City area is best at promoting absolute economic mobility for lower-income children…Children from the bottom 20% of the national income distribution in the Salt Lake City region were more likely to “reach the top 20% of the national income distribution” as adults than poor children hailing from any other major metropolitan region in America…[T]he Harvard-Berkeley study…found that the most powerful (negative) correlate of such mobility was the share of single moms in a region. This means that children were most likely to realize the American dream when they came from regions—like the Salt Lake City area—with comparatively strong families.Utah, for instance, has some of the lowest rates of nonmarital childbearing and highest shares of its adult population married of any state. Likewise, the study also found that the strength of a region’s civil society was strongly correlated to economic mobility. Communities rich in social capital and religiosity, for instance, were more likely to foster economic mobility for children. And Utah is one of the most religious states in the country, and it scores high on national indices of social trust…[R]ealizing the Rawlsian vision of justice for the least among us, and giving poor kids a shot at the American dream, may depend on the nation’s capacity to revive communitarian virtues and institutions.

So, which utopian model is best: the Mormons or the Swedes?

Male Cover: “Let It Go” From ‘Frozen’

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Disney’s Frozen was, as summarized at Rotten Tomatoes, “beautifully animated, smartly written, and stocked with singalong songs…[A]nother worthy entry to the Disney canon.” While Olaf’s “In Summer” stole the show, you can’t get “Let It Go” out of your head. The film version features Idina Menzel (of Wicked and Glee fame) on vocals, while the single (and inferior) version features Demi Lovato. Like every other song known to man, a bagillion covers showed up on YouTube. However, Caleb Hyles‘ cover below caught my attention. Listen all the way through. I was only mildly impressed with the first verse and chorus. And then he changed octaves…

Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

Assortative Mating and Income Inequality

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In his book Coming Apart, political/social scientist Charles Murray examined the divorce rates among both the working class (“Fishtown”) and professional (“Belmont”) whites.

Image result for coming apart divorce

Not only is the educated, professional class staying married, they are marrying each other. A new NBER paper “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality” finds that this factor has a major impact on income inequality (see my previous “Inequality and Demographics“).

Once again, family factors help explain much of the income inequality we see today.