Society

The Future of Chinese Christianity

by

Multiple books[ref]For example, see David Aikman’s Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power and Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang’s A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China.[/ref] over the last decade have focused on the rise of Christianity in China. In the newest edition of First Things, there is an incredible essay by Chinese writer and activist Yu Jie titled “China’s Christian Future.” Jie points out that “in 1949, when the Communist party defeated the Nationalists and founded the People’s Republic of China, Christians in China numbered half a million. Yet almost seventy years later, under the Chinese government’s harsh suppression, that population has reached more than sixty million, according to Fenggang Yang, a sociologist at Purdue University. The number grows by several million each year, a phenomenon some have described as a gushing well or geyser. At this rate, by 2030, Christians in China will exceed 200 million, surpassing the United States and making China the country with the largest Christian population in the world.” Jie names two major events that led to this rise: “the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and the Tiananmen Square massacre instigated by Deng Xiaoping in 1989. Countless innocent lives were lost as a result of these two cataclysms, and the people’s belief in Marxism-Leninism and Maoism was destroyed. These events opened up a great spiritual void, and the Chinese began searching for a new faith.”

Following the 1989 massacre, “Deng Xiaoping thought the key to keeping the regime in power was to make a select few wealthy. He made their economic dream of getting rich come true while sacrificing the political dream of many to live in a free society. Like a drug, however, money’s hold on people could only last so long. Man cannot live on bread alone. Beyond his material needs lie spiritual ones as well. Government leaders sensed a crisis, too. They started rummaging through the Confucianism and Buddhism they had tossed out, hoping to reclaim the former moral authority of these traditions for the party.”

But this supposed renewal of Confucianism isn’t what it seems:

Today…party officials clutch at Confucius like a drowning man clutches at straws. Without ever having apologized for what they did to destroy Confucianism, they now set up so-called Confucius Institutes around the world, no expense spared, to foster their agenda. The institutes offer financial assistance to scholars of China in the West, inviting them on luxury tours of the country in exchange for favorable reviews of the Chinese government. By the same token, they blacklist those critical of the administration and send their names to Chinese embassies around the world, which in turn deny them visas. The Confucius Institutes are political tools for maintaining power, not genuine sources for cultural renewal. Had the Communists not dug up his grave, Confucius would be spinning in it.

The growth of Christianity has made the Chinese president see it as “a threat: It is the largest force in China outside the Communist party. In China, home churches outnumber government-sponsored churches three to one. Against home churches that refuse to cooperate, the government has waged a large-scale cleansing campaign in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, particularly in the city of Wenzhou, known as “China’s Jerusalem,” where 15 percent of the population is Christian. In two years, more than two hundred churches in Zhejiang have been demolished, over two thousand crosses removed. The scene of the cross being removed from a church in Ya village, Huzhou city, on August 7, 2015, was typical.”

Yet, the transforming power of the Christian gospel is nonetheless continuing to spread throughout China. It has changed the lives of both the essay’s author and millions of others throughout his native country. Check out the rest of this powerful story in the full article.

The Rise of Zero-Sum Economics

by

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal describes “The Rise of Zero-Sum Economics” among both political parties:

[Trump] sees [trade] not as a form of cooperation where everyone wins but a contest where someone must lose for someone to win. “We already have a trade war, and we’re losing badly,” he declared last month.

It’s not just Mr. Trump who has embraced economics as a bleak zero-sum game; so have Democratic activists. Their platform this year calls the economy “rigged” in favor of the 1%, at the expense of everyone else.

In shifting their attention from how income grows to how it’s divided, the parties think they’re catering to reality.

However, this seems to be out of touch with most voters:

The author concludes,

Yet less trade and less legal immigration will hurt U.S. growth and the average worker, not help them. Moreover, the median voter seems to get that: Net support for free trade is solidly positive, according to the latest WSJ/NBC News poll, while support for immigration among Democrats and independents is growing (it remains low among Republicans). Voters worry far less about inequality than whether they personally are getting ahead financially.

That is the irony: In a year when both parties are rallying their partisans by portraying the economy as a win-lose proposition, most Americans still think it’s win-win.

The Benefits of Religious Involvement

by

A recent article in the Deseret News highlighted the benefits of religious participation. The rather extensive list includes:

  • Marital satisfaction
  • Less likelihood of divorce
  • Stronger inclination toward marriage
  • Marital stability
  • More active, engaged, and affectionate fathers
  • Lower rates of domestic violence

Among teens:

  • Higher self-esteem
  • Positive outlook
  • Stronger family and adult relationships
  • Less risky behavior
  • Lower levels of substance abuse and alcohol use
  • Less crime and violence
  • Less likely to have premarital sexual relations (and consequently less out-of-wedlock births)

You can find links to the research within the original article. Check it out.

The Age of Political Polarization

by
I chuckled.

A new NBER paper provides further evidence for increasing political polarization. The abstract reads:

We study trends in the partisanship of Congressional speech from 1873 to 2009. We define partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson’s party from a fixed amount of speech, and we estimate it using a structural choice model and methods from machine learning. The estimates reveal that partisanship is far greater today than at any point in the past. Partisanship was low and roughly constant from 1873 to the early 1990s, then increased dramatically in subsequent years. Evidence suggests innovation in political persuasion beginning with the Contract with America, possibly reinforced by changes in the media environment, as a likely cause. Naive estimates of partisanship are subject to a severe finite-sample bias and imply substantially different conclusions.

Well, that’s disheartening.

There’s a lot more to Trump support than racism.

by

hillbilly elegy

I’m a conservative. Over the last 9 months or so the Trump campaign has sent me from incredulous to enraged to dejectedly resigned, and I admit I’m still trying to figure out what just happened.

To hear some of my leftist friends talk, the Trump phenomenon is the inevitable climax of an increasingly out-of-touch, racist, backwards party, a predictable extension of the “extremism” of Bush.[ref]In general I think it’s a bad idea to let people who aren’t part of Group X–especially people who are hostile to Group X–explain what Group X thinks, feels, and wants. The explanation is usually pretty off-base.[/ref]

Those theories makes no sense to me. The conservatives I know who supported Bush hate Trump. In fact, Pew Research recently published a study showing the most religious and “very conservative” Republicans have been most resistant to Trump. This study echoes a Gallup poll last year that found the highly religious ranked Trump 12th out of 17 GOP candidates. But if the most religious and conservative Republicans dislike him, who has been supporting Trump from the outset?[ref]The WSJ had a great graphic explaining how Trump’s coalition differs from the traditional factions of the right-wing (what the WSJ dubbed the social conservative faction and the establishment faction).[/ref]

In his article “Trump: Tribune of Poor White People,” Rod Dreher interviews J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, on the interplay between our current political parties and hillbilly culture.

The interview is a fascinating read. Vance discusses a variety of sometimes opposing ideas in an empathetic but honest way. For example, he talks about how the anti-elitist streak in hillbilly culture helps those who achieve financial success stay grounded, but it also pressures people not to become successful in the first place. Vance talks about  the problems with how, when it comes to the poor, there are opposing narratives suggesting either (a) the poor are helpless, with no power to affect their own lives or (b) the poor must simply bootstrap their way out of poverty. Both of these views fail to address important factors.

Vance uses his understanding of hillbilly culture to explain Trump’s popularity:

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades.  From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below).  Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.  

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth.  Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis.  More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.  He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas.  His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground.  He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.  

This part especially resonated with me:

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.  It’s not just that he inflames the tribalism of the Right; it’s that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left.  In the past few weeks, I’ve heard from so many of my elite friends some version of, “Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve.” These comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero culturally working class Americans.  And I’m always left thinking: if this is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly doomed.

Read the full interview here.

 

Causes of Anti-Immigration Sentiments: Evidence from Brexit

by

The graph above from researchers Chris Lawton and Robert Ackrill at The Conversation “shows the proportion of Leave votes for all local authorities in England and Wales (on the vertical axis) against the proportion of residents who stated that they had been born outside the UK in the 2011 census (on the horizontal axis). It shows that high proportions of Leave voters were overwhelmingly more likely to live in areas with very low levels of migration” (italics mine). “Of the 270 districts that had a lower proportion than average of people born outside the UK in 2011,” they continue, “in 229 (85%) the majority vote was for Leave. Of the 78 districts with a higher than average population born outside the UK, only 44% voted Leave.”

This seems to indicate that those with little exposure to immigrants have greater anti-immigration sentiments. However, this isn’t the whole story. Consider the graph below:

As The Economist explains,

Consider the percentage-change in migrant numbers, rather than the total headcount, and the opposite pattern emerges (chart 2). Where foreign-born populations increased by more than 200% between 2001 and 2014, a Leave vote followed in 94% of cases. The proportion of migrants may be relatively low in Leave strongholds such as Boston, in Lincolnshire (where 15.4% of the population are foreign-born). But it has grown precipitously in a short period of time (by 479%, in Boston’s case). High levels of immigration don’t seem to bother Britons; high rates of change do. 

Innovation and Its Enemies

by

Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has a recent article based on his new Oxford-published book Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. He explains,

[T]he answer is not simply that people are afraid of the unknown. Rather, resistance to technological progress is usually rooted in the fear that disruption of the status quo might bring losses in employment, income, power, and identity. Governments often end up deciding that it would be easier to prohibit the new technology than to adapt to it.

He uses the example of the Ottoman Empire forbidding the printing of the Koran for nearly 400 years. “By banning the printing of the Koran,” he writes, “Ottoman leaders delayed employment losses for scribes and calligraphers (many of whom were women who were glorified for their mastery of the art). But protecting employment was not their main motivation…[Religious knowledge] was both the glue that held society together and a pillar of political power, so maintaining a monopoly over the dissemination of that knowledge was critical to maintaining the authority of Ottoman leaders. They feared going the way of the Catholic pope, who lost considerable authority during the Protestant Reformation, when the printing press played a key role in spreading new ideas to the faithful.”

The list goes on, from English women petitioning against coffee in 1674 to American dairy farmers spreading misinformation about margarine in the 1800s to the resistance to tractors in the early 1900s. “People almost never reject technological progress out of sheer ignorance,” Juma concludes. “Rather, they fight to protect their own interests and livelihoods, whether that be operating a dairy farm or running a government. As we continually attempt to apply new technologies to improve human and environmental wellbeing, this distinction is vital.” The key in Juma’s mind is “inclusive innovation,” which seeks to help “those who are likely to lose from the displacement of old technologies are given ample opportunity to benefit from new ones. Only then can we make the most of human creativity.”

The Economic Case for Gender Equality

by

A 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report found that–surprise, surprise–gender equality is good for the economy:

A “best in region” scenario in which all countries match the rate of improvement of the fastest-improving country in their region could add as much as $12 trillion, or 11 percent, in annual 2025 GDP. In a “full potential” scenario in which women play an identical role in labor markets to that of men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26 percent, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025. MGI’s full-potential estimate is about double the average estimate of other recent studies, reflecting the fact that MGI has taken a more comprehensive view of gender inequality in work.

MGI focused on 15 gender-equality indicators, all of which fell under the categories (1) equality in work, (2) essential services and enablers of economic opportunity, (3) legal protection and political voice, and (4) physical security and autonomy. Both developing and advanced countries stand to gain from increased gender parity. “MGI’s new Gender Parity Score (GPS) measures the distance each country has traveled toward gender parity, which is set at 1.00. The regional GPS is lowest in South Asia (excluding India) at 0.44 and highest in North America and Oceania at 0.74. Using the GPS, MGI has established a strong link between gender equality in society, attitudes and beliefs about the role of women, and gender equality in work.” Furthermore, “MGI has identified ten “impact zones” (issue–region combinations) where effective action would move more than 75 percent of women affected by gender inequality globally closer to parity. The global impact zones, which are globally pervasive issues, are blocked economic potential, time spent in unpaid care work, fewer legal rights, political underrepresentation, and violence against women.”[ref]Compare this to the findings in the Columbia-published Sex & World Peace.[/ref]

So, if thinking of women as equals on moral and ontological grounds is just too much of a stretch for you,[ref]Shame on you.[/ref] try indulging in a little economic self-interest and fight for gender equality.

Are Safety Standards Relative?

by

Five cars for the Indian market were recently awarded a zero-star safety rating by the London-based Global New Car Assessment Program. While this low rating is gaining a bit of negative press, economist Alex Tabarrok thinks we should reconsider:

Let’s take a closer look. These cars are very inexpensive. A Renault Kwid, for example, can be had for under $4000. In the Indian market these cars are competing against motorcycles. Only 6 percent of Indian households own a car but 47% own a motorcycle. Overall, there are more than five times as many motorcycles as cars in India.

Motorcycles are also much more dangerous than cars.

…The GNCAP worries that some Indian cars don’t have airbags but forgets that no Indian motorcycles have airbags. Even a zero-star car is much safer than a motorcycle. Air bags cost about $200-$400 (somewhat older estimates here a, b, c) and are not terribly effective. (Levitt and Porter, for example, calculated that air bags saved 550 lives in 1997 compared to 15,000 lives saved by seatbelts.) At $250, airbags would increase the cost of a $5,000 car by 5%. A higher price for automobiles would reduce the number of relatively safe automobiles and increase the number of relatively dangerous motorcycles and thus an air bag requirement could result in more traffic fatalities.

A broader point is that in India today $250 is about 5% of GDP per capita ($5,700 at PPP) and that’s a high price to pay for the limited protection provided by an air bag. Lots of people in the United States wouldn’t pay $2750–5% of US GDP per capita–for an air bag. Why should Indians be any different?

Intending to save lives and actually saving lives are not the same thing.

Income Mobility vs. Educational Mobility

by

Nobel laureate James Heckman has a new paper out with exploring social mobility in the U.S. and Denmark. The abstract reads:

This paper examines the sources of differences in social mobility between the U.S. and Denmark. Measured by income mobility, Denmark is a more mobile society, but not when measured by educational mobility. There are pronounced nonlinearities in income and educational mobility in both countries. Greater Danish income mobility is largely a consequence of redistributional tax, transfer, and wage compression policies. While Danish social policies for children produce more favorable cognitive test scores for disadvantaged children, these do not translate into more favorable educational outcomes, partly because of disincentives to acquire education arising from the redistributional policies that increase income mobility.

In short, the disadvantaged in Denmark are not flourishing and moving up financially because of the labor market, educational attainment, or careers, but simply due to wealth redistribution via high taxes.

The authors conclude,

The failure to promote greater educational mobility in spite of providing generous social services is most likely rooted in the welfare state. Our findings point to wage compression and the higher levels of welfare benefits as being counterproductive in providing incentives to pursue education. The low returns to education observed in Denmark, in particular at the lower levels of education, help explain the disconnect between the egalitarian childhood policies in Denmark and the roughly equal levels of educational mobility in Denmark and the U.S. The sorting of families into neighborhoods and schools by levels of parental advantage is likely another contributing factor. While the Danish welfare state may mitigate some childhood inequalities, substantial skill gaps still remain.

…This paper sends a cautionary note to the many enthusiasts endorsing the Scandinavian welfare state. We make no statements about the optimality and fairness of the U.S. and Danish systems from a philosophical or social choice point of view. The Danish welfare state clearly boosts the cognitive test scores of disadvantaged children compared to their U.S. counterparts. But test scores are not the whole story, or even the main story of child success, despite the emphasis on them in popular discussions. Moreover, substantial gaps in test scores remain across social groups within Denmark.

…The U.S. excels in incentivizing educational attainment. The Danish welfare state promotes cognitive skills for the disadvantaged children. Policies that combine the best features of each system would appear to have the greatest benefit for promoting intergenerational mobility in terms of both income and educational attainment (pgs. 55-56).

Check it out.