Politics

Family Instability and Wages

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Marriage historian Stephanie Coontz has an interesting piece in The New York Times on rising family instability. Commenting on male and female wages, she states,

Today, job prospects for young men are far less favorable. Real wages for men under age 35 have fallen almost continuously since the late 1970s, and those with only a high school diploma have experienced the sharpest losses. Between 1979 and 2007, young male high school graduates saw a 29 percent decline in real annual earnings — an even steeper decline than the 18 percent drop for men with no high school diploma…Women’s wages, by contrast, have risen significantly since the 1970s, except for those on the very bottom…Meanwhile, women’s expectation of fairness and reciprocity in marriage has been rising even as men’s ability to compensate for deficits in their behavior by being “good providers” has been falling. Low-income women consistently tell researchers that the main reason they hesitate to marry — even if they are in love, even if they have moved in with a man to share expenses, and even if they have a child — is that they see a bad marriage or divorce as a greater threat to their well-being than being single.

She concludes,

If women lowered their expectations to match men’s lower economic prospects, perhaps marriage would be more common in low-income communities. But it would most likely be even less stable, and certainly less fair. Turning back the inequality revolution may be difficult. But that would certainly help more families — at almost all income levels — than turning back the gender revolution.

This piece goes nicely with a recent review in The Wall Street Journal by sociologist and National Marriage Project director W. Bradford Wilcox, in which he points out,

Although the authors put too much stress on economic explanations-their approach cannot explain, for instance, why the economic dislocation of the Depression did not result in high levels of family breakdown in the 1930s-the story told by “Marriage Markets” is worth heeding, whatever one’s political affiliations. Conservatives need to take note of the growing family divide in part because fragile families require more public aid, from Medicaid to food stamps: As marriage goes, so goes the tradition of limited government. Progressives, for their part, might well worry that the family divide begets not only economic disparity but also gender inequality. After all, communities where fathers are largely absent from their children’s day-to-day lives do not come close to approximating the egalitarian ideal championed by today’s left-of-center thinkers and activists.

…What, then, is to be done? Ms. Carbone and Ms. Cahn offer a number of good suggestions, such as job-relocation grants for laid-off workers (to help them move away from high-unemployment regions to those with jobs) and portable health plans that allow workers to seek out the best job opportunities instead of clinging to bad, low-paying jobs for the sake of their benefits.

But the authors also think that the way forward requires strategies designed to “enhanc[e] women’s power”-such as “improved access to contraception.” …Perhaps. But a stronger case could be made that the bigger challenge facing working-class and poor families is not a lack of female empowerment but rather that contemporary masculinity has been decoupled from work, fatherhood and marriage-and for reasons that are not entirely economic.

Good stuff. Check them out.

 

Income Inequality, MotherJones, and Irony

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First, let me say that I promise not to make a habit out of cherry picking MotherJones articles to use as a punching bag.[ref]I’m referring to this post I wrote last week, btw.[/ref] I realize it’s unhealthy to spend too much time recapitulating the perceived failures of one’s ideological opponents, but I’m violating my own rule for two reasons. First, I am more inclined to use any article as a rhetorical punching bag when I feel it is, itself, perpetuating partisanship in a particularly noxious way. Second, I think some of the issues raised in this post will be genuinely interesting and important.

So this is what I saw on MotherJones last week:

Daily Dose of Irony

I took a screen grab because it’s not just the article that I found so captivating. It’s the juxtaposition of an article about “how the superrich spoil it for the rest of us” with an advertisement for Patek Philippe watches. I’m no watch connoisseur, but that looks pretty expensive to me. Google would seem to agree:

Patek Phillippe

The cheapest watch on that list costs about what both of my family’s cars cost put together. And the most expensive literally costs more than our house did, back before the housing bubble burst when we owned our own home. So I have to wonder: what kind of person is concerned about “the superrich” and in the market for a watch that costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars? Well, apparently some of the folks who read MotherJones fit that particular bill.[ref]Of course it’s possible that the ad was served to me by some process that has nothing to do with MotherJones as a magazine. If so: (1) they need to fix their algorithm (2) the rest of this article will still be interesting.[/ref]

So what makes the post more than a mere gotcha? Well, I have two serious thoughts to add that I hope elevate us beyond mere rabblerousery[ref]I, for one, think “rabblerousery” should be a word.[/ref]

The first is a quick note on inflation-adjusted dollars. One of the charts claims that if median US wages had kept pace with the economy since 1970, then they would currently be at $92,000 instead of $50,000. Mathematically, I am sure that is probably correct. But can you really compare 1970s dollars to 2010s dollars so easily? Let me ask you this: would you rather have $92,000 in 1970 or $50,000 in 2014? How about $92,000 in 1714 vs. $50,000 in 2114?

Money, it turns out, isn’t everything even when you’re talking about economics.Think about some of the things you would lose by going back to the 1970’s: the Internet, cell phones, and Game of Thrones all come to mind. But it’s not just fun and games, would you trade 1970s medicine for 2014 medicine? Would you, if you had cancer? If your child did?

2014-07-30 Car Crashes

So that’s a chart that[ref]From the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration[/ref] shows your likelihood of dying in a car crash per 100,000,000 vehicle miles traveled (VMT). You can see in the 1970s it was about 3 to 4. By 2009 it was about 1. So your chances of dying in a car crash (per mile traveled) were roughly triple or quadruple in the 1970s what they are today. This is just one off-the-top-of-my-head example of the kind of comparison that inflation-adjusted wages don’t capture.[ref]It doesn’t escape my notice that a large part of the reason for increasing safety is government regulation, which is (broadly considered) a left-leaning policy. If that admission softens the tone of this piece: good.[/ref]

My point is just that there actually isn’t a way to compare our lives in the 1970s with the 2000s in a way that allows any kind of meaningful analysis. Inflation is calculated by economists who first create a bundle of goods (gasoline, food, clothes, etc.) that is supposed to be more or less representative of what a person or household buys, and then track the change in price of that bundle of goods over time. That’s the best they can reasonably do, and for a fairly consistent commodity (like wheat) it does OK. But it fails to address increases in product quality (e.g. a laptop in 2014 is not the same animal as a laptop in 2004), not to mention new products (e.g. a laptop in 2014 vs… ? in 1974), not to mention increases in public goods (like better air quality, perhaps) that are not captured by any bundle of goods that a person purchases. In short: saying that median income has stagnated doesn’t actually tell you if people are better or worse off, or at least, not nearly as clearly as MotherJones might want you to think.

The second thing to consider, and this one will not be very popular, is the question of why the median wages haven’t risen much over the last 40 years. MotherJones specifies that it’s “the superrich,” but that’s not a theory it’s a slogan. It’s designed to make people feel better, not to explain things. Here, on the other hand, is a theory that might actually offer some plausible explanation: the increasing numbers of women in the workplace suppress wages.[ref]Hey, I told you it wasn’t going to be popular. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.[/ref] This is econ 101: when supply (the number of workers, in this case) goes up then prices (the wages a worker earns, in this case) go down. The HuffPo conveniently has some numbers pegged to 1970 for comparison:

In terms of sheer numbers, women’s presence in the labor force has increased dramatically, from 30.3 million in 1970 to 72.7 million during 2006-2010. Convert that to percentages and we find that women made up 37.97 percent of the labor force in 1970 compared to 47.21 percent between 2006 and 2010.

At least some [ref]How much? I won’t try to guess or research that question for this piece.[/ref] of the wage stagnation therefore comes from women entering the work place. That’s not the only effect, by the way. At least one economic paper (based on dramatic changes in female participation in the workplace around World War II) found that not only did wages go down when women entered the workplace, but that wage inequality increased between high and low incomes and even that the gender pay gap increased. This might sound like ultra-right-wing propagandizing, but none less than Elizabeth Warren has contributed significantly to the understanding that women entering the work force has had negative impacts on our economy. In The Two Income Trap, Warren basically argued that (1) dual-income families are less financially secure than single-income families because if there is no insurance policy[ref]Meaning: that if worker loses his or her job in a single-income family, the other spouse can go to work to make up at least some of the difference, but in a 2-income family there is no Plan B.[/ref] and (2) dual-income families have bid up the cost of living (especially homes) to a point where single-income families can’t really compete anymore, which creates a vicious cycle. MotherJones covered this back in 2004, by the way, and they asked the book’s coauthor Amelia Tyagi about the apparently right-wing narrative she seemed to endorse:

MJ.com: Some conservative commentators might see this as evidence that the mother should return home.

AT: [Laughs] Right. Of course, the notion that mothers are all going to run pell-mell back to the hearth and turn back the clock to 1950 is absurd. But that aside, a big part of the two-income trap is that families have basically bid up the cost of living. Housing is a big example. A generation ago, an average family could buy an average home on one income. Today you can’t do that in three-quarters of American cities. We all know that housing prices are going up, but what most people don’t realize is that this has become a family problem. Housing prices are rising twice as fast for families with kids.

It’s telling that Tyagi replies to MotherJones’ comment with laughter and then sets the question aside. That’s because the evidence is actually pretty clear: two-income families have significant costs for our society. And let me be equally clear: my point is not that we should send all women back home. As far as the evidence presented so far is concerned, an equally prudent strategy (from a socio-economic standpoint) would have been to stick with single-income family structure, but to have men become the primary caregiver in 1/2 of the families, just as one possible example.

My point isn’t that the left-wing view is wrong and the right-wing view is right. My point is that reality doesn’t care about your politics. Or mine. If we really want to do our level best to fix problems, that means we’ve got to be more willing to entertain explanations and solutions that depart from everybody’s narrative and agenda. Who benefits politically from the fact that two-income families are bad for the country? I’m not sure anybody does, but if it’s true (and it seems to be true) then it’s important to know so. Maybe it will help us invent some new policy that will make things better, but at least it will help us avoid snake oil policies that will do no good.

Something else I like about this line of argument–and this does appeal to the conservative within me–is that it underscores the tragic vision conservatives have for our world. Want to improve society by making the work place more egalitarian on gender grounds? OK, but there are going to be costs. And some of those costs will be: stagnant wages, an increased gender pay gap, and increased income inequality.

Or, you know, you could ignore research that is politically uncomfortable and just blame the superrich. While you try to sell them luxury watches.

Look, my big problem with MotherJones has nothing to do with the fact that it is liberal. I will admit that doesn’t endear them to me, but there are lots of liberals I admire and respect (some of whom comment here.) If you want to see what really gets to me about MotherJones, just glance back at the very first line of the article. Or, to save you time, I’ll quote it here:

Want more rage?

No, MJ. I don’t think that’s what America needs right now. But thanks for being open and honest about what–even more than luxury watches–it is that you’ve got on offer.

The Politics of Character

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Image result for snow blower calvin and hobbes

The Brooking Institution’s Richard Reeves has an incredible article in the most recent volume of National Affairs entitled “The New Politics of Character,” which basically summarizes much of the research associated with Brooking’s Character and Opportunity Project (which I’ve mentioned before). As Reeves explains,

Character, as we will see, is not synonymous with morality. Character combines qualities like drive and prudence that could — but might not — serve moral ends. It’s much more prosaic, but it may be more important.

The development of character is perhaps the central task of any civilized society and every individual within it. Its absence is felt not only when communities collapse into a brief, riotous war of all against all, but in many long-standing areas that are vital for human flourishing and constitute many of the abiding concerns of policymakers and the everyday issues of American politics. This is perhaps most true of the current debates about inequality and social mobility. Gaps in character development closely correlate to gaps in income, family functioning, education, and employment. The character gap fuels the opportunity gap, and vice versa.

If we want a better, freer, fairer society, we will have to complement the 20th-century focus on strong institutions with a new (if also ancient) concern for strong individuals. The quality of our policies is a vital concern. But so is the quality of our people.

After exploring a vast amount of research, he concludes,

Any new emphasis on character will need bipartisan support. This will require liberals to get past their squeamishness about words like “character” and conservatives to get over their hostility to public policy. Liberals who are genuinely concerned about rising inequality cannot turn a blind eye to the deep character inequalities that track with class lines. They are understandably afraid of seeming to blame the poor for their plight. But as we work to provide opportunities, we need to ensure people are able to seize them.

Conservatives who are genuinely concerned about opportunity need to look beyond tropes about moral character to the more practicable cause of performance character. As James Q. Wilson urged in The Public Interest’s 20th-anniversary issue: “For most social problems that deeply trouble us, the need is to explore, carefully and experimentally, ways of strengthening the formation of character among the very young.” Step one is to harness education and put character development firmly on the school agenda; step two is to invest in parenting, especially in the very early years. More broadly, the design of policies aimed at alleviating poverty or promoting opportunity ought to be sensitive to their impact on character development.

What is needed is a bipartisan policy push to help cultivate character in the name of opportunity. Given deepening concerns on both sides over barriers to upward mobility, there is an opportunity for a new coalition on character. Let us hope it is seized.

Well worth the read.

I Miss Mitt (America Does, Too)

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I’ve been saving this adorable BuzzFeed Politics article since I saw it a couple of weeks ago: Mitt Romney Has The Same Problems We All Have Flying Coach. It made me miss Mitt–by which I mean, miss what might have been–almost as much as the documentary Mitt.

2014-07-30 Mitt's Pink iPad
There are lots of photos of him flying coach, but my favorite is the one with the pink iPad.

Then today I saw this article in The Week: Americans really wish they had elected Mitt Romney instead of Obama.

Americans are so down on President Obama at the moment that, if they could do the 2012 election all over again, they’d overwhelmingly back the former Massachusetts governor’s bid. That’s just one finding in a brutal CNN poll, released Sunday, which shows Romney topping Obama in a re-election rematch by a whopping nine-point margin, 53 percent to 44 percent. That’s an even larger spread than CNN found in November, when a survey had Romney winning a redo 49 percent to 45 percent.

Yes, as the article says, you should take the polls “with a grain of salt,” but at the same time the list of things Romney was right about is both extensive and depressing.[ref]BuzzFeed again, humorously.[/ref]

Well, we’ll never know what could have been. But hey, maybe in 2016 we’ll get a chance at the next best thing. It’s not likely–and I’m not sure it’s politically wise–but I’m still hoping.

Immigration and the Poor

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Pretty much
Pretty much. The claims provoking this sign tend to be untrue.

Immigration is in the news again with the influx of Central American children across U.S. borders. Some of the responses to these child immigrants have shown the ugly side of American nationalism. This skepticism toward immigration can be traced back to several of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and John Jay.[ref]Historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr. discusses their various concerns in his 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007). However, some anti-immigration Americans assume immigrants are predominantly criminals, which the evidence doesn’t bear out. Furthermore, we often ignore how our own policies (such as the War on Drugs) helps create undesirable environments from which these immigrants want to escape.[/ref] However, even the skeptics among the Founders expressed the benefits of immigration. But I’m not particularly interested in cherry-picking Founders statements. What I am interested in is alleviating global poverty. Here are a few links that cover a variety of studies demonstrating increased immigration does just that:

  • Economist David Henderson, writing in a 2012 issue of The Freeman, notes, “Boston University economist Patricia Cortes, in a study published in the Journal of Political Economy, found that cities with larger influxes of low-skilled immigrants had lower prices for labor-intensive services such as dry cleaning, childcare, housework, and gardening. In a later study, Cortes and coauthor Jose Tessa found that these low-price services allowed Americans, especially women, to spend more hours working in high-skilled, high-paying jobs.The gains from eliminating barriers to immigration are huge. In a recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, economist Michael Clemens finds that getting rid of all immigration restrictions worldwide would approximately double world GDP.” He continues, “…Harvard University economist Lant Pritchett’s observ[es] that the average gain from a lifetime of microcredit in Bangladesh, such as that provided by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank, is about the same as the gain from eight weeks working in the United States. Asks Pritchett, “If I get 3,000 Bangladeshi workers into the US, do I get the Nobel Peace Prize?” …Pritchett found that if rich countries allowed just a 3 percent increase in their labor forces through immigration, the world’s have-nots would benefit by $300 billion a year, and the residents of the rich countries would benefit by $51 billion a year.”
  • The Economist reports on a brand new study that “offer[s] ammunition for fans of more open borders. In 19 out of 20 countries, the authors calculated that shutting the doors entirely to foreign workers would make the native-born worse off. (Never mind what it would do to the immigrants themselves, who benefit far more than anyone else from being allowed to cross borders to find work.) The study also suggests that most countries could handle more immigration than they currently allow. In America, a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of immigrants in the population made the native-born 0.05% better off. The opposite was true in some countries with generous or ill-designed welfare states, however. A one-point rise in immigration made the native-born slightly worse off in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. In Belgium, immigrants who lose jobs can receive almost two-thirds of their most recent wage in state benefits, which must make the hunt for a new job less urgent. None of these effects was large, but the study undermines the claim that immigrants steal jobs from natives or drag down their wages.”[ref]This actually offers evidence for Milton Friedman’s initial point about immigration and the welfare state.[/ref]
  • Lydia DePillis at The Washington Post reports on two new papers that demonstrate immigrants fill labor gaps, complement existing capital, tech, and labor, and that this complementarity increases production and consequently wages.

Be sure to read and research the actual studies.

A Little on Hamas

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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply personal to me. I am Israeli, and still have family in Israel. I also have Palestinian friends and acquaintances. Death and suffering are not abstract or theoretical notions. They will always affect someone that I know. As such, it can be a painful topic for me to discuss, but I do want to raise some perspectives that I feel are missing from the popular debates on blogs and social media now that violence has escalated in the Gaza Strip. Needless to say, my views are my own. Difficult Run has multiple voices, and welcomes different views. Before I proceed, I would like to direct the reader to two even-handed and reasonable pieces written by people that I know personally. While I disagree with both to some extent (the Mercurio quote can get tiresome), I appreciate the way that they frame their views, and recommend reading them. It is worth the time.

In this post I want to look at a major aspect of Hamas, the terrorist organization that became the ruling party in Gaza. Recently there have been several voices arguing that Hamas has been “horrendously misrepresented.” Most recently, Cata Charrett claimed that Hamas should be seen as a “pragmatic and flexible political actor.” This is essentially the same argument made earlier by others like Jeroen Gunning who produced pioneering research on the political side of Hamas.[ref]Gunning’s important study, Hamas in Politics, should be read cum grano salis due to an apologetic stance which spoils many of his insights. For example, Gunning considers that Hamas has “broadly followed” the ceasefire because although it fired rockets, it did not send suicide bombers.[/ref]

Hamas’ position, though, is not merely political, but draws deeply from certain metaphysical assumptions which frame their struggle. I’ll grant that divergent opinions certainly exist amongst the Hamas leadership. Some are pragmatists, and many others are decidedly hardliners. However, they do share a certain world-view.

Hamas’ founder, chief ideologue, and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, considered Palestine a waqf, that is, something consecrated to God. He formulated this belief as article 11 of Hamas’ Covenant, its charter document.

“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day… This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia…”

Treating the land that way means that any permanent concessions can be construed as blasphemy against God himself and Islam (which of course aren’t considered completely separate concepts). There is also no earthly authority that can do so because it cannot speak for all Muslim generations. Compromise can only be tactical, and thus, limited. It makes negotiating with Hamas to achieve a peaceful state of coexistence a decidedly tricky prospect. As the concept is part of their founding covenant, it cannot simply be laid aside, even when they somewhat moderate their stance, or express some discomfort with the wording.[ref]The main discomfort has been more with the phrases used than the ideas behind them. This article discusses a Hamas initiative to change the Covenant’s wording, but eight years have passed with no change.[/ref] For example, much has been made of Hamas dropping the call to destroy Israel from its 2006 election manifesto. However, the evidence suggests that this was downplaying a fundamental position in order to focus on domestic political ambitions. The fundamental position itself did not change. This is despite Charrett’s insistence that the 1988 covenant is irrelevant to understanding the contemporary Hamas. Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas politician, said in 2006, that “Hamas is talking about the end of the occupation as the basis for a state, but at the same time Hamas is still not ready to recognise the right of Israel to exist… We cannot give up the right of the armed struggle because our territory is occupied in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is the territory we are fighting to liberate.”

Hamas has sought not a lasting peace, but a hudna, a temporary, multi-year cessation of violence for which it demands a very high price. Yes, Hamas has offered to recognize the June 1967 borders, but only for 10-20 years, and conditioned on Israel granting Palestinians the right of return and evacuating all settlements outside of said borders. Those terms should be worked out, but as part of a lasting, normative peace. When the twenty years are up (or less), Israel will find itself disadvantaged, its very existence considered an act of aggression. Khalid Mish’al, Hamas’ current leader, wrote in 2006 that, “We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else’s sins or solve somebody else’s problem.” In order to obtain another hudna, Israel will have to make concessions just as big. The possibility of permanent peace is vaguely left to the judgment of the next generation.[ref]While the conclusions of this paper are debatable, the quotes presented are very useful.[/ref]

Now, there are Jewish metaphysics of the land, too. The most famous is it being the land promised by God to his people Israel. Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Charlap, a prominent member of Rabbi Kook’s circle in the first half of the 20th century, considered the land of Israel a part of the highest aspect of the Divine. ‘‘In days to come, [the land of] Israel shall be revealed in its aspect of Infinity [Ein Sof], and shall soar higher and higher… Although this refers to the future, even now, in spiritual terms, it is expanding infinitely.’’ Charlap further considered Jewish settlement of the land of Israel as an essential condition for holiness to spread throughout the world. His teachings were very influential amongst radical Jewish settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. More recently, R. Yitzchak Ginsburg taught that Chabad’s seventh rebbe was the manifestation of the Divine, and that in order to return him to this world the land of Israel must be saved from “Arab hands.”[ref]Jonathan Garb, The Chosen will become Herds: Studies in Twentieth Century Kabbalah (Yale University Press, 2009), 62, 67-68.[/ref]

The major difference that I see is that Israel-even under a right-wing government- has shown itself willing to act against groups with such metaphysical views. When unilaterally disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Israeli government dismantled the Jewish settlements, and expelled the settlers. The settler ideology (particularly in the Gaza Strip), as I’ve mentioned, was highly informed by teachings like that of Charlap’s. Such metaphysics, though, do not form an integral aspect of Israeli policy. Israel may be right or wrong about many things like the Gaza disengagement, but that is beside the point. Although I love it dearly, it is certainly an imperfect state. What matters here is the ability to lay aside metaphysics of the land and carry out concessions that are unpopular with many of its constituents.

Perhaps Hamas will change into a truly moderate force. Perhaps.

 

Case Study: Winning the Argument Through Framing

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2014-07-21 Explaining Conservatism

What explains conservatism? Famous left-leaning magazine MotherJones wants to know, and Chris Mooney writes about new research that might explain the puzzle in a piece that’s making the rounds on Facebook: Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative. Here’s a part of the solution to the puzzle, right from the article:

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The reason I love this paper is because it’s not often that life hands me an example of prejudicial thinking so perfectly gift-wrapped for analysis. In this case, there’s absolutely no reason why the exact same underlying experimental evidence couldn’t be presented using a totally different frame. Instead of talking about a “negativity bias” and wondering why conservatives are so negative and speculating that this might explain conservatism, one could take the exact same data and talk about a “Pollyanna bias” and wonder why liberals are so unaware of threats and speculate that this might explain liberalism.

This is how political partisanship works, folks. It’s not that conservatives and liberals have different conclusions. Sure, that’s what most of the debates are about (for or against gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc.) Those debates never get anywhere, however, because they miss the point. Conservatives and liberals see the world in different ways, and the way their conflicting world views actually compete with each other for followers is by spreading the assumptions that–if you accept them–lead logically to their policy positions. The way to win a debate is not by having more evidence or better reasoning because people don’t actually pay very much attention to evidence or reason. The way to win the debate–or at least to gin up your own side–is to frame it in such a way that you must be correct before the debate even starts.

Thus, in this case, Mooney starts out with the question: how do we explain conservatism? What he doesn’t actually come out and say–but what is actually the most important part of his piece–is the assumption that conservatism is an aberration and liberalism is the norm. There’s nothing about liberalism we have to explain; it’s just natural. But conservatism? It begs for some kind of explanation. Once you accept that premise, there’s really not much left to talk about. C. S. Lewis even invented a term for this debate style: bulverism:

The modern method [of argumentation] is to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third — ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment’, E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth [and Twenty-First] Century.[ref]C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism,” in God in the Dock, p. 273, which I got from here.[/ref]

As pleased as I am to have such a clear case study of Bulverism / winning the argument through framing ready at hand from now on, the thing that makes me sad is that it isn’t just MotherJones engaging in it. The researchers, by using the term “negativity bias” without an accompanying “positivity bias”, are jumping right in as well. (The name of their paper is: “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology.”) Although sad, it’s hardly surprising. Dr. Jonathan Haidt was quoted about this very problem in the NYTimes back in 2011. Commenting on total domination of social psychology by the political left, he has said:

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

The article goes on to quote him again:

Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

It’s bad enough to have MotherJones serving up the Kool-Aid, but it’s really quite sad to have academic researchers as their direct suppliers.

As a coda: I do think that there are real and interesting psychological differences to study with regards to politics. But I think that this research is most useful when, as Haidt’s own Moral Foundations Theory does[ref]The book-length exposition of this theory in The Righteous Mind is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.[/ref], it seeks to take all sides seriously and create room for understanding and common ground. And not when, as with the articles in question, it serves as a flimsy excuse to pathologize your political opponents.

Pro-Russian Separatists Probably Shot Down the Malaysia Flight 17

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2014-07-18 Malaysian Flight 17
Image Source, NYT

By now I’m sure everyone has heard about the Malaysian airliner that was shot down over Ukraine yesterday, killing nearly 300 people including over 20 Americans and about 100 HIV experts who were traveling to a conference in Australia. The plane was flying at an altitude (about 30,000 feet) that is outside the range of shoulder-fired surface-to-air-missiles, but within the range of mobile (truck-mounted) rockets. These kinds of rockets are in the hands of the Ukrainians, the Russians and–alarmingly–also pro-Russian separatists within Ukraine.

Lots of folks are saying we shouldn’t rush to judgment, and that’s usually the position I take, but in this case I think the evidence is already pretty clear. Within hours of the tragedy, NPR and others were reporting that a leader of the pro-Russian separatists had bragged on Twitter about downing a Ukrainian military transport plane at approximately the same time the Malaysian flight went missing. No such Ukrainian transport plane is missing, and the tweet was quickly deleted.

“In Torez An-26 was shot down, its crashes are lying somewhere near the coal mine “Progress,” read the tweet, obtained by FoxNews.com and translated into English. “We have warned everyone: do not fly in our skies.”

The self-titled “Self-defence forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic” boasted in a June 29 press release of having taken control of Buk missile defense systems. The Buk, or SA-11 missile launchers, have a range of up to 72,000 feet.[ref]Source[/ref]

The wreckage of plane came down in a separatist held region, and the black boxes are reportedly already shipped off to Moscow. It’s very unlikely that we will ever get really open, credible evidence because it is probably damning for Russia (since they gave the rocket launcher to the separatists). Meanwhile, the Ukrainians want to blame not only the separatists, but Moscow directly by alleging that it was Russian military forces (and not just their hardware on loan to rebels) that shot down the plane. It’s because we’re unlikely to get good information going forward that we may as well tentatively conclude what happened at this point.[ref]”We” in this case refers to folks just reading the newspapers like you and me. I hope that the experts, of course, conduct as thorough and objective an investigation as possible.[/ref]

The other reason it seems OK to call a tentative conclusion at this point is that the political ramifications are just not as important as people believe they are. ABC has a list of commercial airliners that have been shot down, and it includes the Ukrainians accidentally shooting down an airliner from Air Siberia in 2001, the infamous downing of Iranian flight 655 by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes in 1988 and a Soviet fighter jet shooting down a Korean Air Lines plane in 1983.[ref]There are eight instances on the list altogether, going back to 1973.[/ref]

I don’t mean to diminish the tragedy at all. Quite the opposite. In some ways what is most tragic about this is that, from a geopolitical standpoint, it probably won’t really have much of an impact. If the Ukrainians, Russians, and Americans have all shot down passenger planes before on accident (and there’s no reason to suspect this wasn’t an accident as well) and World War III was averted, it’s unlikely major changes will come from this either. It might serve as a goad or a pretext for the EU to stiffen their stance somewhat in regards to Russia’s role in Urkaine, but it’s not going to change the fundamental nature of the conflict. The only real result, and I saw this with a sense of resignation, will be that airlines give up a little bit in their fuel-saving algorithms and re-route flights around the region.[ref]Airplane flight paths almost never look like what you expect them to, by the way, because we’re not very good at thinking about the world as a sphere. Look how far “north” the SF-Tokyo route goes, for example. That’s why I’ve got no idea what routes might usually fly through this region.[/ref]

One more note: part of why I think the first theory (that pro-Russian separatists shot down the plane when they thought it was a Ukrainian military transport) is that it’s so non-conspiratorial. There’s no great mystery, just a case of mistaken identification in a warzone. Something that, tragically, happens all the time. But if you do need any additional perspective on why a conspiracy is unlikely, read this: Count to ten when a plane goes down… It’s the first-hand account of how a 23-year old techie accidentally ignited decades of conspiracy theories after that Korean Air Lines jet was shot down in 1983 with a single mistaken keystroke.

More on the Minimum Wage

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minimum wageWe’ve written a lot about minimum wage hikes here at Difficult Run. Here’s another to add to the list: economist David Neumark (who has published extensively on minimum wage) has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that minimum hikes may indeed go to low-wage workers, this very different from saying they go to low-income families. “One might think that low-wage workers and low-income families are the same,” Neumark writes. “But data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that there is only a weak relationship between being a low-wage worker and being poor, for three reasons” (reasons that are “descriptive evidence” and “not disputed by economists”):

  1. “[M]any low-wage workers are in higher-income families—workers who are not the primary breadwinners and often contribute a small share of their family’s income.”
  2. “[S]ome workers in poor families earn higher wages but don’t work enough hours.”
  3. “[A]bout half of poor families have no workers, in which case a higher minimum wage does no good.”

The amount of low-wage workers from poor families dropped from 85% in 1939 to 17% by the early 2000s due to changes in social safety nets and family structure. Evidence indicates that only 18% of the benefits of a national minimum wage of $10.10 would go to poor families, while 29% would “go to families with incomes three times the poverty level or higher.” The benefits for poor families decline to 12% at 15 dollars, while benefits for the well-off would increase to 36 percent. Neumark further explains that “most studies…fail to find any solid evidence that higher minimum wages reduce poverty.”

He concludes, “The desire to help poor and low-income families is understandable. But increasing the minimum wage is a misguided way to do it.”

Essays on McCloskey

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Over at the Online Library of Liberty there is an excellent group of essays covering economist Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the “Bourgeois Era”:  The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), and the forthcoming Bourgeois Equality: How Betterment Became Ethical, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect (2015).

The full amount of essays are still in the process of being posted, but so far you can read ones by economists Don Boudreaux, Joel Mokyr, and John Nye. Boudreaux captures many of my own feelings about McCloskey’s work, while Mokyr and Nye provide some excellent feedback and criticism.

Definitely worth checking out.