Over at the Brookings Institution there is a fantastic post on how cultural norms affects social mobility with numerous links to pertinent research. For example:
Neighborhood cultures that accept dropping out of high school, out-of-wedlock births, and unemployment hinder social mobility.
These cultures often lead to obesity, smoking, and other similar habits.
Religion is connected to greater social capital and mobility.
Traits like saving are rooted in community cultures.
What the chart shows is that if a man gets a lower grade (a B instead of an A) in Econ 101 his chance of majoring in econ is basically unaffected. But for women, there is a very strong and obvious correlation between their grade in Econ 101 and their willingness to major in economics. Just going from an A to an A- (still an A!) drops the likelihood of majoring in econ by about 7 points, from 42% to 35%.
This is a really important finding because it could answer the question of why so few women graduate in STEM courses, despite the fact that more women start them than men. STEM courses are much harsher than humanities, and so if you’re highly responsive to grades, you’re going to abandon STEM to get a degree in something less intimidating. But STEM courses also pay more, so women are sacrificing earnings to avoid lower grades. This could have important relevance for the gender gap, because it is pretty strong evidence that it’s not just preferences that are leading women to lower-paying jobs. As Rampell writes: “If women were changing their majors because they discovered new intellectual appetites, you’d expect to see greater flows into STEM fields, too.”
For me the big question is why women react more to grades than men do. Rampell has ideas (maybe men are overconfident? maybe they just care more about future salary than about grades?) but no solid answers. My initial reaction was to think that women might be more concerned with achievement overall, but my wife pointed out that men may be perfectionists too, but in other areas. Like sports and video games. That really made me think. After all, one major reason I never did sports much in high school was that I knew I didn’t have any amazing athletic ability, so why bother? And to this day I don’t like playing StarCraft 2 online because I know I won’t have the time to get really good at it. On the other hand, I do play a lot of Call of Duty, and I’m only mediocre at that game.
So I’m curious: what do you think makes women more sensitive to grades? And what impact do you think it is having on things like the gender gap and the lack of women in STEM careers?
There is a great post over at the Newton Blog on RealClearScience about Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was the Father of the Green Revolution. It demonstrates the difference between the Green Revolution and Green Imperialism. Starting in Mexico, he toiled “for endless hours in the lab and in the fields to breed a wheat plant that was resistant to disease, thick-stemmed, and enormously productive.” Mexico’s wheat yield was six times higher in 1963, sixteen years after Borlaug’s arrival. Ninety-five percent of Mexico’s wheat was of “Borlaug’s dwarf variety.” Developing nations began sowing Borlaug’s crop. The results? “Global yields skyrocketed. Starvation rates decreased. Doom was postponed.”
Yet, environmental lobbyists attempted to block Borlaug’s expansion into Africa. They even convinced the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to cut funding. While Borlaug was able to boost Ethiopia’s wheat yield to record levels, Africa is still steeped in starvation.
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists…” he told The Atlantic. “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
But the post doesn’t stop there. It captures perfectly what is often wrong with environmental debates:
As with most debates, this one comes down to intrinsic values. From our lofty position in the developed world, we have the luxury to value the fallacious image of pristine, untouched nature over feeding ourselves. Hunger simply isn’t something that most of us are familiar with.
“These people have never been around hungry people,” Borlaug says of people like this. “They’re Utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.”
Proselytizing is easy. But try doing it when you’re starving.
Walker recently posted on a study showing that 19th century missionary efforts had a positive, even vital effect on the development of liberal democracy.
The study focused on “conversionary Protestants,” but if we look beyond the scope of democracy, we still find that the influence of missionary group was by large a positive one. This includes ”non-conversionary” Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. Some interesting examples come from missionary efforts in 19th century Palestine, and they have something to tell us about the supposed dichotomy between science and religion, as well as the contention that religion is a corrosive, negative influence.
Missionary movements have made a very real contribution to the spread of modern medicine. As an example (though certainly not the earliest), for over half a century one of the few modern hospitals in Israel/Palestine was the one run by Scottish missionaries in Tiberias, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 1885, the young Dr. David Watt Torrance arrived as a medical missionary. His clinic was at first very small- only two rooms- and the locals were understandably suspicious of his motives. Torrance gained the confidence of the locals due to his skill and compassion, although very few took any steps toward conversion. In 1894, a proper hospital was built, and it remained in operation until 1959. Malaria and dysentery were among the most common illnesses treated at the hospital.
To give an idea of just why this was a big deal, before the medical missionary efforts traditional medicine in Palestine involved amulets, pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men, exorcisms, and bloodletting. This was true no matter to what religion or social class you belonged.
One measure of these medical missions’ success was that Jewish communities in turn made increased efforts to establish their own hospitals and clinics wherever missionaries operated as a way to counter their influence.
It is probably not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands owe their lives to the Torrances’ religion (Herbert took over from his father until his own retirement in 1953), and the number increases significantly if one takes other mission hospitals into consideration. Torrance himself paid a terrible price- he buried two wives and four children in Tiberias. It was Torrance‘s faith in God which led him to dedicate his life to improving the health and lives of Galileans, regardless of their religious denomination or convictions. Science, that is, modern medicine, was his tool, but religious faith was the motivator. What the Torrances and other medical missionaries show is that religion has often led to the spread of science in very practical ways.
We suggest that it is informative to emphasize a new dimension to the study of missions- that of the relationship between religion and belief systems and place or space. Within the missionary context this relates to the study of the impact of missionary concepts and activity on environmental and spatial change and the creation of new urban and rural landscapes. These reflect far-reaching effects that remain evident to the present.
Their study deals with two German missionary groups. The first, Protestants, founded an orphanage and school in 1860 just outside of Jerusalem for Christian victims of persecutions in Lebanon. Not only did they provide schooling, they also taught the children various practical trades employing and constantly upgrading modern methods of production.
In 1889, German Catholic missionaries purchased land at Tabgha, the traditional site of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. They established a network of schools for local Arab Christians, and an agricultural commune run by monks. They introduced a lot of modern agricultural tools and techniques, re-introduced bananas to the region, and sailed the first motor-boat on the Sea of Galilee.
The article is well worth a read, and it gives a new spin on the role of religion in progress and modernization.
Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.
So begins a recent op-ed in the Financial Times by Roger Pielke (University of Colorado) and Daniel Sarewitz (Arizona State University). The attempt to cap carbon emissions in developing countries has vast consequences for the poor:
A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.
In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . .in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources.
Or consider Pakistan, where energy shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest – as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns over carbon emissions.
This is worth considering, especially on the heels of Nathaniel’s climate science post. Science writer Matt Ridley has compared the policies proposed to address climate change to a tourniquet being used to stop a nosebleed: the bleeding is real, but the solution will do more harm than good. It is actually my acceptance of climate change that drives my support for innovation-based solutions. It strikes me as morally wrong to deny the poor energy consumption (such as a washing machine). As Pielke and Sarewitz write,
…[I]f the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern economies. Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?
Economist Deirdre McCloskey presented a paper entitled “The Great Enrichment Came and Comes From Ethics and Rhetoric” at a New Delhi conference for the Centre for Civil Society in January. The following excerpt is, in large part, why I support markets:
Free markets, that is, have not been bad for the poor of the world. The sole reliable good for the poor, on the contrary, has been the liberating and the honoring of market-tested improvement and supply. Private charity and public works, socialism and central planning, by contrast, have often made people worse off. Yet economic growth since 1800 has almost always made them better off, by enormous factors of increase. The enrichment of the poor, that is, has not come from charity or planning or protection or regulation or trade unions, all of which, despite their undoubted first-act popularity among our good friends on the left, merely redistribute a constant or a shrunken pie. The mere arithmetic shows why. If all profits in the American economy were forthwith handed over to the workers, the workers (including some amazingly highly paid “workers,” such as sports and singing stars and big-company CEOs) would be 20 percent or so better off, right now. One time only. The 20 percent is to be compared with a rise in real wages 1800 to the present by a factor of 10 or 30 or (allowing for improved quality of goods) 100, which is to say 900 or 2,900 or 9,900 percent. If we want to make the non-bosses or the poor better off by a significant amount, 9,900 percent beats 20 percent every time. At 5 percent per year market-tested improvement and supply goes beyond the one-time 20 percent in a scant four years, and then cumulates to a quadrupling.
Check it out. The third volume of her trilogy on the Bourgeois Era- (the 2nd of which is pictured above)-The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Virtuous, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect–will be out in 2015.
Back in 2011, I graduated from the University of North Texas with a BBA in Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management. My excitement over it was lackluster to say the least. I rarely mentioned my upcoming graduation in the months prior. My own sister hadn’t even been aware I was graduating until afterwards (much to her irritation). I wrote my thoughts about my business education over at The Slow Hunch, noting its pros and cons:
While it may be true that businessmen and economists alike are not as accustomed with philosophy, ethics, or literature as they should be, this does not by default mean that the philosophers opining on the state of the economy have any justification for doing so. Business majors may need to crack open the work of Aristotle, but liberal arts majors would do well to be acquainted with Economics 101. Why? Because one advantage of business education is the focus on practical application, even in management. Theory is important, but whether it actually works is critical.
I didn’t stop with just business majors, but instead commented on the state of higher education as a whole:
The critiques of business education are valid. However, before the [insert liberal arts degree] majors begin their victory dance or crowing about their more nuanced understanding of the world…it should be pointed out that this decline in business major standards is fairly typical across the board. I often quip that the bachelor degree is the new high school diploma. Given the grade inflation that has taken place over the past several decades, I think it is fair to say that higher education as a whole has suffered. Economist Richard Vedder has found that “some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.” With tuition increasing, Vedder has no problem labeling the push for more college graduates a scam. Vedder explains, “Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole.” Apparently, another type of bubble has popped: higher education.
A new report from the Lumina Foundation and Gallup fuels my pessimism:
Seven in 10 leaders say they would consider hiring someone without a degree or credential over someone with one.
Just 13% of business leaders say higher education institutions collaborate with business a great deal.
Most leaders (88%) favor an increased level of collaboration with higher education institutions.
About one in ten business leaders strongly agree that higher education institutions in this country are graduating students with the skills and competencies their business needs.
Just (14%) of executives say they are very likely to hire a candidate who has a degree from an online higher education over a candidate with a traditional higher education.
Business leaders were most likely to indicate the amount of knowledge a candidate has in the field is a very important factor to managers making hiring decisions for organizations.
For business leaders, work skills top the list of factors that should drive immigration policy decisions.[ref]”What America Needs to Know About Higher Education Redesign,” pg. 23[/ref]
There is a disconnect between what business leaders need and what higher education institutions think they are producing. A separate Gallup study for Inside Higher Ed finds that 96% of chief academic officers at higher education institutions say their institution is very or somewhat effective at preparing students for the world of work. Quite the reverse, business leaders say that college graduates do not have the skills that their particular businesses need such as applicable knowledge and applied skills in the field. Even though leaders are not yet turning to foreign-born workers when hiring, they favor increasing green card policies for foreign-born international graduate students in the U.S.
This is likely why “a strong majority of business leaders favoring an increased level of collaboration between higher education institutions and businesses. An increased level of collaboration will benefit both business leaders and higher education institutions in preparing students with the right knowledge and applied skills so that they are ready for the real world and have the best opportunity to find a good job.”
While we may be complacent in thinking the shiny degree hanging on the wall means we’re educated and highly-skilled, business leaders are providing a much-needed wake up call. It’s not about the piece of paper, but what you can actually do. In the immortal words of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, “You wanna work here — close.”
Over at The Atlantic, Brooking’s Richard Reeves argues that “the most affluent and educated Americans…are creating a new model for marriage—one that is liberal about adult roles, conservative about raising children.” Reeves calls these “high-investment parenting” marriages or HIP. “The central rationale for these marriages,” explains Reeves, “is to raise children together, in a settled, nurturing environment.” These couples “take their time to select a partner; and then, once the marriage is at least a couple of years old, take the final step and become parents. Money, marriage, maternity: in that order.” According to Reeves, this represents a new child-centric, gender-equal model of marriage.
However, a couple recent articles demonstrate that this isn’t exactly new. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute points out that far from being a product of the Industrial Revolution, “the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.” In northwestern Europe “men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property.” This led to expanding roles between genders.[ref]As historian Mary Hartman explains, “Within households, men came to depend less on their own male blood relatives and more on their wives for livelihood and support, whereas outside households they came increasingly to rely on unrelated men rather than on kin networks. Women, for their part, emerged as more active if not equal partners with their husbands in decisionmaking within households and also within their local communities . . . Husbands requiring responsible partners were obliged, however reluctantly, to abandon the image of the irrational and unruly female, and to refashion women’s image more closely to their own. . . . [t]he whole society was becoming less, not more, patriarchal, starting at the basic level of the household . . . the unity of kin and property that for thousands of years had been the central focus of most men’s worlds began to dissolve” (Quoted in V.H. Cassler, “‘Some Things That Should Not Have Been Forgotten Were Lost’: The Pro-Feminist, Pro-Democracy, Pro-Peace Case for State Privileging of Companionate Heterosexual Monogamous Marriage,” SquareTwo 2:1, Spring 2009).[/ref] Furthermore, this arrangement was “uniquely child-centered… The older brides of northwest Europe…had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child.” This means that “the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter.”
Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox notes that “family life is organized along neo-traditional lines, and has been since the 1990s, when the gender revolution stalled out in married families. It’s new in the sense that today’s married dads do a lot more child care and housework than dads of the 1950s, and that most married moms are working in the paid labor force. But it’s “traditional” in the sense that most husbands take the lead when it comes to breadwinning, and most wives take the lead when it comes to childrearing.” Married mothers still handle close to 70% of the child care and housework, while married fathers work 65% of their households’ hours in paid labor force and earn nearly 70% of their families’ income. This fits their preferences: “53 percent [of married mothers] prefer part-time work and 23 percent prefer to be stay-at-home mothers. (This stands in marked contrast to married fathers: 75 percent of them think working full-time is ideal and an additional 13 percent prefer part-time work, according to Pew data.)”
This is why “public policies and cultural norms related to work and family should be geared toward maximizing flexibility, rather than locking in approaches geared to serving full-time, dual-income families, and toward renewing the employment opportunities of poor and working-class men who have become less “marriageable” in recent years.”
Apparently, child-centeredness and adaptation of gender roles to economic circumstances and preferences aren’t all that new. We should remember that before skewering “traditional” marriage.
The Boston Globe reports on the brand new UN panel report on human rights violations in North Korea:
It has been known for years that North Korea is a totalitarian hellhole ruled by megalomaniacs who have turned the country into a vast concentration camp. Millions of North Koreans have died from starvation caused by their government’s deranged policies; millions more have been victimized by its fanatical efforts to repress any hint of independent thought, and by its merciless assaults on human dignity. But the report issued by the UN panel this month, after a year-long investigation that gathered evidence from more than 320 victims and witnesses, paints such an extensive and meticulous portrait of evil that it compares in significance, as the Washington Post observed, to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s devastating history of the Soviet labor camps, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
…“These crimes against humanity,” the report concludes, “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”
North Korean concentration camps have “lasted twice as long as the Soviet gulag did, and 12 times as long as the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and people the world over rallied for his freedom…Who rallies for the freedom of North Korea’s martyrs?”
“We should be ashamed,” says Justice Kirby, “if we do not act on this report.”
Christianity Today has an excellent article that explores “The Inconceivable Start of African-American Christianity.” It turns out that “Presbyterian theology and Anglican liturgy…held little appeal to most blacks. Not until Methodists and Baptists arrived—with their emphasis on conversion as a spiritual experience—did black Christianity begin to take off…The Great Awakening, then, planted the seed of a more experiential type of Christianity that blossomed suddenly late in the eighteenth century. Black Methodism in the U. S. grew from 3,800 in 1786 to nearly 32,000 by 1809. Membership in black Baptist congregations increased as well, from 18,000 in 1793 to 40,000 in 1813.”
The abolition movement “prompted increasingly more slave owners to take the Great Commission seriously. Slave owners wanted to prove that slaveholding could be a positive good for both owners and slaves. In 1829, the South Carolina Methodist Conference appointed William Capers to superintend a special department for plantation missions—the first official and concerted effort of the sort.” Charles Jones, “the apostle to the negro slaves” and a slave owner himself, “began a ministry to evangelize slaves and to convince others to do likewise” four years later. “Southern whites were eager to show northerners that a gentle, Christian society—slave and free—could flourish in the South.”
Despite the intentions of slave owners, slaves were nonetheless “struck by something that transcended their culture. Many of them described how they were seized by the Spirit, struck dead (so to speak), and raised to a new life. Such conversions took place in the fields, in the woods, at camp meetings, in the slave quarters, or at services conducted by the blacks themselves.” While “some of the success must be credited to white missionaries—both slave owners and abolitionists—who insisted that slaves hear at least the rudiments of the Christian message,” ultimately “the Christianity that finally took hold of black souls, that grew and blossomed in its own distinct way, and that comforted and gave hope to a sorely oppressed people, was a different thing altogether than what whites had imagined. It was in some sense created and nurtured by blacks themselves, who refused to let whites frame their faith.”
Over at the Brookings Institution there is a fantastic post on how cultural norms affects social mobility with numerous links to pertinent research. For example:
