Society

Manhattan Institute: New Volume on Income Inequality

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A brand new volume of essays on income inequality was recently published by the Manhattan Institute and is available for free online. Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth introduces the volume with the following:

Claims of ever-increasing shares of wealth going to top earners are a perennial complaint. This year, partly due to the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, discussions of inequality are preoccupying policymakers and political pundits.

Today Economics21.org is releasing Income Inequality in America: Fact and Fiction, a series of essays from leading experts on different aspects of measuring inequality. For Winston Churchill, inequality was an unavoidable part of economic life in capitalist societies. “The main vice of capitalism,” said the British Prime Minister, whose youngest daughter, Lady Mary Soames, died last weekend at the age of 91, “is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.”

In conclusion, she states, “Empirical analysis shows that many commonly accepted ideas about income inequality are false or overstated. If policy recommendations are to be effective, they must be informed by an accurate picture of the current situation. Income Inequality in America: Fact and Fiction offers the empirical tools for such an analysis.”

Check it out.

The Slow Hunch: Joseph Spencer’s Monastic Zion

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Philosopher Joseph Spencer’s new book For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope was published just this week by Greg Kofford Books. In one chapter, he compares the earliest revelations on what Mormons know as the Law of Consecration to medieval Christian monasticism. The analogy is one that I’ve been tinkering with for a few months, so I was thrilled to see it in Spencer’s book. In a new post at The Slow Hunch, I explore Spencer’s analogy by applying some economic work that has been done on the monastic tradition (Spoiler: it involves both “spiritual capital” and divine curses that protect property rights).

Check it out.

“Tank Man” After 25 Years

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Chris Henrichsen at Approaching Justice posted this fantastic video from Amnesty International. Twenty-five years ago today, the still unknown “Tank Man” took his stand.

Just because China wants to forget doesn’t mean we should.

Reason.com: Video Game Nation

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The libertarian website Reason.com has a special collection of articles and videos on video games coinciding with the June 2014 issue of their magazine. I’ve never been a huge gamer, mainly because I wasn’t allowed to have a video game system growing up. But I’ve always loved them when I had the chance to play. I especially became interested in their impact on people after reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. I even recently bought Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit. I don’t see them as the “waste of time” that I was often told they were.

Reason‘s collection looks at the interaction of gaming and society from various angles. Check it out.

BYU: Bastion of Liberalism

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Damon Linker has an interesting article in The Week relaying his teaching experience at Brigham Young University:

The combination of crusading moral indignation and hypersensitive self-protectiveness has the potential to stamp out genuine liberalism at some schools, transforming them into institutions devoted to insulating students from provocation and free thinking rather than to exposing them to it.

…In my experience, liberalism in the classical sense often thrives where many scholars and academics would least expect to find it — in institutions of higher learning that are unlikely to get swept up in the illiberal currents currently washing over so many of the nation’s campuses. I’m talking about schools with deep, serious religious commitments.

I happened to spend two years in the late 1990s teaching at one of these schools — Brigham Young University, wholly owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and it was a clarifying experience.

Check out the full article for his admittedly surprising (even to this active Mormon) experience.

Americans Don’t Know Global Poverty Has Declined

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Americans are missing out on one of the greatest stories in the history of mankind:

According to a recent Barna Group survey…more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) are unaware global poverty has  [decreased by more than half in the past 30 years]. More than two-thirds (67%) say they thought global poverty was on the rise over the past three decades.

Similarly, while both child deaths and deaths caused by HIV/AIDS have decreased worldwide, many Americans wrongly think these numbers are on the rise: 50% of US adults believe child deaths have increased since 1990, and 35% believe deaths from HIV/AIDS have increased in the past five years.

Despite the very real good news, more than two-thirds of US adults (68%) say they do not believe it’s possible to end extreme global poverty within the next 25 years. Sadly, concern about extreme global poverty—defined in this study as the estimated 1.4 billion people in countries outside the US who do not have access to clean water, enough food, sufficient clothing and shelter, or basic medicine like antibiotics—has declined from 21% in 2011 to 16% in 2013.

It turns out that practicing Christians are more likely to believe it’s possible to end extreme global poverty in the next 25 years: “Practicing Christians under 40 are the most optimistic at nearly half (48%), with practicing Christians over 40 slightly higher than the general population (37%) compared to 32% of all adults).” But people are hesitant to give more for reasons ranging from belief in the inevitability of poverty’s existence to distrust in corrupt foreign governments. [ref]Unfortunately, the Barna Group doesn’t even mention the impact of liberalized markets and globalization on extreme poverty. This is exactly what Nathaniel and I cover in our SquareTwo article.[/ref]

Check out the full article.

The Inequality Illusion?

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Economists Wojciech Kopczuk and Allison Schrager have a Foreign Affairs article with the eye-catching title “The Inequality Illusion.” The two argue that “imposing a tax on wealth is a terrible way to promote equality. It actually benefits the super wealthy the most.” They continue:

What is not widely understood is that the growth in income inequality [in the U.S.] has been driven almost entirely by earned income, that is, what people are paid for their work rather than what they earn on their investments. 

Wealth inequality refers to the stock of people’s assets. It represents the accumulation of saved income and returns on investments over the years. Some wealth inequality is inevitable, even desirable, because wealth represents a lifetime of saving and not just luck or opportunity. Extreme income inequality can beget extreme wealth inequality because people with a lot of income, if they save, can amass large fortunes and pass them on to their children. But over time, such wealth can also dissipate as people leave it to multiple children, get married and divorced, develop expensive lifestyles, contribute to charities, or make poor investment decisions. Whereas income inequality has clearly worsened, the recent evidence about wealth inequality is much less convincing.

After reviewing a number of sources, they declare, “Taken together, then, the economic evidence points to increased earnings inequality but to a much more benign picture of changes in wealth inequality. Increasing inequality has been driven by income earners not necessarily by the entrenched wealth holders.”

Given the recent controversy over errors in Thomas Piketty’s data (errors that may or may not undermine his argument),[ref]The FT analysis is likely the most famous (update: Financial Times has a follow-up post), but others have found some major errors as well. For example, former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor Diana Furchtgott-Roth has pointed out Piketty’s errors in the history of the U.S. minimum wage. Economist Randall Holcombe has written on the “fundamental problems with the way [Piketty] depicts capital.” Inequality expert Scott Winship has two articles in Forbes that are also quite critical of Piketty. Economist Robert Murphy disputes Piketty’s tax history. In response to a recent Spectator article contrasting Deirdre McCloskey and Piketty, GMU economist Don Boudreaux writes, “[I]ndispensable to our modern prosperity is not only the innovative creation of capital but also the continual destruction of capital that such successful innovation entails…What is destroyed is not only some jobs (e.g., t.v. repairman) and the value of some consumer goods (e.g., crutches for polio victims) and services (e.g., postal delivery), but also the value of capital. Capitalism’s nature is not, contrary to Piketty’s claim, to forever protect and augment existing capital.  Central to capitalism’s nature is what McCloskey calls “market-tested innovation.”  And this innovation inevitably destroys the value of older, less-productive capital that is in competition with with it – in competition with the new capital, the new goods, the new production and consumption processes, and the new knowledge that innovative entrepreneurs create.” Update: A brand new paper out of Yale disputes Piketty’s “second law of capitalism.”[/ref] the above article is quite timely.

Check it out.

The Slow Hunch: Gratitude and Grace at Work

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Gratitude and grace are subjects I’ve written on before, but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly connected it with work. My latest post at The Slow Hunch does just this. It was disheartening to learn (based on a survey by the John Templeton Foundation) that work is the place at which people are least likely to express or feel gratitude. But business organizations are human institutions and thus have the potential to be islands of human meaning and progress. There is plenty to be grateful for in one’s employment. Expressing it not only benefits individuals, but the organization as a whole.

Check out the post to see how.

Mike Rowe On Political Partisanship

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2014-05-26 Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe is best known as the host of the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs, but I’ve noticed he’s been writing about politics more and more these days, and I like what he has to say. Here’s a story he shared, along with the photo above, on Facebook recently.[ref]I checked, and the photo is actually from July 2013. So I heard about it recently, but it’s an old story. Still good, though.[/ref]

[Bob Reidel: “Mike – Saw you hangin with Bill Maher. I had no idea you were a liberal. Really blew me away. Love everything you do but now that I know who you really are, I won’t be tuning in to watch anything your involved with.”]

Well, hi there, Bob. How’s it going? Since your comment is not the only one of its kind, I thought I’d take a moment to address it.

Bill Maher is opinionated, polarizing and controversial. I get it. So is Bill O’Reilly, which is probably why I heard the same comments after I did his show. (“How could you Mike? How could you?”)

Truth is, every time I go on Fox, my liberal friends squeal. And every time I show up on MSNBC, my conservative pals whine. Not because they disagree with my position – everyone agrees that closing the skills gap is something that needs to happen. No, these days, people get bent simply if I appear on shows they don’t like, or sit too close to people they don’t care for.

What’s up with that? Is our country so divided that my mere proximity to the “other side” prompts otherwise sensible adults to scoop up their marbles and go home?

Back in 2008, I wrote an open letter to President Obama, offering to help him promote those 3 million “shovel-ready” jobs he promised to create during his campaign. (I suspected they might be a tough sell, given our country’s current relationship with the shovel.) Within hours, hundreds of conservatives accused me of “engaging with a socialist,” and threatened to stop watching Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe if I didn’t come to my senses.

When I made the same offer to Mitt Romney (who actually responded), thousands of liberals chastised me for “engaging with a greedy capitalist,” and threatened to stop watching Dirty Jobs if I didn’t take it back.

You may ask, “But what did these people think about the issue at hand?” Who knows? They were too busy being outraged by my proximity to the devil. (Poor Ed Shultz at MSNBC nearly burst into tears. “You were on the wrong stage, Mike! The wrong stage!! With the wrong candidate!!!”)

Oy.

Here’s the thing, Bob – Profoundly Disconnected (http://profoundlydisconnected.com/) is not a PR campaign for Mike Rowe. It’s a PR campaign for skilled labor and alternative education. PR campaigns need … that’s right, PR, and if I limit my appearances to those shows that I personally watch, hosted only by those personalities with whom I personally agree, I might as well start a church and preach to the choir.

Point is, I didn’t go on Real Time to endorse BM, and I didn’t go on The Factor to endorse BO. I went on because millions of people watch those shows. I approached our liberal president for the same reason. Likewise, his conservative opponent. And I showed up on Sesame Street with the same agenda that I took to Congress.

Closing the skills gap is bigger than you or me or any particular venue, and Real Time gave me an opportunity to reach 5 million people. I’m grateful for that, and I’ll do it again if they want me back.

As for Bill Maher off-camera, you’ll be pleased to know that the guy was a perfect gentleman. His staff is excellent, and his after-party included an open bar with a spread I’ve never seen in such a setting. Bill took the time to hang out with his guests and their friends after the show, chatting about this and that for over an hour, and taking pictures with anyone who wanted one. Trust me, that’s rare.

Yes, he’s outrageous, inflammatory, and to many, a jagged little pill. But he’s also gracious, generous, engaging, and taller than he appears on TV.

Which, frankly, surprised me.

The world could use a few more guys and gals like Mike Rowe.

Looking for Racism on the Right: A Case Study

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2014-05-23 Townson U

There’s a story percolating through the right wing blogosphere right now about the victory of Townson U in a national debate contest “by repeating N-word and babbling nonsense.” The fact that the winning team consists of two black females is never mentioned explicitly[ref]By the right wing blog posts that I’ve read. It is mentioned by others reporting on the story.[/ref], but race is obviously a part of this story. The (unspoken) gist of it appears to be something like: black students who are not actually competent at debate got an award because of political correctness. To back that up, the blog posts feature transcripts and YouTube videos of the debate, like this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCx2uGBhvEc

That video contrasts the two young ladies in a news story, where they speak articulately and calmly, with clips of their emotional and quite frankly weird speech during the debate. It’s an ugly video because of what it implies instead of having the courage to say. The cuts are obviously designed to undermine what the young ladies say to the reporter with seemingly contradictory excerpts from their debate performance. For example, the reporter asks, “Once you know the topic, what’s next?” One of the women replies, “Well, you do a lot of research.” And then there’s an immediate cut to the debate right at the point where one of the speakers is stuttering heavily. Race is never mentioned, but the point is clear.

Now, I approached this story without any special inside info. I’ve never debated competitively, nor have I ever seen a competitive debate. But I decided to do the one thing that the conservative bloggers apparently decided to skip. Research.

I started with two hypotheses that might explain the apparent contradiction between assumptions about what a national championship debate team might sound like and the jarring YouTube footage. Either this was in some sense an “urban” form of debate or, more likely, the timing rules of competitive debate forced competitors to adopt really strange, unnatural speech patterns. It’s not hard at all for me to imagine, for example, that competitors are judged purely based on the content of their argument and not so much their delivery and/or that the expectations for content delivery are much different in a competitive setting.

I started with the first one because while it seemed less likely, it would be easy to check. Is the Cross Examination Debate Association a minority-focused group? No, it is not.Founded in 1971, it is “the largest intercollegiate policy debate association in the United States.”

So I went to my second hypothesis and decided the simplest thing to do would be to check on the winners from last year. If I got a video of some white competitors using roughly the same kind of speech, I’d kill two birds with one stone. Clearly, if last year’s competitors were white, there wouldn’t be some kind of obvious minority-preference and secondly, if this is how the teams from last year sounded then it would strongly indicate that what we’re hearing has nothing to do with race and is just the way competitive debate works. I searched YouTube and, on the first try, hit the jackpot. Here’s a video called: “More CEDA 2013 Debate Highlights.” A couple of things to note before you watch it:

  1. It features two teams consisting of three white women and one white man.
  2. It represents the “highlights,” so ostensibly this is what competitive debaters find impressive.
  3. It does, indeed, feature the exact same speech: very fast, slurred technical terms, rapid-fire breathing, and weird stuttering.

So let’s recap. In 2013, and probably in many years before that, white kids won a debate contest that, by its competitive nature, seems to require participants to speak in really, really weird ways. No one cared. In 2014, black women won the debate contest using the same tactics, but suddenly conservative writers noticed, [ref]Which isn’t, in and of itself, racist. They tend to keep an eye on political correctness and are often not wrong.[/ref] and they wrote off the bizarre-sounding speech as “unintelligible gibberish” without checking to see if that’s just how debates work.

So: assumptions about folks being less intelligent and/or less capable of speaking standard English because they are black. Yup, that looks like racism to me.

Am I missing something here?