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.

2014 Grammy Performances: Metallica & Daft Punk

by

I don’t particularly care for the Grammys. Half the time, I’m not up-to-date enough with new artists to know who is winning (typically, I don’t care for them when I do know who they are). On the other hand, Grammy performances can sometimes be pretty rad. For example, Metallica joined with Chinese pianist Lang Lang to perform the Grammy-nominated (lost to Jethro Tull) “One” from their 1988 album …And Justice For All. While it is no S&M, it is still rockin’.

The next standout was Daft Punk (who went home with Album of the Year for Random Access Memories) with Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers, and Stevie Wonder performing “Get Lucky” (which won Record of the Year). The performance works in Daft Punk’s “Harder Better Faster Stronger,” “Lose Yourself to Dance,” Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star,” and Chic’s (Nile Rodgers’ band) “Le Freak.”

Deirdre McCloskey & “Worship Through Corporeality”

by

A while back, I co-authored a couple posts with Allen Hansen over at Worlds Without End on an important thread running through Mormonism: the religious significance often attached to secular acts. Part one explored this phenomenon in light of similar traditions in Judaism, specifically Hasidism and its “worship through corporeality.” Part two added managerial perspectives and its connection to eternal progression.

Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a Nov. 2013 piece that draws on Christian history to express the morality and theology of work and self-development. Readers of my posts with Allen will find that many of McCloskey’s ideas resonate with the idea of “worship through corporeality.”

Check it out.

1991 Radio Shack and Dematerialization

by

Look at the 1991 Radio Shack ads below.

As the author of the piece I’ve borrowed this from states, “There are 15 electronic gimzo type items on this page, being sold from America’s Technology Store. 13 of the 15 you now always have in your pocket.” Here is the list of the items above which are now conveniently on your iPhone:

  • All weather personal stereo, $11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box
  • AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.
  • In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.
  • Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.
  • Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.
  • VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.
  • Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.
  • Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.
  • 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.
  • Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.
  • 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.
  • Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.
  • Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.
  • BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’  Do you even know how to use a phone book?

All this was $3054.82 in 1991 (about $5100 in 2012 dollars) and has been “replaced by the 3.95 ounce bundle of plastic, glass, and processors in our pockets” (which is about $200 nowadays). A few years ago, Reason‘s science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote on the concept of “dematerialization”:

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, show that the world economy is increasingly using less to produce more. They call this process “dematerialization.” By dematerialization, they mean declining consumption of energy or goods per unit of GDP. In a 2008 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ausubel and Waggoner, using data from 1980 to 2005, show that the world is on a dematerialization binge, wringing ever more value from less material. It turns out that dematerialization achieves many of the same environmental goals as deconsumption. 

Ausubel and Waggoner demonstrate that the global economy dematerialized (got more outputs from fewer inputs) steadily in the production of crops, use of fertilizer and wood, and carbon dioxide emissions. For example, while global per capita income rose by 40 percent between 1980 and 2005, farmers around the world raised crop yields 57 percent. Had farming productivity remained stuck at the 1980 level, farmers would have had to plow down an additional 1 billion hectares (about half the land area of the U.S. and six times current U.S. cropland) to produce the amount of food grown in 2005. Instead cropland expanded by less than 100 million hectares and farmers so boosted their productivity that they could produce the same amount of crops on only 60 percent of the amount of land they used in 1980. 

The world economy emitted more carbon dioxide in 2005 than it did in 1980, but nearly 30 percent less than it would have had emissions grown at the same rate as the world economy grew. Using European Carbon Exchange prices per ton of carbon dioxide, Ausubel and Waggoner calculate that this dematerialized carbon would be worth nearly $400 billion dollars per year.

As the Cato Institute’s Marian Tupy notes, “Dematerialization, in other words, should be welcome news for those who worry about the ostensible conflict between the growing world population on the one hand and availability of natural resources on the other hand. While opinions regarding scarcity of resources in the future differ, dematerialization will better enable our species to go on enjoying material comforts and be good stewards of our planet at the same time. That is particularly important with regard to the people in developing countries, who ought to have a chance to experience material plenty in an age of rising environmental concerns.”

 

Miller Eccles Study Group Texas: Terryl & Fiona Givens

by

Terryl and Fiona Givens (Nathaniel’s parents) were here in Texas this past weekend at the invitation of the Miller Eccles Study Group and the Genesis Group. Their presentations were based on their books The God Who Weeps and the upcoming The Crucible of Doubt. I’ve written up a brief commentary at Worlds Without End on their Saturday presentation (based largely on Crucible), sprinkling it with a bit of neuroscience.

Check it out.

A Regressive “Progressive” Report

by
Brad Wilcox
Brad Wilcox

Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox (Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia) has a piece at National Review on the new Shriver Report. The report suggests that “government, business, and other institutions must accommodate themselves to the “profound change in the makeup and reality of American families,” especially the dramatic increase in single motherhood.” Wilcox points out “three profoundly unequal and regressive trends in American life” that would result from the “deal with change” proposals of the report:

  1. Parenting will become primarily the work of women via single motherhood.
  2. Children remain in an intergenerational cycle of poverty.
  3. A whole class of children will face higher amounts of social and emotional trauma.

See the piece for details why.

Minimum Wage Hikes: Still (Possibly) Dumb

by

Nathaniel recently argued that minimum wage hikes were dumb, largely due to the policy harming those it intends to help. New research (2012 working paper version here) examines turnover rates in relation to minimum wage increases. The researchers

find that when the minimum wage is higher, all low educated workers face jobs that are more stable (in the sense that they are less likely to end in a lay-off) but harder to get. This shifts the debate over the usefulness of minimum wages to the question of whether workers are better off with improved job stability or improved chances of finding a job when unemployed. It also means that minimum wages affect a much larger part of the labour market than is usually recognised and potentially raises the stakes in the policy debates…Thus, the policy debate should not just be about the employment rate effects of minimum wage increases but about the trade-off between good jobs with higher wages and more job stability versus easier access to jobs. And the debate is relevant for all of the low educated labour market, not just teenagers.

War on Poverty: The Results – Part Deux

by

Yesterday, I posted “War on Poverty: The Results” with a rather depressing graph from economist Lawrence McQuillan. However, the post may have struck readers as odd, given that I tend to actually be optimistic about the rise of living standards all over the world (including the U.S.). I’ve also mentioned before that there is a difference between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood people (i.e. “the poor” in 1970 are likely not “the poor” of 2014). But frankly, the U.S. Census data (which McQuillan’s graph was based on) is, as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson writes, “a lousy indicator of people’s material well-being. It misses all that the poor get — their total consumption. It counts cash transfers from government but not non-cash transfers (food stamps, school lunches) and tax refunds under the EITC. Some income is underreported; also, the official poverty line overstates price increases and, therefore, understates purchasing power.” In fact, one could argue that “the poor will always be with you” if we take the U.S. Census Bureau’s approach to measuring poverty:

The current poverty thresholds do not adjust for rising levels and standards of living that have occurred since 1965. The official thresholds were approximately equal to half of median income in 1963-64. By 1992, one half median income had increased to more than 120 percent of the official threshold (pg. 1).

Due to rising standards of living, poverty must become relative to the surrounding standards:

Adjustments to thresholds should be made over time to reflect real change in expenditures on this basic bundle of goods at the 33rd percentile of the expenditure distribution (pg. 2).

While the U.S. Census data can be useful (hence my original post), it is woefully inadequate. As a mentioned above, a major thing it misses is the material well-being of the poor. As science writer Matt Ridley explains,

Yet looking back now, another fifty years later, the middle class of 1955, luxuriating in their cars, comforts and gadgets, would today be describe as ‘below the poverty line’…Today, of Americans officially designated as ‘poor’, 99 per cent have electricity, running water, flush toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 per cent have a television, 88 per cent a telephone, 71 per cent a car and 70 per cent air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these. Even in 1970 only 36 per cent of all Americans had air conditioning: in 2005 79 per cent of poor households did. Even in urban China 90 per cent of people now have electric light, refrigerators and running water. Many of them also have mobile phones, inter net access and satellite television, not to mention all sorts of improved and cheaper versions of everything from cars and toys to vaccines and restaurants.

Amenities in Poor Households

(From the Heritage Foundation)

While poverty by certain standards may not have budged, the literal material well-being of the underprivileged in America has increased dramatically. The safety net has played (and should arguably continue playing) a role in protecting the poor from some of the most brutal blows poverty has to offer. But when you consider the many life-easing materials mentioned above, I think you’ll find that LBJ had little to do with the market forces that brought them about.

War on Poverty: The Results

by

War on Poverty

In a brief blog post, economist Lawrence McQuillan comments on the chart above:

The poverty rate in the United States fell by half from 1950 to the start of the “War on Poverty.” And it was on track to continue falling. But after the “War on Poverty” programs kicked in, the poverty rate has been stuck in a narrow corridor.

The lesson: Despite good intentions, statist redistribution programs to “help the poor” lead to multigenerational dependency and shrinking opportunities and incentives for low-skill individuals to enter the workforce, increase their skills, and move up the income ladder.

In the comments, McQuillan says, “Note in the chart above that the poverty rate fell dramatically after the Clinton overhaul [in 1996].” This drop in poverty was also corroborated in a 2000 study referenced by McQuillan.

But does this faithfully capture the condition of the poor in the U.S.? I’ll explore this in Part 2.

If You Post on Twitter, You Might Be a Narcissist

by
"If you constantly Tweet or your name is Kanye West, you might be a narcissist."
“If you constantly tweet, or your name is Kanye West, you might be a narcissist.”

A recent study has linked Twitter to narcissism, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. However, there appears to be a generational divide: narcissistic college students preferred Twitter, while narcissistic adults preferred Facebook (likely due to Millennials viewing status updates as routine as telephone calls were to previous generations). When it comes to Facebook, “the frequency with which users post status updates is a better predictor” of narcissism than mere usage, notes one of the study’s authors. “We can also begin to dig deeper – if posting frequency is linked to narcissistic traits then it’s important to determine whether this applies to any kind of posting (like linking to a news story) or only postings related to one’s own thoughts, feelings, and accomplishments.” A piece in The Atlantic followed up with a nice overview of the research behind narcissism and social media, including online gaming.

I wonder what this says about bloggers…