Politics

William Easterly: Poverty Is a Moral Problem

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Christianity Today has an excellent interview with economist William Easterly on his new book The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. In it, Easterly explains that poverty is a moral problem that cannot be easily fixed by technocratic solutions. The answer comes from treating the poor with the same dignity as everyone else. He explains,

I realized our attitude towards the poor is so often condescending and paternalistic. We think of them as helpless individuals. We don’t respect their dignity as individuals.

The next step was not to just avoid paternalism or condescension but actually to go back to first principles and think about the rights of the poor and what role those rights play in development. Economists’ research actually does give the institutions associated with individual rights a lot of the credit for the development in the West and the rest of the world. This combined with my own moral awakening that these rights are a desirable good in and of themselves. Whenever we violate them, we set back development.

Check it out.

 

What Would a Tea Party USA Look Like?

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Conservative Political Action Conference Draws Major Leaders From The Right

I wouldn’t have expected such a fair piece from Slate, but this article about a hypothetical alternate universe where the Tea Party is in charge and Rand Paul is President is really useful for understanding some of the basic beliefs and aspirations of the Tea Party. Here’s a sample:

Deep divisions notwithstanding, there are a number of principles that unite the movement. The most important of them is a devotion to subsidiarity, which holds that power should rest as close to ordinary people as possible. In practice, this leads Tea Party conservatives to favor voluntary cooperation among free individuals over local government, local government over state government, and state government over the federal government. Teatopia would in some respects look much like our own America, only the contrasts would be heightened. California and New York, with their dense populations and liberal electorates, would have even bigger state governments that provide universal pre-K, a public option for health insurance, and generous funding for mass transit. They might even have their own immigration policies, which would be more welcoming toward immigrants than the policies the country as a whole would accept.

I don’t consider myself a Tea Partier, but I have been to one rally (it was fun) and I’m sympathetic to a lot of the sentiments and principles that animate the movement. From my standpoint, this article is definitely worth the read if you want to understand a little bit more about it.

Catholics Against Capitalism

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Kevin Williamson has an article over at National Review that expresses many of the feelings I’ve had regarding some of the more hostile, self-righteous religious critics of capitalism. The article discusses the recent “panel of Catholic intellectuals and clergy, led by His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga,” that was “convened to denounce a political philosophy under the headline “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The conference was mainly about free-market economics rather than libertarianism per se…” But as Williamson notes, “There is something about the intellectually cloistered lives of religious professionals that prevents them from engaging in anything but the most superficial way with the 21st-century economy.” But then he just lays it out:

The implicit economic hypothesis [of the panel] is that producing a certain amount of goods more efficiently — in this case, with less labor — makes the world worse off. (“Why not use spoons?”) The reality is the opposite, and that is not a matter of opinion, perspective, or ideology — it is a material reality, the denial of which is the intellectual equivalent of insisting on a geocentric or turtles-all-the-way-down model of the universe.

The increasingly global and specialized division of labor and the resulting chains of production — i.e., modern capitalism, the unprecedented worldwide project of voluntary human cooperation that is the unique defining feature of our time — is what cut the global poverty rate in half in 20 years. It was not Buddhist mindfulness or Catholic homilies that did that. In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, neither of those great religious traditions, nor anything else that human beings ever came up with, made a dent in the poverty rate. Capitalism did.

Production and resources are important. “If the Good Samaritan had been the Poor Samaritan,” explains Williamson, “with no resources to dedicate to the stranger’s care, then the poor waylaid traveler would have been out of luck. All the good intentions that we may muster are not half so useful to a hungry person as a loaf of bread.” The fact that “men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.” What is really happening is this: “there is no poverty in the capitalist world comparable to poverty in the early 18th century, much less to the poverty that was nearly universal in Jesus’ time. Our people are clothed, fed, and housed, and the few shocking exceptions, as with the case of the neglected mentally ill, are shocking because they are exceptions.”

It boils down to “how you intend to fulfill the Lord’s command to feed His sheep — with rhetoric or with bread…”

Sun News Network Shows How to Cover Mass Shootings

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2014-06-20 Sun News Network

About two weeks ago, a killer in New Brunswick killed three Royal Canadian Mounted Police and left two more in critical condition. Sun News Network covered the story closely, but in a way that is very different from what the American mainstream press does in similar situations: they refused to release the name or the photo of the killer. They then published an editorial explaining their decision.

Far more people have been killed in the bad neighbourhoods of Chicago than were killed in all the mass shootings combined. But these rare incidents are never forgotten. And with the rise of social media, they’ve become a spectacle… Following the deadly Newtown, Connecticut shooting in December 2012 that left 26 dead, including 20 children, it was discovered that the perpetrator kept a “score sheet” of previous mass shootings. Did he hope his name would be placed at the top of the list?

The theory that publication of mass killings leads to more mass killings is very hard to study empirically because mass killings are so rare, but copycat suicides provide a plausible basis for the fear. In copycat suicides, a well-publicized suicide sparks a wave of imitation suicides. This is a very old phenomenon, with the first notable example dating to the 1774 publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther. Because of this well known effect (called suicide contagion) many news agencies around the world place limitations on the amount of publicity they will give to suicides.

I would like to see similar levels of self-restraint–on the part of news agencies and us, the audience–here in the US. The sad reality is that it’s only a matter of time until we have the opportunity to put it into practice. I do not think that such self-censorship would end mass shootings overnight, but I do think that it could help. And that it’s the least we can do.

 

Dropping CO2 Emissions

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Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 has a great post on natural gas and climate change. After noting that the IPCC reported that methane has 23x the global warming effect as CO2 (though CO2 lasts longer), Campbell mentions a couple recent studies “that methane will cause global warming regardless of CO2″:[ref]Funny that few actually analyze the pros and cons of climate change, let alone the pros and cons of climate change policies.[/ref]

What changed? Well, CO2 emissions went down, and it wasn’t due to the $72 billion in taxpayer money which included solar panel subsidies or the afterthought of wind power or the other get-rich-quick schemes in alternative energy we have tried since 2009 – it even happened without nuclear power, the best and most viable zero-emissions energy of them all.  It also happened without banning existing energy. The big change instead came because America switched to natural gas, and that was thanks to science and the free market. Due to that switch, energy emissions haven’t looked this good in 20 years.  Coal emissions haven’t looked this good in 30 years.

Believe it or not, to environmental fundraisers, that is a really bad thing.

With CO2 emissions dropping, activists have started to wind up the machine against methane and they note it is worse than CO2 – without mentioning that it is short-lived or that it is the primary component in cleaner natural gas. Instead, ‘natural’ is being removed from the term completely and replaced with ‘shale’.

The answer to climate change according to many environmentalists is to just throw money at it:

Environmentalists…who know nothing at all about how real innovation works think they can just throw money at one thing and penalize another and capitalism magic happens. The real world, outside of academia and fundraising brochures, is a lot messier. Like evolution, innovation has starts and stops, sometimes it tries a few times and fails. What has never worked is assuming that if we spend 100X as much money, the process will go 100X as fast.

Environmentalists should be happy. Unfortunately, many are too busy worried about their pet agendas.

Gun Control and Celebrity Bodyguards

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Emma Watson next to her private, undercover, armed bodyguard.
Emma Watson next to her private, undercover, armed bodyguard.

I’ve seen gun control opponents point out that the President uses guns (via the Secret Service) to protect his family. That’s a bit silly and, for bringing his daughters into the debate, out of bounds. But this post from Downtrend makes a related point that I think is more valid. When Emma Watson (AKA Hermione Granger) graduated from Brown, she appears to have brought her armed personal bodyguard along for the ceremony, despite the fact that Brown is emphatically a gun free zone:

There probably aren’t too many Brown students from working class families, but for argument’s sake, let’s suppose one of them was there on a special scholarship. Now imagine that this average Joe or Jane showed up to graduation with a loaded pistol just for personal protection. There would be a lockdown, the SWAT team would be called in, and that student would be looking at years behind bars.

A famous person shows up with an armed guard, just for personal protection, and it’s like nothing ever happened. The gun-free zone only applies to those not fortunate enough to have been born into money or who have never starred in a string of blockbuster movies.

I’ve got nothing against Emma Watson at all, or her decision, but the casual disregard of the rules when it comes to celebrities is particularly noxious on an issue as important as the right to self-defense.

You can read about Watson’s security guard ($150k/year, is with her everywhere) at the New York Post and see how an armed bodyguard going undercover in cap and gown was covered by the celebrity media via EOnline. (It’s “Pretty Sneaky (but understandable!)”)

It’s worth pointing out that Watson isn’t just a celebrity flouting the rules because she can. She has specific, real threats against her safety. As long as Brown would be fine allowing a non-celebrity with stalker problems to also carry a gun themselves (I doubt they could afford a personal bodyguard), I’m OK with things. This isn’t a cause for outrage. Just a bit of concern.

A Conservative Case for Government

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Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton

British philosopher Roger Scruton has a thought-provoking article entitled “The Good of Government” in the June 2014 issue of First Things. I’ve been a fan of Scruton ever since his BBC special “Why Beauty Matters” and his book Beauty. There is a kind of sophistication to his conservatism. He understands the concern of American conservatives:

The seemingly unstoppable expansion of regulations; the increasing control over what happens in the workplace, in the public square, and even in the family; the constant manufacturing of new crimes and misdemeanors, aimed at controlling how we associate and with whom; the attempts to limit First and Second Amendment rights—these developments are viewed by many conservatives with alarm. They seem to be taking America in a new direction, away from the free association of self-governing individuals envisaged by the founders, toward a society of obedient dependents, who exchange their freedom and their responsibilities for a perpetual lien on the public purse. And you only have to look at Europe to see the result…The welfare state has expanded beyond the limits envisaged in the New Deal, and the Supreme Court is now increasingly used to impose the morality of a liberal elite on the American people, whether they like it or not. These developments add to the sense among conservatives that government is taking over. America, they fear, is rapidly surrendering the rights and freedoms of its citizens in exchange for the false security of an all-controlling state. Those tasks that only governments can perform…are forced to compete for their budgets with activities that free citizens, left to themselves, might have managed far more efficiently through the associations of volunteers, backed up where necessary by private insurance.

Yet, Scruton recognizes, “Government is wrapped into the very fibers of our social being. We emerge as individuals because our social life is shaped that way. When, in the first impulse of affection, one person joins in friendship with another, there arises immediately between them a relation of accountability. They promise things to each other. They become bound in a web of mutual obligations. If one harms the other, there is a “calling to account,” and the relation is jeopardized until an apology is offered.” “In other words,” writes Scruton, “in our tradition, government and freedom have a single source, which is the human disposition to hold each other to account for what we do. No free society can come into being without the exercise of this disposition, and the freedom that Americans rightly cherish in their heritage is simply the other side of the American habit of recognizing their accountability toward others.” 

The article is incredibly well-balanced. Check it out.

The Dark History of the Religious Right

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Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College has an interesting article in Politico Magazine arguing that the the origins of the modern Religious Right in American politics can be found in the fight over segregation. Rather than Roe v. Wade (which was seen as a “Catholic issue” by many evangelicals both several years before and after Roe), it was Green v. Connally that caused evangelicals to organize. The case ruling declared that “racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.” One such institution was Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college located in Greenville, South Carolina. The school eventually lost its tax exempt status, “alert[ing] the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference.”

The article is quite a read. Of course, this isn’t the only thing that led to the rise of the Religious Right,[ref]For example, see Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism and Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise.[/ref] but it is an element often left out. This is also true of the American Left’s history, which was often critical of the Constitution (particularly Wilson) while friendly toward fascism and eugenics.

It kind of makes you lose faith in American politics altogether (if you had any to begin with).

Shrinking Waves May Save Sea Ice

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2014-06-10 sn-seaice

The whole global warming issue is pretty controversial, and one of the reasons for that is that–no matter what the consensus on the science might be–there’s actually a long and convoluted path from “human carbon emissions make the world warmer” to answering the question “what should we do about it?”

One of the big uncertainties, of course, is the cost-benefit analysis of policies designed to slow global warming. That’s what the Freakonomics guys did in one of their chapters from Super Freakonomics, and their conclusion was that–assuming climate change is real–there might not be any policy to stop it that is worth the cost. That claim, as you can imagine, landed them in some hot water.[ref]Time, The New Yorker, and many, many others weighed in as well. Questioning the global warming orthodoxy, which includes policies as well as science, is a big deal.[/ref]

But there are other uncertainties as well. So the planet gets warmer. So ice at the poles melts and sea levels rise, right? Well, maybe not so fast:

It’s a nagging thorn in the side of climatologists: Even though the world is warming, the average area of the sea ice around Antarctica is increasing. Climate models haven’t explained this seeming contradiction to anyone’s satisfaction—and climate change deniers tout that failure early and often. But a new paper suggests a possible explanation: Variability in the heights of ocean waves pounding into the sea ice may help control its advance and retreat.

That’s Carolyn Gramling writing for Science. She goes on to summarize the paper’s theory: warmer climate means lower waves, lower waves means less pounding on sea ice, less pounding on sea ice means slower melting to the point where (as noted above) sea ice in Antarctica is actually growing instead of shrinking.

The reality is that the Earth’s atmosphere and land and ecosystems and the sun’s radiation all work together to form a very, very, very complex system full of all kinds of negative and positive feedback loops that we know nothing about. This is just one example. Ice has been growing since at least 1979 despite projections, but no one had a clue. Now they have one but it is, of course, still just a clue. As science goes: this is great. When the data doesn’t line up with your predictions, it means you’re not understanding something and you have a chance for a new discovery.

But as a basis for expensive, global policy-making goes, this is not so great. The one thing all policies to thwart global warming have in common is making energy more expensive which will have the effect of lowering growth which will have the effect of keeping more people in the developed world in poverty for longer. We can be much more certain about that then we can about the corresponding threat from global warming. After all, we can’t even predict if the sea levels will rise at all, let alone by how much, so how can we begin to make a careful evaluation of the cost/benefit of policies to mitigate this unknown danger?

The consensus on global warming is often trotted out as a cudgel with which to beat skeptics, but this isn’t really effective once you step back and realize that climate change, itself, is only one part of a much, much more complex puzzle.

Evolution, Scientific Literacy, and Culture (Again)

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2014-06-09 Evolution

Every so often there’s a poll that comes out showing that only 50% of Americans believe in evolution (give or take) and the hand-wringing and demagoguery commences. Not too long ago, I wrote about the particularly Mormon aspect of this boring, repetitive, non-issue in a post for Times And Seasons called Beware Instrumental Beliefs. It turned out that Mormons were especially unlikely to agree with the statement “evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth” and some among the Mormon intellectual classes started hyperventilating again.

My argument was that the only signal that survey really picks up is a cultural one. Americans see the issue of evolution as fundamentally one of cultural identity, not science, and they answer accordingly. So the common assumption that religious people are so mentally hamstrung by superstitious mumbo-jumbo that they can’t grasp enlightened science is really just an expression of prejudice and not a valid reflection of survey data. That was my theory, in any case. I felt it was a pretty strong one, given that plenty of the most vociferous critics of those who expressed doubt in Darwinian evolution were humanities majors rather than biologists, but still: it’s nice to be vindicated.

That’s Dan Kahan at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project who cites new research to draw three conclusions:

First, there is zero correlation between saying one “believes” in evolution & understanding the rudiments of modern evolutionary science.

Second, “disbelief” in evolution poses absolutely no barrier to comprehension of basic evolutionary science.

Third — and here we are getting to the point where the new data come in! — profession of “belief” in evolution is simply not a valid measure of science comprehension.

The last point might seem redundant, but it isn’t. It’s a separate point, and it’s an important one because it shows a clear path forward for those who believe that teaching the ideas of human evolution is important and don’t want to get hung up with an irrelevant culture war. As Kahan reports, the NSF tried to get the question “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” removed from a test of scientific literacy not to assuage conservatives, but for the simple fact that:

the answer people give to this question doesn’t measure their comprehension of science. People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren’t any more likely to get this item “correct” than those who do poorly on the remaining portions.

The NSF faced a backlash, however, “from those who either couldn’t get or didn’t care about the distinction between measuring science comprehension and administering a cultural orthodoxy test.” Kahan goes on:

But those of us who don’t have to worry about whether taking a stance will affect our research budgets, who genuinely care about science, and who recognize the challenge of propagating widespread comprehension and simple enjoyment of science in a culturally pluralistic society (which is, ironically, the type of political regime most conducive to the advance of scientific discovery!) shouldn’t equivocate.

We should insist that science comprehension be measured scientifically and point out the mistakes — myriads of them — being made by those who continue to insist that professions of “belief” in evolution are any sort of indicator of that.

Definitely read the entire article for more insights and the very interesting data analysis Kahan did to arrive at his conclusions.