Politics

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?[ref]This is obviously a misleading question for three reasons: (1) Not all of Utah is Mormon and not all Mormons live in Utah, (2) there are Swedish Mormons (though Sweden is highly irreligious), (3) Mormonism is a religion, Sweden is a country and nationality. But you get the point.[/ref]

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.[ref]For a summary of Murray’s findings, see his Wall Street Journal article “The New American Divide.”[/ref]

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“).[ref]I imagine the clustering of like-minded people described in The Big Sort also has an impact on marriage outcomes.[/ref]

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

Pro-Life Activists Who Were Conceived in Rape

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Why is Business Insider covering the “anti-abortion activists who were conceived in rape and incest”? I don’t know. Seems a bit outside their bailiwick. Still, despite the typically slanted title, it’s actually a really interesting piece.

2014-01-27 Rebecca Kiessling
Rebecca Kiessling, who was conceived in a rape, is one of the more prominent voices opposing abortion even in cases of rape.

I’ve written about abortion and the rape exception before in a piece that was carried by Secular Pro-Life . In the short run, and thinking pragmatically, it doesn’t strike me as a good issue to get hung up on. The vast majority of abortions are for purely elective reasons. In other words: most abortions are a form of voluntary birth control. This is the biggest problem numerically and ethically, and I think the focus should be on ending abortion as a method of birth control.

In the long run, however, I have a lot of empathy for the position that folks like Rebecca Kiessling and her group Save the 1 take. A careful reading of the piece I wrote for SPL will show just how narrow our differences are.

1991 Radio Shack and Dematerialization

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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.”

 

Child Support

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This post is reprinted with permission from Secular Pro-Life:

 

When arguing about abortion, I’ve seen a lot of people claim “sex isn’t a contract.” Other variations of this idea include: 

  • Consent to A doesn’t mean consent to B (that is, consent to sex doesn’t mean consent to reproduction).
  • You clearly don’t consent to reproduce if you use birth control.
  • Sex is not a crime and shouldn’t be punished / Rights cannot be restricted unless there is a crime.

The problem is, when it comes to reproduction, these arguments only apply to women. 

If a man gets a woman pregnant–be it his wife, girlfriend, affair, or one night stand–he is legally bound to provide support for that child. In other words, because the man participated in the child’s conception (because the man had sex), his rights are altered. It doesn’t matter if the man was only consenting to sex, and not to reproduction. It doesn’t matter if he used birth control. It doesn’t matter that sex isn’t a crime. He fathered the kid, so the law considers him responsible for the kid.

And the law takes a pretty hard line on the subject. Courts can require a father to pay child support based not just on what he earns, but on what courts believe he has the ability to earn. Child support obligations remain even if a father goes to prison, or declares bankruptcy. Even if he wants to terminate his parental rights (and therefore his parental responsibilities), the courts usually won’t allow it unless there is another adult prepared to adopt the child and take over that responsibility. And there are many methods for enforcing child support. A man’s tax refunds can be intercepted, his property seized, business or occupational license suspended, and in some states his driver’s license can be revoked. If he still fails to make payment, he can be held in contempt and given jail time.

In short, if a man has sex he runs the risk of being (rather tightly) legally bound to any new life he creates. In the essay “Abortion and Fathers’ Rights“, author Stephen D. Hales summarizes the situation:

…the father, having participated in conception, cannot escape the future duties he will have toward the child. The father can decide that he cannot afford another child, that he is not psychologically prepared to be a parent, that a child would hinder the lifestyle he wishes to pursue, and so on, to no avail.

Sound sad? If a man is forced to pay child support, that could mean serious emotional, psychological, financial, and social repercussions for him. So why do we have child support laws? Is it because we hate sex, and want to punish people for having sex?

No, of course not. And interestingly, you rarely see anyone even suggest as much. No, it’s clear to most people that we have child support laws in order to, you know, support children. Child support laws aren’t enforced to punish men for having sex—they’re enforced because it’s best for the child. In the same way, abortion shouldn’t be outlawed to punish women for having sex—it should be outlawed to protect fetal life. In both cases, it’s not about punishment, it’s about protection.

And that’s as it should be.

I’d love to live in a world in which there are no unplanned pregnancies and no unintentional parents. I think people should have control over whether they become parents, in the sense that people should have control over whether they get pregnant or get someone pregnant. That’s why I support comprehensive sex education: I want people to understand their own fertility and, if they do choose to have sex, I want them to understand how they can best prevent pregnancy while being sexually active.

However, once pregnancy has happened, once there’s already a new human organism in the picture, it changes everything. I think the people whose actions created that new life should be responsible for its protection. 

Of course, many people disagree. Abortion rights advocates place reproductive freedom over protecting the lives we create, at least when it comes to women and pregnancy. How would this mentality look if they also applied it to men and child support? Hales has an idea:

A man has the moral right to decide not to become a father (in the social, nonbiological sense) during the time that the woman he has impregnated may permissibly abort. He can make a unilateral decision whether to refuse fatherhood, and is not morally obliged to consult with the mother or any other person before reaching a decision. Moreover, neither the mother nor any other person can veto or override a man’s decision about becoming a father. He has first and last say about what he does with his life in this regard.

(And if we’re being really consistent, he doesn’t have to inform the woman he impregnated, or anyone else, about his decision to refuse fatherhood.)

It seems to me that consistency requires abortion rights advocates to argue for the man’s right to choose as well as the woman’s: the pro-choice mentality means that, as women can “walk away” from their pregnancies, men should be able to walk away from the women they have impregnated. 

Not very uplifting, is it?

Or we could strive for a different kind of consistency–the kind that holds both men and women to a higher standard. This is why I’m for child support laws, and this is why I’m against abortion.

A Regressive “Progressive” Report

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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

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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.

A New Supply-Side Economics

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This article at Business Insider is one of those articles for political moderates who want to know about practical, non-ideological, expert-approved policies we can do to grow our economy. The premise of the article is that demand-side economics (think: government intervention and redistribution) has been the right response to the fiscal crisis, but that in the long run sustainable growth depends on supply-side economics (think: deregulation). Rather than a return to the supply-side theories of prior decades, however, the article lists 8 new supply-side policies, and a lot of them are exactly the sane, sensible policies that could make our country better.

This pic has nothing to do with the article, really, but BI used it so I did, too.
This pic has nothing to do with the article, really, but BI used it so I did, too.

Precisely because they are sane, sensible, and not easily classifiable as left or right, they will probably be totally ignored. Don’t let my cynicism get you down, though! At a minimum, if you read the article you can trot them out whenever you feel the need to browbeat your partisan friends (from either end of the spectrum) into submission the next time they explain why it is that their particular political ideology is the One True Way for America.

And that’s…. something, right?

War on Poverty: The Results – Part Deux

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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.[ref]Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 16-17.[/ref]

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

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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.