Society

Lost Christianities: An Interview with Bart Ehrman

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Last week, I posted an interview with economist Thomas Sowell on his brand new book Wealth, Politics, and Poverty. At the time I was reading through the book and have since finished it. The relative popularity of the post gave me an idea:[ref]I’m almost certain the popularity had more to do with Sowell than my reading list.[/ref] I will begin posting clips from interviews and/or lectures (depending on their availability) that are based on the books I read throughout the year. Obviously, not all of these books will be published in 2016. In fact, most won’t be. Nonetheless, if you’re anything like me, you might like to know what others are reading. And if it peaks your interest, you might like to get a firm grasp of the book’s subject and potential quality prior to reading. So, I plan on making this a consistent thing.

Without further ado, here’s the next book.

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has at times been the center of public controversy due to some of his more popular books (Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted), largely for introducing pretty standard New Testament scholarship to lay readers. His Oxford-published Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, however, is one of his earlier academic publications. The book covers the history of Christian diversity and contention in the first few centuries. The debates and controversies among the chaos of early Christianity ranged from the nature of Jesus to the contents of the scriptural canon. It’s a fascinating and important history. I’d merely piecemealed the book over the last few years since I was already familiar with the sects Ehrman describes,[ref]I started studying the Gnostics on my mission when I was given a book on the Nag Hammadi library.[/ref] but I finally buckled down and read through the entire thing. Well worth it.

You can listen to a Beliefnet interview with Ehrman below.

Equal Marriage Partners, Unequal Households

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The Don Drapers of the world used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry fellow executives, who could very well earn more than they do. With more marriages of equals, reflecting deep changes in American families and society at large, the country is becoming more segregated by class.

This is how The New York Times opens an insightful article on the topic of assortative mating. The rise in assortative mating (or class segregation: take your pick) is the changing “nature of marriage itself…It used to be about the division of labor: Men sought homemakers, and women sought breadwinners. But as women’s roles changed, marriage became more about companionship, according to research by two University of Michigan economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers (who also contributes to The Upshot). Now, people marry others they enjoy spending time with, and that tends to be people like themselves…Another reason people are finding mates like themselves is that they are marrying later, so they know more about their partners’ prospects and increasingly meet at work. People were least likely to marry those with similar educational backgrounds around the 1950s…when people married very young.” This is an international trend, with “40 percent of couples in which both partners work…belong[ing] to the same or neighboring income bracket, up from 33 percent two decades ago, according to 2011 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes 34 countries. Two-thirds have the same level of education.” The article concludes,

Researchers say the rise in assortative mating is closely linked to income inequality. The two have increased in tandem, Dr. Schwartz, the sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, said: “People who are married tend to be more advantaged, and on top of that, more advantaged people are marrying people like themselves, so those people tend to be doubly advantaged.”

The effects could become more pronounced in future generations. Studies tell us that parents’ income and education have an enormous effect on children’s opportunities and achievements — and children today are more likely to grow up in homes in which parents are more similar than different.

I’ve written about assortative mating before. It is becoming more and more apparent that this is a major player in the class divisions over the last several decades.

Minimum Wage Fallacies

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minimum wage

The New Republic has an excellent article by a Stanford doctoral student in economics that argues against the fallacies of minimum wage proponents:

The first fallacy is that changes in the minimum wage do not affect the behavioral response among firms and individuals. The second fallacy is that higher wages will force companies to innovate in order to reduce costs. Both these arguments overlook some very basic, but informative, economic principles.

The first overlooks the fact that wages are designed to compensate workers for productivity. When wages are distorted, they affect the profit-maximizing decisions that businesses make. The textbook prediction, which is generally supported in the data, is that higher minimum wages reduce employment since companies restrict the number of workers they will hire. These adverse effects are especially likely given the pace of technological change and automation.

The second overlooks the fact that there are effective and ineffective ways to stimulate innovation among businesses. The idea that making hiring more costly will spur innovation is tantamount to requiring companies to reduce the size of their physical presence so they become more productive. While these types of distortions may prompt a small fraction of companies to innovate, misallocation more generally is a major factor behind cross-country differences in productivity.

Given that many advocates of a higher minimum wage do so in the name of equality, it’s notable that the author states, “My own ongoing research, which focuses on the link between such wage-setting mechanisms and company behavior, suggests labor-market distortions like raising the minimum wage can have other negative effects on workers, businesses and inequality beyond the overall impact on employment.” The reasons include reduced hours, reduced skill accumulation, and reduced investment in workers. Finally, the evidence suggests that “even in the best of worlds—where the minimum wage has no unintended side effects—it appears to only marginally reduce inequality.”

The whole thing is worth reading. Check it out.

 

The College “Experience” Cannot Be Free

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college-freshman-seniorOne of the reasons college costs so much is that American universities operate like elite private schools with extra administration. Since Germany became tuition free a couple of years ago (again), Americans have apparently been “flocking” there to take advantage of a free higher education. I have to wonder which Americans are benefiting from Germany’s generosity. How many lower-middle class and below 18 year olds do you know that would be able to get a passport, plane ticket, and housing in Germany to get one of these great free educations? According to one website, to get a German education VISA, “They will ask for proof of enrollment from the university, health insurance documentation, plus you will need to demonstrate you have access to at least 659 euro per month for the first year, or 7,908 euro total.” That’s not an enormous amount of money, compared to college education in the US, but if your parents don’t even make enough money to have Obamacare require health insurance (and you don’t either), chances are you are facing many obstructions to getting a free education in Germany. I guess if college was free in America, this wouldn’t be a problem anymore, right?

Beyond the problem of who would really benefit from free college (hint, mostly kids who could afford better early education, and thus college as well, and get into schools that will likely have lower acceptance rates), we also have to consider what free college looks like. Let’s go back to the idea that colleges behave like elite private schools. Do you attend (or does your child attend) a school with state-of-the-art facilities, recently built dorms, fantastic exercise facilities, sports teams, administrative personal for every imaginable problem, tutoring and expansive disability services, a plethora of majors, relatively small class sizes, and clubs, events, and frats galore? Did you read that list of think, “of course, that’s what real life looks like!”? No, college today is nothing like real life and that is why it is so darn expensive. You are not paying for an education, you are paying for an experience. (And considering the fact that universities are hiring more and more woefully underpaid adjuncts, you truly are not paying for an education). A free education in Germany, or most of Europe, will educate you and require you to live (or learn to live) like an adult because it strips out all of that bloat.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s horrible that schools offer these things. You have to be pretty heartless to say expansive disability services is a bad idea, and I would even say that most items on that list are good things. (I could do without frats and their unequal female counterparts, personally.) They may say the best things in life are free, the good things (or the goods) are not. So if we want affordable, or even free, higher education it needs to be significantly stripped down, just like it is in Germany. Say goodbye to dorms, food courts, many majors, any kind of small-liberal-arts experience, and even the opportunity for most to go to college. That’s right, in Germany only about 30% of students attend college, likely because the path to college is divvied out by the end of the American elementary school, and there is a quota system in each major. There is, however, excellent vocational training in Germany for those who don’t attend college. I love German reasonableness and American excess. But American excess cannot, and should not, be free. We should focus on how to provide low cost tertiary education, including vocational schools and apprenticeships, before we consider throwing taxes at it.

Without a License

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Yes, I know permits aren’t exactly the same as licenses, but it’s funny nonetheless.

I’ve blogged about occupational licensing before, citing its negative impact on upward mobility. Now Richard Reeves at the Brookings Institution adds his voice to the critics. In a brief post, he lists four ways in which occupational licensing can hinder upward economic mobility:

  1. “Since state licensing laws vary widely, a license earned in one state may not be honored in another…This licensing patchwork might explain why those working in licensed professions are much less likely to move, especially across state lines…”
  2. “In many cases, people who’ve been imprisoned face a lifetime ban on obtaining an occupational license.”
  3. “Licensing requirements impose up-front costs. The actual licensing fees are often just the tip of the iceberg; many aspiring professionals must spend time and money attending the required trade school courses. These burdens fall disproportionately on people from lower-income backgrounds.”
  4. “Licensing can act as a form of “opportunity hoarding,” allowing those with resources and connections to benefit from the higher incomes flowing from these occupations, in part by preventing others from competing with them.”

Check it out.

What Are Facts?

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This opinion piece from the New York Times popped up in my feed a couple of weeks ago: Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts by Justin P. McBrayer. It’s a pretty common sub-topic within the “kids these days” genre and it goes something like this. First, kids these days are taught that morality is subjective (often as a side-effect of misguided tolerance or non-judgmentalism efforts):

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

Second, this moral relativism leads to high rates of immoral behavior among students (e.g. cheating):

It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on.

I don’t know that there’s any direct evidence of this. For example, I don’t know of any survey that specifically asks about cheating behavior and asks about moral relativism, which would be interesting. But the link seems plausible.

McBrayer then points out that, among philosophers, moral relativism is rare:

There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare.

I was interested, so I dug around and found a survey that asked philosophers about that explicitly. Here are the results:

Accept or lean toward: moral realism 525 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: moral anti-realism 258 / 931 (27.7%)
Other 148 / 931 (15.9%)

I’m not sure that almost a quarter of philosophers accepting moral relativism makes it “rare,” but it is certainly the case that they are outnumbered more than 2:1 by philosophers who accept moral realism. That’s really interesting  me for a couple of reasons. First, conservatives often blame liberal trends among college kids on the overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere of  college campuses, but at least in this regard the students are clearly way out in front of the professors (and heading in the opposite direction). Second, in popular discussion I usually see moral objectivism / moral realism associated with simplistic religious beliefs and therefore looked down on by the cool kids of the Internet who are all convinced that evolution explains morality and therefore morality is socially constructed and relative. Newsflash: moral realism is not just for Young Earth Creationists.

McBrayer also points out that indoctrinating our kids to believe moral relativism starts early:

When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

As McBrayer points out, this is a total train wreck that conflates three distinct concepts: true vs. false, objective vs. subjective, and knowable vs. unknowable. Ontology, epistemology, and relativism are all mashed together. What about things that a person thinks that are factual and can be proven? What about statements that are objectively false but also unprovable?

Coincidentally, within day or two of reading this, my son came home with the following homework:

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It’s not quite as bad as McBrayer’s example, but it’s not good either.

I’m not really sure who to blame on this one, but it’s just another reason I try to keep a fairly close eye on what my kids get taught at school. Teaching is hard, and my kids have great teachers this year, but it’s important to let ’em know from time to time that the stuff they are taught in school has to be taken with a grain of salt.

The Capitalist Welfare State

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The merits of the social democratic Nordic countries have once again become popular in American political discourse due to their praise by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. This revival of the “U.S. vs. Sweden” debate reminds me of the following interview with Swedish economist Andreas Bergh:

Bergh presents a fairly clear view of the difference between what some have called the administrative state vs. the social insurance state.[ref]Understanding this difference has made me more open to welfare policies such as a guaranteed basic income (mainly as a replacement of current policies): an idea put forth by libertarian thinkers such as F.A. Hayek and even Milton Friedman via a negative income tax.[/ref] For those interested in his research–which is quite relevant to the current political climate–check out his aptly titled blog The Capitalist Welfare State.

Einstein Was Right

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As readers have likely heard, gravitational waves have been detected:

A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.) It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

Kids These Days

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Vox has a great article on teenage behavior compared to generations past. Despite the consistent complaint about “kids these days,” they appear to be doing better than before. After selecting my birth year (1986), it turns out that teenagers today are

  • 45% less likely to smoke
  • 30% less likely to binge drink
  • 15% less likely to have tried alcohol at all
  • 15% less likely to have sex before 13 (with 40% fewer teen girls getting pregnant)[ref]4.5 percent of teen girls got pregnant in 2001 compared to 2.5% in 2015.[/ref]
  • Slightly more likely to have had sex in the last 3 months (34% compared to 33.4%)[ref]However, this is lower than the 37% of kids in the early 1990s.[/ref]
  • Better at using birth control
  • More likely to wear a seat belt
  • Less likely to carry a weapon

This is compared to when I was a teenager, specifically a freshman/sophomore in high school. The data goes back to those born in 1972, so pick the year you were born (if you were born past 1972) and see how your generation compares to kids today.[ref]This isn’t to say that “kids these days” don’t have problems, as Jean Twenge has documented. But it should derail the narrative of a total decline in generational quality.[/ref]

Compassionate (Sentimental) Liberals, Loyal (Authoritarian) Conservatives, and Intelligent (Cold-Hearted) Libertarians

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the Cato Institute’s Emily Ekins have an incredible article on the moral psychology of different candidate supporters. The two begin with the 6 major moral foundations:

  • Care/harm: We feel compassion for those who are vulnerable or suffering.
  • Fairness/cheating: We constantly monitor whether people are getting what they deserve, whether things are balanced. We shun or punish cheaters.
  • Liberty/oppression: We resent restrictions on our choices and actions; we band together to resist bullies.
  • Loyalty/betrayal: We keep track of who is “us” and who is not; we enjoy tribal rituals, and we hate traitors.
  • Authority/subversion: We value order and hierarchy; we dislike those who undermine legitimate authority and sow chaos.
  • Sanctity/degradation: We have a sense that some things are elevated and pure and must be kept protected from the degradation and profanity of everyday life. (This foundation is best seen among religious conservatives, but you can find it on the left as well, particularly on issues related to environmentalism.)

In the graph below you can find how supporters of the various candidates scored:

Here are some highlights from Haidt and Ekins:

  • “The most obvious thing to note is that supporters of the two Democratic candidates are high [in Care], whereas supporters of most Republicans are low. This is consistent with most studies of the left-right dimension: The left values care and compassion as public or political values more than the right does. (We note that all people, and all groups, value care to some extent; we are merely looking at relative differences among groups.)…Rand Paul’s supporters score particularly low [in Care]. We have consistently found that libertarians score lower on care and compassion compared with others — indeed, they score low on almost all emotions, while scoring the highest on measures of reason, rationality, and intelligence.”
  • “As you move to the right, the bars [in Fairness] rise. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio supporters score highest on this foundation. This pattern is consistent with these candidates receiving the most support from the Tea Party. In our earlier research, we have each independently reached the conclusion that Tea Party supporters are highly motivated by the sense that the government routinely violates proportional fairness, by bailing out well-connected corporations and by spreading a safety net of welfare benefits under people they see as undeserving of help.”
  • “Not surprisingly, Rand Paul’s supporters rate [Liberty] the most important foundation, by far…More surprisingly, Bernie Sanders supporters also score high. Sanders seems to be drawing the more libertarian elements of the left, consistent with his more libertarian views on personal freedom, gun rights, and dovish foreign policy. Libertarian-minded voters seem to choose Sanders if they are on the left on economic policy, and Paul if they are on the right…Clinton supporters, in contrast to Sanders’s supporters, score slightly below the national mean. This may be one of the most important differences between the two candidates: Clinton attracts voters less concerned about individual autonomy.”
  • “Supporters of the Republican candidates tend to highly rate authority/loyalty/sanctity. Supporters of Democrats and libertarian-leaning Rand Paul do not…Sanders supporters score the lowest on these foundations and are joined not by Clinton supporters but by Paul supporters.”

But perhaps the biggest surprises?:

One surprise in our data was that Trump supporters were not extreme on any of the foundations. This means that Trump supporters are more centrist than is commonly realized; consequently, Trump’s prospects in the general election may be better than many pundits have thought. Cruz meanwhile, with a further-right moral profile, may have more difficulty attracting centrist Democrats and independents than would Trump.

One last interesting finding: Jeb Bush supporters are closest to the average American voter, despite the fact that his campaign has thus far has failed to gain any traction among Republican primary voters.

Bush’s failures may have more to do with his poor debate performances than with his moral profile, but in this time of high and rising polarization, cross-partisan hostility, and anger at elites and the establishment, Bush appears to be suffering from an excess of agreeability: He has no standout moral message that connects to any particular moral foundation, even at the risk of alienating supporters of another.

Check it out.