Society

The Long-Term Impact of Immigrants

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“Immigration is one of the most controversial policy issues in the US and Europe today,” write the authors of a new economics paper.

The debate mostly focuses on the short-run effects of immigration: Do immigrants take jobs away from natives? Do immigrants increase pressure on public goods? Do immigrants increase crime and reduce social capital? Many researchers have attempted to address these questions by providing empirical evidence on the short-run, immediate effects of immigration (e.g. Kerr and Kerr 2016, Peri 2012, Peri and Sparber 2009, Card 2009, 2012). While understanding the short run is important, policymakers should also consider the long-run consequences if the welfare of our children and grandchildren are to matter. And yet, we know very little about the long-run impact of immigration.

In order to study this long-run impact, the researchers

examine migration into the US during America’s Age of Mass Migration (from 1850–1920) and estimate the causal effect of immigrants on economic and social outcomes approximately 100 years later (Nunn et al. 2017). This period of immigration is notable for many reasons. First, this was the period in US history with the highest levels of immigration. Second, the immigrants that arrived during this time were different from previous waves of immigrants. While earlier immigrants were primarily from western Europe, the new wave also included large numbers of immigrants from southern, northern, and eastern Europe who spoke different languages and had different religious practices (Hatton and Williamson 2005: 51, Daniels 2002: 121–137, Abramitzky and Boustan 2015).

In order to measure the effects, the authors developed “an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that exploits two facts about immigration during this period. The first is that after arriving into the US, immigrants tended to use the newly constructed railway to travel inland to their eventual place of residence (Faulkner 1960, Foerster 1969). Therefore, a county’s connection to the railway network affected the number of immigrants that settled in the county. The second fact is that the aggregate inflow of immigrants coming to the US during this period fluctuated greatly from decade to decade.”

Their findings?

We find that higher historical immigration (from 1860–1920) resulted in significantly higher incomes, less poverty, less unemployment, more urbanisation, and higher educational attainment today. The estimates, in addition to being statistically significant, are also economically meaningful. For example, according to the estimates for per capita income, moving a county with no historical immigration (i.e. during 1860–1920) to the 50th percentile of the sample (which is 0.049) results in a 20% increase in average per capita income today.

We also try to shed light on the mechanisms. We find that immigration resulted in an immediate increase in industrialisation.  Immigrants contributed to the establishment of more manufacturing facilities and to the development of larger facilities. We also found that immigrants contributed to increased agricultural productivity in the medium-run and to increased innovation, as measured by patenting rates of both immigrants and the native-born. These findings are consistent with a long-standing narrative in the historical literature suggesting that immigrants benefitted the economy by providing an ample supply of unskilled labour, which was crucial for early industrialisation. A smaller number of immigrants brought with them knowledge, skills, and know-how that were beneficial for industry and increased productivity in agriculture. Thus, by providing a sizeable workforce and a (smaller) number of skilled workers, immigration led to early industrial development and long-run prosperity, which continues to persist until today.

 

What Are the Effects of Housing Constraints on Economic Growth?

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According to a new working paper, the effects are huge:

Image result for housingWe use data from 220 metropolitan areas in the US from 1964 to 2009 to perform two calculations. First, we quantify the effect of spatial misallocation. We find that most of the increased spatial dispersion in the marginal product of labor is due to the growing spatial dispersion in housing prices. In turn, the growing spatial dispersion of housing prices is largely driven by strict zoning laws in cities such as New York and the San Francisco Bay Area with strong productivity growth. We find that the increased spatial misallocation of labor due to housing supply constraints in cities with high productivity growth rates lowered aggregate growth by almost 50% between 1964 and 2009.

Second, we calculate the contribution of each US city to aggregate US growth and compare it to an “accounting” measure based solely on the growth of the city’s GDP. The difference reflects the effect of a city’s growth on the efficiency of labor allocation across cities. While the accounting measure suggests that New York, San Francisco and San Jose’s contribution to aggregate GDP growth between 1964 and 2009 is 12%, viewed through the lenses of our model, these cities were only responsible for 5% of growth. The difference is because the aggregate benefit of TFP growth in New York and Bay Area was in part offset by increased misallocation of labor across cities. In contrast, for Southern cities the accounting and model-based measures are the same. Due to an elastic supply of housing, much of the growth in the South took the form of employment growth, with no effect on misallocation.

We conclude that local land use regulations that restrict housing supply in dynamic labor markets have important externalities on the rest of the country. Incumbent homeowners in high productivity cities have a private incentive to restrict housing supply. By doing so, these voters de facto limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers (pgs. 2-3; bold mine).

We’ve blasted zoning laws here at Difficult Run several times before. Just one more reason to do so.

Do Immigrants Assimilate?

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“In the past,” writes one pair of economists,

new immigrants arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, joining earlier waves of migrants from Britain, Germany and Ireland. Today, many immigrants hail from Latin America and Asia, entering a country that is already more diverse. Are fears that immigrants retain their own cultural practices and fail to fully join American society justified by the data?

In recent work with our co-author Katherine Eriksson, we study the cultural assimilation of immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), during which 30 million migrants moved from Europe to the US (Abramitzky et al. 2016). We trace out a ‘cultural assimilation profile’ with time spent in the US, using changes in the foreignness of names that immigrant parents selected for their children as a measure of cultural adaptation. Children’s names offer an attractive measure of the assimilation process, both because names carry cultural content and because naming is a pure choice for immigrant parents, unconstrained by financial limitations or by discrimination on the part of natives. In particular, we measure the relative probability that each first name was held by a foreigner versus a native in the 1920 Census, and use this to construct a Foreignness Index, a measure between zero (name only held by natives) and one (name only held by foreigners).

By this measure, we find that recent immigrants gave their children more foreign names than did long-standing immigrants, which we take to be evidence of cultural assimilation with time spent in the US.

This change in names yielded benefits for the children of immigrants:

We link over a million children of immigrants across historical Censuses from their childhood families in 1920 into adulthood in 1940, and find that children with less foreign names completed more years of schooling, earned more and were less likely to be unemployed. Children with less foreign names were also less likely to marry a spouse who was born abroad or who had a very foreign name herself.

To summarize,

Despite arriving with a distinct set of cultural practices (proxied here by name choices), immigrants closed half of their cultural gap with natives after 20 years in the US. By 1930, more than two-thirds of immigrants had applied for US citizenship and almost all reported some ability to speak English. A third of first-generation immigrants who arrived in the US before marrying and more than half of second-generation immigrants married spouses from different origins.

I’m really not all that worried about cultural diversity. But for those who are, looks like you don’t have much to fear from immigrants.

Full Moral Alchemists

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Caring about a loved one’s seemingly non-moral values may in fact moralize them according to a new study. The authors explain,

[W]e believe that many of our everyday moral anxieties center on cases where there is a conflict between our belief in any proposition (including morally neutral ones) and our belief that actions consistent with that proposition will upset someone we love. It is in this sense that love can lead to what we will call moral alchemy: caring for others (and indeed the moral obligation to do so) allows propositions with little or no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. To be very clear, our hypothesis is distinct from the claim that our moral values depend on the values of our close others; many researchers have investigated the degree to which our sense of moral value is affected by moral contagion, or social affiliation (see e.g., Eskine, 2013; Haan et al., 1968; Haidt and Hersh, 2001 ;  Hofmann et al., 2014). Here we are interested in cases where although our own opinion about the actual rightness or wrongness of the behavior may remain unchanged, we nonetheless assign the behavior an elevated moral status.

They provide the following examples:

We will start with a trivial example: the moral status of Pogs. (For those of you who were neither a parent nor child in the 1990’s, Pogs are collectible colored disks, originally from bottle caps.) Clearly in the world at large, if someone steps on a Pog, uses one to prop up a table leg, or publically disparages them on national TV, he is morally blameless. He is morally blameless even if he knows that Pogs are valued by millions of school children in his culture. Suppose however, your child comes up to you and says, ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Most of us would be (morally) appalled if you replied, ‘‘Pogs are stupid” and snapped a Pog in two.

Of course what is bad in this example is hurting your child’s feelings, not hurting Pogs. Nonetheless, we suggest that the effect of moral alchemy is to (locally) change the moral status of Pogs. You cannot disregard them as objects worthy of care and attention without insufficiently valuing your child’s values…All that matters is that you knew he cared about Pogs and you did not take his utilities as your own. Note that this is neither moral contagion nor moral duplicity: you do not adopt your child’s attitude of valuing Pogs for their own sake but neither do you merely act ‘‘as if” you care about Pogs when you do not. Rather, insofar as, and for as long as, failing to care about Pogs would be hurtful to your child, you represent Pogs as objects worthy of care (e.g., you would likely feel guilty about intentionally destroying a Pog, even in private).

…It is after all, uncontroversial that people value idiosyncratic things and that morality requires respecting things that others value. However, we suggest that taken together, these commonplaces of human psychology play a key and underappreciated role in real life moral dilemmas, moral learning and moral change. Consider a proposition less trivial than ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Consider ‘‘Academic achievement is important.” For the sake of argument, let’s presume that within a given cultural context, this counts as a value but not a moral one: everyone concerned accepts that mediocre students can be morally unimpeachable. Suppose however, that your parents are among those who care about this (non-moral) value. If you underachieve in school, rip up your homework, and refuse to study for tests, are those moral transgressions or not?

The researchers tested the hypothesis that non-moral concerns could be moralized based on close relationships with the following steps:

• participants rated how much they cared about a set of behaviors.

• Next they rated how much a close other or an acquaintance cared about different items from the set.

• On a third set of items, they rated “how most people” would judge the behavior.

• Experiment 1 looked at permissibility judgments.

• Experiment 2 looked at whether the behavior was seen as a norm, value, or moral.

Their results?

Experiment 1 suggested that failing to engage in a behavior is perceived as “more wrong” by third parties when someone you care about cares more about the behavior than you do. Experiment 2 suggests that the behavior may also be perceived as “more moral”. To the degree that positive behaviors exist on a continuum of importance, with conventions regarded as relatively unimportant, values as moderately important (insofar as their importance varies from person to person), and morals as extremely important, believing that a loved one cares more than you about a behavior elevates the significance of the behavior, making conventions somewhat more like values and values somewhat more like morals.

The results further suggest that this was not due to a general elevation of the status of positive behaviors in the context of thinking about a loved one. Relative to participants in the Distant Other condition, participants’ ratings in the Close Other condition were only higher when they believed the loved one cared more about that kind of behavior than they did themselves. This is consistent with the idea that concern for the interests of close others makes us treat some behaviors more seriously than we otherwise would because failing to so value them risks interpersonal harm.

…[C]oncern for the loved one added moral importance to behaviors perceived as more important to their close other than the self, leading participants to elevate the moral significance of these behaviors to third parties.

Looks like we’re all full moral alchemists.

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The Economic Consequences of Political Partisanship

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I’ve mentioned the tribal nature of politics before and its tendency to make us mean and dumb. Now check out the findings from a new paper:

In the first experiment, carried out in a nationwide online labor market, we assess whether partisan congruence between employer and employee influences the willingness of the latter to work, as well as the quality of work they perform. We do so by tracking the wage proposals and task performance of freelance editors when the document they edit indicates whether their employers are co-partisans or supporters of the out-party. Study 2 examines whether partisan considerations also affect consumer behavior. Specifically, we explore whether people are less likely to pursue an attractive purchasing opportunity if the seller is affiliated with the out-party, and more likely to do so if the seller is a co-partisan. We conducted another field experiment that uses an online marketplace to study this question in a more naturalistic setting, albeit one that relies on ecological inferences. Finally, we replicate these patterns in the context of an incentivized, population-based survey experiment, where we find that fully three-quarters of respondents are willing to forego higher personal remuneration to avoid benefitting the opposing party.

Taken together, our studies offer substantial evidence that partisanship shapes real-world economic decisions. All four experiments offer evidence that partisanship influences economic behavior even when there are real pecuniary or professional costs. Although the effect sizes vary somewhat across contexts, in some situations, they are quite large. For example, the effect of partisanship on reservation wages in the labor market experiment is comparable to the effect of task-relevant skills such as education and experience. In the marketplace, consumers are much more likely—almost two times as likely—to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matches that of the seller. In our survey experiment, three quarters of all subjects forego a higher monetary payment to avoid helping the other party. We show that these effects of partisanship are at least as large as the effects of religion, another well-known and salient social cleavage. Even among weak or leaning partisans, fully two-thirds of them reject the partisan offer. In sum, partisanship’s effect on economic decisions is not only real but often also sizable, extending throughout the electorate.

…The results underscore the power of partisanship as a social identity in an era of polarized parties—partisanship can shape apolitical behavior, including economic transactions. The results also call for paying greater attention to potential discrimination based on partisan affiliation. To date, few social norms are in place to constrain it, as they are with respect to unequal treatment along other social divides (e.g., race and gender). Our analysis suggests that partisan-based discrimination may occur even in the most basic economic settings, and as such should be the subject of more systematic scrutiny (pgs. 3-5).

Hooligans in action.

Solving Conflict With Business

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From the World Economic Forum:

Last year, the World Bank revised its position on conflict – upgrading it from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty, to being the primary driver. In Somalia, despite some political progress, the conflict has put more than half the population in need of assistance, with 363,000 children suffering acute malnutrition. In Nigeria, conflict with Boko Haram in the country’s northeast has left 1.8 million people still displaced, farmers unable to grow crops, and 4.8 million people in need of food assistance. In Yemen, an escalation in conflict since 2015 has worsened a situation already made dire by poor governance, poverty and weak rule of law. Now more than 14 million people need food aid.

Only if we understand conflict can we understand these hunger crises…Across the places we work, where people are facing starvation, the pattern is the same. Hunger is not some freak environmental event; it is human-made, the result of a deadly mix of conflict, marginalization, and weak governance…In South Sudan, as in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen it is not generally a lack of food that has caused famine-like conditions to occur. The crises exist because of violence and conflict. They don’t need more food, they need investment into conflict prevention and the stability that brings.

Who do they turn to to help stabilize these conflict-prone regions? Businesses:

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragility, Violence and Conflict found that corporate partners can foster stable, inclusive and prosperous societies that respect the rule of law and benefit from accountable governance. Both local and multinational businesses can play an important role, often working alongside each other to support and grow local and national economies and, in the process, help support efforts undertaken by others to reduce fragility and conflict.

The WE Forum has highlighted the way businesses can foster peace before.[ref]You can find the referenced study here.[/ref] Business leaders should take note.

Post-Seculars: Science-Oriented, Religiously Inclined

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A fairly recent study by sociologists Timothy O’Brien and Shiri Noy looks at the relation between science, religion, and politics with interesting–and perhaps counter-intuitive–results.

“We were looking at the assumption that science and religion are conflicting sources of knowledge,” O’Brien said. “There is this assumption in the popular imagination that if you’re scientifically oriented you can’t be religious, and if you’re religious you can’t be scientifically oriented. What was found was that it is true to some extent. We found three big groups of Americans based on their attitudes about science, their knowledge about science, and their attitudes about religion.”

The author broke the survey data into three categories:

  1. Moderns: “those most familiar with and favorable toward science.”
  2. Traditionals: “the most religiously devout and the least familiar with science.”
  3. Post-seculars: “whose worldviews blend elements of both science and religion.”

“As you might expect,” O’Brien continues, “moderns tend to hold more liberal or progressive opinions and traditionalists tend to be more conservative or orthodox.” The post-seculars, however, were different from both groups. You can see how they compare to moderns and traditionals below:

  • Human Life: Post-seculars are “less supportive than moderns of making contraceptives accessible to teenagers. Postseculars and traditionals are also less likely than moderns to agree that it is acceptable for individuals to end their own lives and that patients with incurable diseases have a right to die…[P]ostseculars’ restrictive beliefs about abortion and other issues in this domain are evidence that appreciation and understanding of science do not necessarily lead to liberal social attitudes” (pg. 7).
  • Gender and Sexuality: “Results indicate that compared with each other group, moderns hold more progressive views of gender roles, sexuality, pornography, and sex education. There are no significant differences in postseculars’ and traditionals’ attitudes in this area, indicating that as with attitudes about human life, familiarity with science does not ensure liberal sociopolitical beliefs” (pg. 10).
  • Race and Civil Liberties: “Given their liberal views on gender and sexuality, it is perhaps surprising that moderns are less supportive than traditionals of affirmative action. Postseculars are even less supportive than moderns of affirmative action. Yet this pattern aligns with moderns’ and postseculars’ greater likelihood of agreeing that African Americans can overcome prejudice without favors. In addition, traditionals and postseculars are more likely than moderns to explain Black-White differences in terms of innate qualities, whereas moderns are more likely than traditionals to attribute race disparities to educational opportunities and discrimination…Moderns are more likely than traditionals to agree that atheists, communists, gays and lesbians, militarists, and racists should be able to place books in public libraries and to speak publically. Postseculars are also more supportive than traditionals of these civil liberties these groups” (pg. 10).
  • Government and Social Assistance: While “postseculars are more religious than traditionals, they are less supportive than traditionals of government efforts to reduce inequality” (pg. 10).
  • Criminal Justice: “Interestingly, although moderns are less likely than traditionals to approve of the police’s use of force in some situations, moderns are more likely than traditionals to approve of police force under other circumstances. Furthermore, compared with traditionals, moderns report that courts should deal with criminals more harshly. Postseculars’ opinions in this domain generally resemble moderns with one exception: despite moderns’ relatively tough-on-crime attitudes, they are more likely than each other group to support the decriminalization of marijuana” (pg. 10).
  • Children, Families, and School: “Postseculars share moderns’ emphasis on independent thinking but emphasize obedience more and social acceptance less than moderns. Furthermore, traditionals are more likely than moderns to view spanking as an acceptable form of punishment for children. Finally, consistent with the prominence of faith in the traditional and postsecular worldviews, these groups are each more likely than moderns to approve of prayer in public schools” (pg. 10).
  • Personal Well-being and Interpersonal Trust: “Postseculars…report more positive interpersonal attitudes compared with traditionals” (pg. 11).

In conclusion,

In most, but not all, domains, moderns’ beliefs are relatively liberal or inclusive, whereas traditionals’ are more conservative or exclusive. However, the postsecular perspective defies this binary. Individuals in this category, who are familiar with and appreciative of science and also deeply religious, are marked by sociopolitical attitudes that cannot be consistently labeled conservative or liberal (pg. 11).

Quality vs. Size of Government

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Economist Ed Dolan has a couple of interesting posts at the Niskanen Center. His first one draws on data from the Economic Freedom of the World index, the Legatum Prosperity Index, and the Human Freedom Index. Based on his breakdown, personal freedom and economic freedom are positively correlated.

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And while the relationship between personal freedom and economic freedom and real GDP is nonlinear, a “one-point increase in EFI is…associated with a 0.61 point increase in the PFI rather than the 0.91 point increase that was estimated without including GDP.  All of these results are statistically significant at a 0.01 level of confidence.”

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In short, “personal freedom and economic freedom are positively associated with each other, and…both freedom indexes are positively associated with prosperity as measured by real GDP per capita. Good libertarians should expect these results and be gratified to find them confirmed.”

These indices also demonstrate that “human freedom in both its economic and personal manifestations contributes positively to human well-being as measured by data on education, health, and personal safety—another result sure to please libertarian readers.”

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And yet, “[w]hen we look at the simple correlations between the personal freedom index and the EFI components, we find they are all are positive, as expected, except that for the size of government (SoG), which is negative. The correlation of SoG with the personal freedom index is -0.16. Remember that for all components of the EFI, a higher value means more freedom, so the negative coefficient means that a larger government is associated with greater freedom. That is not what most libertarians would expect. Is this just an anomaly or a real statistical regularity?”

After pointing out some of the shortcomings of the EFI’s “size of government” measure, Dolan instead employs data regarding the ratio of total government expenditures to GDP from the IMF World Economic Outlook. Check the comparisons below:

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What these measurements show is:

  1. First, the data appear to support notion that economic freedom makes a positive contribution to personal freedom and prosperity. That holds true whether we measure prosperity in a narrowly economic sense, as GDP per capita, or in a broader sense, using noneconomic indicators of education, health, and personal safety.
  2. Second, the data do not support the notion that a larger government is necessarily detrimental to either freedom or prosperity.  On the contrary, countries with larger government sectors tend to have more personal freedom and higher indicators of education, health, and personal safety.

I’m reminded of Nathaniel’s review of Francis Fukuyama’s books on political order: “Fukuyama is dismissive of arguments about the quantity of government in favor of arguments about the quality of government.” In Dolan’s second post, he attempts to measure the quality of government using subsets of the same three databases as before:

  • “Legal system and property rights” (EFI): “indicators of judicial independence, impartiality of courts, and protection of property rights.”
  • “Rule of Law” (HFI): “indicators of procedural justice, civil justice, and criminal justice. These subcomponents consider factors such as adherence to due process and the presumption of innocence, the risk of arbitrary arrest, and the degree to which civil and criminal courts are subject to corruption and improper government influence.”
  • “Governance” (LPI): “measures of confidence in the government and elections; the corruption perceptions index from Transparency International; a measure of the level of democracy; and an overall measure of government effectiveness from the World Bank’s Doing Business survey.”

Check out how quality and size of government go together below:

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And to drive the point home:

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Dolan obviously provides much more detailed explanations than what I’ve shown here, but the graphs alone should make his conclusions fairly clear:

  • The size of government per se is not an especially useful indicator. Simple correlations based on cross-country data suggest that by and large, people who live in countries with relatively large governments, as measured by the share of GDP devoted to government spending, are better educated, healthier, safer, and generally more prosperous. They also tend to enjoy greater personal freedoms.
  • On the other hand, cross-country data on the rule of law, protection of property rights, and other measures of the quality of government show strong, positive associations with quantitative indicators of freedom and prosperity.
  • When size and quality indicators are compared directly, using multivariate analysis that controls for the effects of per-capita GDP, quality dominates. In such tests, the size of government turns out to have little effect one way or the other on most measures of freedom and prosperity.

Dolan is quick to point out, “There is a lot of variety in the world. Too strong a focus either on statistical regularities or on selected outliers can draw us too strongly toward conclusions that, in reality, admit of many exceptions. For example, the small-government city states of Singapore and Hong Kong are rightly admired for their prosperity and economic freedoms. However, it gives one pause to note how many small-government countries enjoy neither. Chad, Bangladesh, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, labeled in the chart, are just the outliers among a whole cluster of countries in that category.”

Perhaps the focus should be on improving our government rather than simply shrinking it.

 

An Economic View of Mental Health

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“The factors involved in mental health are many and varied,” writes economist Isamu Yamamoto,

but for a working person, work styles in the workplace are an important factor. For example, if workers have to put in long hours, have little discretion over their work, or get few opportunities to change assignments or workplaces, this adds to their stress and increases the likelihood of deteriorating mental health.

On the other hand, there has been little research on mental health problems in the field of labour economics, which focuses on analysing work styles in the workplace. As for Japanese work styles, we see moves everywhere to try to change from so-called ‘Japanese employment’ practices. New aspects now include reducing long working hours, seeking a better work/life balance, diversity management, and encouraging women to be more involved in the workplace. These moves suggest that work styles under conventional Japanese employment practices create some kind of difficulty for workers. In other words, there are concerns that work styles under Japanese employment practices are a major factor in causing mental health to deteriorate.

In Yamamoto’s view, there are at least two economic approaches that could be utilized regarding mental health research:

  1. “The first approach is to reveal the characteristics of work styles, based on labour supply-and-demand mechanisms and internal labour market models, and use those characteristics to explain the impact that work styles have on workers’ mental health and the role of the business in mental health.”
  2. “The other approach is to reveal work style factors that impact mental health from observed data (controlling for heterogeneities between individual employees and businesses, and other noise), and to show how mental health affects objective indicators such as business productivity and profitability.”

Using findings from the Labor Market Analysis Using Matched Employer-Employee Panel Data research project, Yamamoto provides the following insights:

First, the research shows that factors affecting employees’ mental health include long work hours, job characteristics, workplace management methods, workplace climate, job transfers, and promotions, among others (Kuroda and Yamamoto 2016a, Sato 2016). Second, mechanisms that cause employee mental health to deteriorate include working irrationally long work hours because of such psychological tendencies as overconfidence bias (i.e. the employee has too much confidence in his or her own health), which could result in unexpected health damage (Kuroda and Yamamoto 2016b). Research also has looked at the impact of deteriorating mental health on corporate performance, with the results showing that businesses with higher sick leave or turnover rates of employees with mental disorders tend to have poorer performance as measured by return on sales (Kuroda and Yamamoto 2016c).

There are still just a few examples of research that validate mental health problems from an economic perspective, and more research needs to be done. Moreover, mental health is a major issue that is relevant to a number of fields, including medicine, epidemiology, industrial health, and psychology. As such, it is important to address it with interdisciplinary research, and researchers in various fields should collaborate in this regard.

Stop Snacking on Scripture

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New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman shared a story about how he used to open his 300-person NT class years ago:

I would ask:

  • How many of you in here would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God (PHOOM!  Almost everyone raises their hands)
  • OK, great: Now, how many of you have read the Harry Potter series? (PHOOM! Again, almost everyone raises their hand).
  • And now, how many of you have read the entire Bible? (This time: scattered hands, here and there, throughout the auditorium)

Then I’d laugh for a minute and say, “OK, so I’m not telling *you* that *I* think the Bible is the inspired Word of God; you’re telling *me* that *you* think it is.   I can see why you might want to read a book by J. K. Rowling.   But if God wrote a book – wouldn’t you want to see what he had to say???”

What I have found over the years, consistently, is that my students have a much higher reverence for the Bible than knowledge about it. 

A December 2016 interview in Christianity Today touches on this biblical illiteracy: “We use the Bible as a manual or answer book. We look to it as a talisman or horoscope. We proof-text, cherry-pick, and impose our own biases. The sins against Scripture are numerous and, according to Glenn R. Paauw of the Institute for Bible Reading, endemic.” Too often, Paauw says, believers attempt to save the Bible from critics and skeptics. However, “the more dangerous fact is that even those people who think they are doing right by the Bible often aren’t. What if those of us who have a high view of Scripture are, in practice, not doing it justice?” He worries that we all have “been trying to live off of what Philip Yancey calls “Scripture McNuggets.” But we’ve got to start feasting on the whole Word of God.”

He continues,

There’s this fear that if we admit it’s a difficult and challenging book, we’ll scare people off. We want to tell people, especially new Christians, about all the great things that will happen to them by reading it.

Since we’re not honest about what kind of book the Bible is, and how it’s supposed to work, when people start reading for themselves, they encounter all kinds of crazy material that doesn’t fit the paradigm that we’ve given them. They find stuff from ancient cultures, from different parts of the world, and they don’t understand it immediately. And it’s hard for them to get something they can apply to their lives every single day from just reading through the Bible. So it leads to cherry-picking verses. Because there are these gems, these verses that seem to contain important spiritual truths.

So you get all these cherry-picked passages, but everything else gets neglected or completely ignored. Certain passages are essentially de-canonized. We end up with a partial Bible. So people get discouraged. They try again with a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan, but they’re just not making it.

We need to start equipping people to understand the Bible on its own terms. We have to go back into the Bible’s world, rather than demanding it be immediately relevant to ours. We need to give them pathways from the ancient world into today’s world.

…We have a diminished view of Scripture in another way, especially in the West. We see the story as this individualistic, go-to-heaven-when-I-die story instead of a restorative story about the renewal of all creation and my place within that larger narrative. That’s the bigger, glorious vision that the Scriptures give us.

This is applicable to Mormon scripture as well, including the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. I’ve often heard 2 Nephi 9:28 thrown out as a kind of anti-intellectual, anti-elitism slogan: “When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.”[ref]The next verse tends to be ignored: “But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.”[/ref] This leads to a kind of sneering at scholarship and higher criticism. Yet, Pauuw points out what’s wrong with this picture:

The real danger is overemphasizing the Reformation ideal that every single person should read the Bible, and read it alone. That’s a very modern experience of the Bible. Within 100 years of the printing press, all these modern translations started coming out. Suddenly individuals are getting Bibles when they didn’t have them throughout church history.

In America, a place focused on individualism and democracy, we can all supposedly develop our own interpretation of the Bible. There’s even this idea that you’re not supposed to allow church history to influence you. It’s just you and God and the Bible. One of the big recoveries we need is to read the Bible in community. That allows community members who have done their homework and have a good grasp of the Bible to help guide others.

There’s a distrust of scholars in the evangelical church. But there are amazing, God-honoring scholars doing great work. We need more bridges between the great work they’re doing and regular Bible readers in the church. We need to be taught by those gifted to teach. That doesn’t rule out the Holy Spirit, working through the Word in your individual life. It’s just in a context that’s bigger and healthier.

…The Bible is rooted in history. We need to understand that the ancient world wasn’t like our world. That rootedness is what makes it a human story, so we need not be afraid of that. Part of the fundamentalist, modernist legacy is that the more we talk about the humanity of the Bible, the more nervous we get. We’re afraid that makes it less of a divine book.

Elder Bednar made the point that Latter-day Saints devote excessive attention to application instead of doctrine and principles. Pauuw shares similar concerns:

I cringe every time I hear the instructions we give to new Christians. Apply your Bible reading every single day. Pray about how you can apply it. That’s just not true. I can read long stretches of the Bible without finding an obvious application. It’s a model that leads to frustration, because people can’t find the application. So let it go. Just read the Bible and try to understand it, and the implications will come soon enough.

The entire interview is worth reading, especially on Sunday.