Society

Scholarship or “Scholarship”?

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A group of academics performed another Sokalesque sting operation, but took it to eleven with multiple articles in multiple journals.

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The authors explain,

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

How did they come up with ideas for papers?:

Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankensteinand Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.

At other times, we scoured the existing grievance studies literature to see where it was already going awry and then tried to magnify those problems. Feminist glaciology? Okay, we’ll copy it and write a feminist astronomy paper that argues feminist and queer astrology should be considered part of the science of astronomy, which we’ll brand as intrinsically sexist. Reviewers were very enthusiastic about that idea. Using a method like thematic analysis to spin favored interpretations of data? Fine, we wrote a paper about trans people in the workplace that does just that. Men use “male preserves” to enact dying “macho” masculinities discourses in a way society at large won’t accept? No problem. We published a paper best summarized as, “A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists.” “Defamiliarizing,” common experiences, pretending to be mystified by them and then looking for social constructions to explain them? Sure, our “Dildos” paper did that to answer the questions, “Why don’t straight men tend to masturbate via anal penetration, and what might happen if they did?” Hint: according to our paper in Sexuality and Culture, a leading sexualities journal, they will be less transphobic and more feminist as a result.

We used other methods too, like, “I wonder if that ‘progressive stack’ in the news could be written into a paper that says white males in college shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class (or have their emails answered by the instructor), and, for good measure, be asked to sit in the floor in chains so they can ‘experience reparations.’” That was our “Progressive Stack” paper. The answer seems to be yes, and feminist philosophy titan Hypatia has been surprisingly warm to it. Another tough one for us was, “I wonder if they’d publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” The answer to that question also turns out to be “yes,” given that the feminist social work journal Affilia has just accepted it. As we progressed, we started to realize that just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

What were the results? 7 papers were accepted (including one recognition of excellence), 2 were revised and resubmitted, 1 was still under review, 4 were in limbo, and 6 were rejected. Here are a few highlights:

The put it crudely, the paper argued that men should have the “rape culture” trained out them in ways similar to dogs. Reviewers described it as an “incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, and extremely well-written and organized given the incredibly diverse literature sets and theoretical questions brought into conversation.” More telling, the editor wrote to them,

As you may know, GPC is in its 25th year of publication. And as part of honoring the occasion, GPC is going to publish 12 lead pieces over the 12 issues of 2018 (and some even into 2019). We would like to publish your piece, Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon, in the seventh issue. It draws attention to so many themes from the past scholarship informing feminist geographies and also shows how some of the work going on now can contribute to enlivening the discipline. In this sense we think it is a good piece for the celebrations. I would like to have your permission to do so.”

To sum up, the paper argues that social justice warriors shouldn’t be made fun of, but that they maintain the right to make fun of others. One reviewer wrote, “Given the emphasis on positionality, the argument clearly takes power structures into consideration and emphasizes the voice of marginalized groups, and in this sense can make a contribution to feminist philosophy especially around the topic of social justice pedagogy.” Another thought it was an “Excellent and very timely article!” 

Bottom-line: feminazi is apparently a thing. The reviewers found it “interesting,” stating that the “framing and treatment of both neoliberal and choice feminisms well grounded.” In their view, the paper had “potential to generate important dialogue for social workers and feminist scholars.”

If you will excuse the language, this is why others have referred to this brand of scholarship as scholarsh*t.

You can see what other academics are saying about the hoax here.

Lie To Me…Cause I Probably Can’t Tell

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Over at FiveThirtyEight, there is a nice rundown of the research on detecting liars. “[R]esearch suggests,” it reads,

our interpretations of testimony like Kavanaugh’s, or Christine Blasey Ford’s earlier on Thursday, will be shaped by what we already believe. The Kavanaugh confirmation fight and Ford’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her are taking place in a political context, tapping into partisan identities. But even without those particular biases, humans just aren’t very good at reading people. And that’s why testimony is “no substitute for a good, solid, thorough investigation and finding of the facts,” said Brian Fitch, a psychologist and retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s lieutenant.


In other words, we were never going to get a better idea of whether Kavanaugh was telling the truth by watching him speak. (He’s denied all the allegations against him.) That’s just not how the human brain works, said Judee Burgoon, director of human communication research at the University of Arizona. That’s because our ability to identify a lie is poor — no betterthan chance, in fact. “The best estimate, and that’s from a lot of studies all accumulated, is that we’re about 54 percent accurate,” she told me. “That’s about equivalent to flipping a coin.”


Both she and Fitch said that there’s no twitchy tell, no revealing behavior, that is indicative of lying or truth-telling. Partly, Fitch said, that’s because behavior is culturally mediated. When we all live in the same culture, people who want to lie know what behaviors might make them look more or less credible, as much as the people who are watching for those behaviors.

How about people who are supposed to detect lies, like judges, police officers, or custom agents? “Studies show they believe themselves to be betterthan chance at spotting liars. But the same studies show they aren’t, Alcock said. And that makes sense, he told me, because the feedback they get misleads them. Customs agents, for instance, correctly pull aside smugglers for searches just often enough to reinforce their sense of their own accuracy. But “they have no idea about the ones they didn’t search who got away,” Alcock said.” It also turns out that “it’s possible to interview someone in a way that creates inconsistencies and credibility issues that weren’t there originally. Because of this potential, there have been efforts to change the way law enforcement officers conduct interviews, particularly of people from vulnerable groups, including victims of traumatic violence.” What’s more, political “bias probably plays a big role in situations where we’re testing the trustworthiness of people under politically charged circumstances, and some studies have shown that it can have as strong an impact as the biases we carry related to race.” 

The article concludes,

Given what we know about how humans interpret the behavior of other humans — and how bad we are at doing that accurately — it should be no surprise that there appears to be a strong partisan split in how both politicians and regular people viewed Kavanaugh’s testimony. In fact, Burgoon said, this is why you generally want more layers of information in an investigation. You’re not going to learn the “truth” based on somebody’s body language. “I think that’s part of the desire for an FBI investigation, because the FBI would produce a more impartial rendering,” she said. Indeed, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, a crucial swing vote, asked on Friday for the full Senate vote on Kavanaugh to be delayed a week so that the FBI could produce just such a rendering. Of course, as Burgoon added, not everyone is going to believe the FBI’s findings either.

If you generally identify on the political left and found Ford’s testimony “credible” or if you generally identify on the political right and found Kavanaugh’s testimony “compelling”, then there was likely nothing credible, compelling, or rational about how you came to that conclusion. [ref]This doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You may very well be right about Ford/Kavanaugh. It just means you’re irrationally biased.[/ref] It was more likely political hooliganism in action.

Does More Education Mean Less Religion?

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It depends. In a recent article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, sociologist Philip Schwadel finds that the effects of education depend on religious context during adolescence:

Results show that higher education is particularly likely to lead to religious decline for mainline Protestants and those with religiously active parents, and to increases in religiosity for the religiously unaffiliated and those with parents who infrequently attend religious services. Unaffiliated emerging adults and those from homes with parents who rarely attend religious services are, on average, less religious than other emerging adults, but, unlike most other emerging adults, they are likely to increase in their religiosity if they go to college. These findings demonstrate how the religious context in adolescence conditions the influence of education, both positive and negative influences (pg. 870).

In short, “the widespread view that education “erodes” religion (Johnson 1997) does not apply equally to all emerging adults, and the religious context in adolescence is one dimension along which it varies” (pg. 882).

This expounds on Schwadel’s previous work. For example, his 2016 article in The Sociological Quarterly found that “graduating from college is associated with declines in prayer, religious certainty, and especially religious belief during emerging adulthood” (pg. 778). However, he also found that “the highly educated are relatively likely to attend religious services. These results suggest that church pews are now disproportionately filled with college-educated young adults, many of who question key religious beliefs. This comports with a long tradition of sociological research (e.g., Fukuyama 1961; Roof 1976) that emphasizes that college students, and the college-educated more generally, often compartmentalize religion to weekend services and holidays (for more recent examples, see Campbell 2005; Clydesdale 2007)” (pg. 779).

When he did a 2015 cross-national analysis, Schwadel found that while those with university degrees had lower levels of religiosity overall, “sex, marital status, and age have considerably larger effects on religiosity than does higher education” (pg. 414).[ref]In a 2018 study, Schwadel writes, “On average, men are more likely than women, non-married are more likely than married, and young adults are more likely than the elderly to have no religious affiliation, but the extent and even existence of these differences varies from nation to nation. This comports with Hayes (2000) analysis of variation in the factors predicting non-affiliation across 10 Western, Christian nations. Going beyond Hayes’ analysis, the results here suggest that demographic differences in the likelihood of non-affiliation are most pronounced in nations with low levels of religious regulation… [H]igh levels of religious regulation are associated with lower levels of non-affiliation, and fewer differences by age, gender, and marital status as the potential consequences of non-affiliation are more severe in many of those nations” (pg. 267).[/ref] Furthermore, “the average level of higher education in each nation is not associated with individual religiosity” (pg. 414). In fact, GDP per capita has a much stronger, negative effect on religiosity than average levels of higher education. Most telling, however,  is the fact that “the effect of university degree ranges from robustly negative to positive. The largest negative effects of university degree are in Israel (b = −.427) and Italy (b = −.409). University degree has a relatively strong, positive effect (b > .16) in Sweden, New Zealand, and South Korea. Overall, the effect of university degree is positive and significant (p < .05) in 9 nations, negative and significant in 18 nations, and has no significant effect in 12 nations” (pg. 411). 

What’s more,

the negative effect of higher education on religiosity is more robust in relatively religious nations. This is evident both from the negative correlation between the random slope for university degree and the adjusted mean of religiosity (i.e., intercept), and from the positive interaction between university degree and the mean with no religion in each nation. These findings appear to support the diffusion argument that the highly educated are innovators and early adopters (Rogers 2003) of new ways of being religious (or irreligious) but that secularity then diffuses to the less-educated segments of the population. As Elias (2000) suggests in regards to attributes associated with the upper classes (e.g., manners), secularity may be a form of status differentiation for the highly educated in relatively religious nations, but it cannot serve that function in relatively irreligious nations (pg. 415).

All of this complicates the narrative of “more education = less religion.” Even Pew’s research from last year–which is often thrown out as evidence of the religiosity-killing nature of education–doesn’t vindicate the common narrative. While college-educated Americans are more likely to, say, identify as “atheist/agnostic”, their religious affiliation and church attendance is about the same as those who never finished/attended college.

College graduates, non-grads report attending religious services at similar rates

For Christians with college degrees, their religious commitment is basically the same as Christians without them. In fact, the college-educated Christian is more likely to attend weekly religious services than their less-educated fellow devotees. 

College-educated Christians about as observant as Christians with less education

A 2007 study actually found that “it is the respondents who did not go to college who exhibit the highest rates of diminished religiosity. Those with the highest level of education – the respondents with at least a bachelor’s degree – are the least likely to curtail.their church attendance. They are followed by those with an associate’s degree, then by four-year college students, and then two-year college students. The most educated are also the least likely to report a decrease in religion’s importance, although those who attended college but did not finish also report low levels of decline in religious salience” (pg. 1677).[ref]The three dimensions of religiosity included (1) decline in religious service attendance, (2) decline in importance of religion, and (3) disaffiliated from religion.[/ref] The researchers also found that “cohabitors are the most likely individuals to report each type of religious decline,” while married persons “are the least likely to report each type of decline” (pg. 1677). Premarital sex and marijuana use was also associated with declines in religiosity. Schwadel’s 2011 study also found that education “has a positive effect on religious participation, emphasizing the importance of religion, and supporting the rights of religious authorities to influence people’s votes. Increases in education do not diminish devotional activities or belief in the afterlife, though highly educated Americans disproportionately lean towards belief in a higher power rather than definite belief in God” (pg. 178).

But does education at least lead to more liberal religious beliefs? A 2011 study found[ref]The measures of religious liberalization include (1) more unorthodox, (2) more naturalistic, (3) more uncertain, (4) more reserved when it comes to converting others, (5) more inclusive of other religious claims, (6) more individualistic, and (7) more independent of institutions.[/ref]

contrary to longstanding scholarly wisdom, attending college appears to have no liberalizing effect on most dimensions of religious belief. In fact, on some measures, college students appear to liberalize less than those who never attended college. College students are less likely to stop believing in a personal god and less likely to stop believing in the propriety of conversion attempts. On the other hand, they are more likely to develop doubts about their religious beliefs. In the main, however, the effect of college on students’ religious beliefs appears to be extremely weak. Although significant  minorities of emerging adults become more liberal in their religious beliefs, college itself does not appear to be the culprit. College students do not liberalize any more than those who do not go to college.

In fact, the case for the null (and perhaps protective) effects of college on traditional religious belief is even stronger than it appears from these results. In supplementary analyses (not shown), college attendance also failed to predict differences on six other variables measuring religious beliefs. College students are also no more likely than non-students to stop believing in a judgment day, stop believing in an afterlife, stop believing in angels, stop believing in demons (except in the final two models, where social networks appear to suppress a positive effect of college attendance), become more uncertain about the existence of God, or abandon the belief that active congregational participation is a necessary aspect of being religious. Thus, on 10 out of 13 possible beliefs, attending college shows no net liberalizing effect before accounting for social networks; on two others, college appears to support traditional beliefs; on only one outcome – increased religious doubt – does college appear to undermine traditional religious belief. In the debate over how college influences religious beliefs, this study overwhelmingly supports those who claim that its influence is largely negligible, and perhaps even somewhat protective of traditional religious belief (pg. 199-200).

Basically, when it comes to education and religion, it’s complicated. 

Ford & Kavanaugh: I’m not on a side, I’m just tired.

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Random thoughts:

It is not at all strange to me that Ford would not go public with these accusations before now. Most women who have experienced sexual assault don’t tell anyone even privately about it, much less go public, much less go public in such a politically polarized context. If I were her I would want to avoid it all too, and I’d also feel conflicted if the person who assaulted me was about to be handed such incredible power. The fact that Ford didn’t speak up before now in no way invalidates her claims, to my mind.

I also think it’s significant that there’s evidence she was talking about this experience at least as far back as 2012, because that fact undermines the idea that this is all some ad hoc plot to stop Kavanaugh. I don’t think it’s weird that she didn’t use his specific name at the time. I could hardly stand to say the name of the dude from my past and he was in no way powerful or famous.

I also don’t think it’s strange that she’s hazy on a lot of details. I’ve seen so many posts—including a lot of posts from sexual assault victims—claiming a victim basically never forgets and if she were telling the truth she’d remember everything. That is just not accurate. Human memory is notoriously imprecise and fallible. We know from the work of the Innocence Project that many people have been imprisoned based largely on eyewitness testimony that was incorrect, and that’s not to say eyewitnesses were lying per se. In many cases they were probably entirely sincere, but there are many psychological biases that can make our memories false. Add to that decades since the event. It’s not weird that she doesn’t remember how she got there or left, in my opinion. I am much younger than she and I am very fuzzy on many high school memories and I was sober the entire time too.

That said, human memory is notoriously imprecise and fallible, so it’s a problem that there appears to be no corroborating evidence of Ford’s account. I think it’s pretty significant that none of the people she said were present have corroborated her. I doubt Ford is lying. I don’t think she’s acting out of partisan politics. But I am not as certain that she’s right.

And then there’s Kavanaugh. His opening statement was more passionate than I expected. He behaved the way a man falsely accused might be expected to behave. Then again I have known men who seemed quite likable, who you’d never believe would do something like that, and they totally have. Or, as a somewhat tangential example, it reminds me of Rod Dreher’s article about how his family very painfully left the Catholic church after discovering that a priest they specifically liked had a history of sexual assault allegations, and Dreher and his wife realized they couldn’t rely on their instincts: they would have had no idea and their parish warned no one. Predators can be very convincing. You can’t tell just based on apparent righteous indignation. I think both an innocent man and a guilty one would behave that way. I’ll admit there were moments when I felt a bit sorry for Kavanaugh but then I kept coming back to the fact that his emotional displays, in my opinion, don’t really tell us anything.

That’s not even getting into the fact that he may 100% believe he’d done nothing even when he had. It was decades ago, and, once again, human memory is very fallible, even more so if it’s true he was drinking a lot. In my personal experience and being familiar with the personal experiences of others, certain types of men can unequivocally cross a line and truly not view it that way at the time or remember it that way later. I have seen this. So just as Ford could be 100% sincere and also wrong, so could Kavanaugh.

That’s the really irritating thing about the hearing yesterday (9/26). At no point did I believe, for the politicians there, that this was about truth-finding. And it was quite clear listening to them go on. So much grandstanding, using their question time to make long-winded political statements, asking questions people have asked many times over, etc. It mostly seemed like attempts to paint Kavanaugh as either innocent or guilty (depending on who was talking) or an attempt to, through talking to Kavanaugh, paint the other side of the aisle as terrible. Very little of it seemed like a genuine attempt to dig into anything.

I will say I thought Lindsey Graham’s enraged outburst seemed sincere and that resonated with me. I also appreciated Amy Klobuchar and Chris Coons. They asked a lot of the same types of things their fellow Democrats asked, but they seemed like they actually wanted to know and weren’t just making power plays. I thought they handled themselves really well.

Other than those three, I could hardly stand listening to anyone, particularly Whitehouse and Harris, ugh. That’s all I have to say about that.

Also Kavanaugh was way too evasive. There were so many instances when he was so transparently not answering the question and it just seemed foolish to me because it didn’t even matter. Like when Whitehouse pressed Kavanaugh on some entry in his yearbook about ralphing. Just say yes! You drank in high school and at least once you puked from it. Too many beers. You already admitted repeatedly to drinking and sometimes to having too much. Stop dragging this out.

And the FBI investigation! Wow, was I tired of hearing about that. I really don’t understand why Kavanaugh couldn’t just say “An FBI investigation will repeat what we are already doing here, thus dragging out this hell for my family and me and providing no new or useful information. So no, if we can skip the FBI investigation, let’s do that.” The end. That would have been far less damning then so obviously refusing to answer the question.

I do think it’s ridiculous that people think Kavanaugh’s displays of emotion disqualify him from consideration for SCOTUS. I doubt there is a SCOTUS justice now or ever before that could remain dispassionate much less impartial under such terrible accusations and such a circus of a process. They’re judges, not robots. They are human. They don’t usually decide on cases that impact them immediately and directly so it seems unlikely the circumstances that pushed Kavanaugh to get upset would recur as a SCOTUS justice.

In the end I feel sorry for Ford, frustrated with Kavanaugh, but more than anything disgusted with politicians and this whole farce of a process. To my mind it is transparently political, and also unlikely to actually change any minds. Whatever happens I’ll be glad when the vote is over, but also whatever happens at least one side of the country is going to be absolutely livid, and I feel like this entire situation has made us even more partisan and angry at one another. I am exhausted even thinking about it.

The Potential Costs of Climate Change

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I’ve written about the economic cost of climate change before. Economist Tyler Cowen recently made a similar observation:

I am struck by the costs of climate change suggested in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, hardly a source of denialism. Its cost estimate — “1 to 5% of GDP for 4°C of warming” — is relatively reassuring. After all, global GDP is right now growing at more than 4 percent a year. If climate change cost “only” 4 percent of GDP on a one-time basis, then the world economy could make up those costs with less than a year’s worth of economic growth. In essence, the world economy would arrive at a given level of wealth about a year later than otherwise would have been the case. That sounds expensive but not tragic.

And yet, Cowen recognizes that this may “not [be] the right way to conceptualize the problem.” Having opened his piece with recent examples of irrational responses to legitimate, if relatively minor, problems–Brexit in response to EU bureaucracy, Trump’s election in response to immigration and trade issues–Cowen explains, 

Think of the 4 percent hit to GDP, if indeed that is the right number, as a highly unevenly distributed opening shot. That’s round one, and from that point on we are going to react with our human foibles and emotions, and with our highly imperfect and sometimes corrupt political institutions. (Libertarians, who are typically most skeptical of political solutions, should be the most worried.)

Considering how the Syrian crisis has fragmented the EU as well as internal German politics, is it so crazy to think that climate change might erode international cooperation all the more? The true potential costs of climate change are just beginning to come into view.

I’d say that we just need to educate people more, but given (1) the amount of political ignorance despite rising levels of education and (2) the general ineffectiveness of our education systems in this regard, I don’t think that will help much. 

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Economic Freedom of the World Report: 2018

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The Fraser Institute just published its Economic Freedom of the World 2018 Annual Report, which looks at data from 2016. The degree of economic freedom is measured using 5 broad areas:

  1. size of government (expenditures, taxes, enterprises)
  2. legal structure and property rights (which now includes the Gender Disparity Index)
  3. access to sound money
  4. freedom to trade internationally
  5. regulation of credit, business, and labor

The ten most economically free countries are:

And what are the benefits of economic freedom? 

But I’m sure we’ll continue to hear about how we need to roll back our economic freedom because reasons. 

Does Economics Explain the Rise of the Swedish Radical Right?

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As of late, I’ve been writing about populism and its causes. Economic reasons have been largely dismissed in various mainstream outlets and they have plenty of studies supporting the claim. However, it is very difficult to separate economic change from cultural change. What’s more, economic shifts provide the overall context for other anxieties to emerge. Too often, ignorance about the effects of these shifts drive the public to populism.

Recent evidence from the rise of the Sweden Democrats–a radical-right party–appears to support this view. The authors of a new working paper write,

We start from the timing of the Sweden-Democrat rise: growing to enter parliament between 2006 and 2010, and continuing to become Sweden’s third largest party in 2014 (with a 12.9 percent vote share). This period pre-dated the 2015 refugee crisis, but coincided with two events that worsened the relative economic lot for large segments of the population. In 2006, a Center-Right coalition of parties took power and implemented a dramatic reform agenda of tax cuts and social-insurance austerity with the purpose to “make work pay.” Over a mere six years, these reforms triggered a dramatic increase in income inequality. With earned income tax credits, incomes continued to grow among “insiders” with stable employment, while spending cuts implied a stagnation of disposable incomes for “outsiders” with unstable or no jobs. The second key event is the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis increased the job insecurity for “vulnerable insiders”, segments of the population with stable employment, but with jobs at higher risk of replacement by automation and other forms of rationalization than “secure insiders”.

To analyze the consequences of these events, we classify the population into economic winners or losers, starting out from comprehensive register data that provides a panel of yearly observations for the full adult population in 1979-2012. With this data, we can characterize the economic and social circumstances for individual politicians and for residents of each precinct or municipality…We find that the groups which faced a relative-income decline and higher job insecurity are over-represented among the politicians and voters of the radical right. Politicians from the Sweden Democrats include more outsiders and vulnerable insiders, compared to both the population and, very starkly, other political parties. Over-representation also grows across sub-groups of labor-market outsiders the more they lost (relative to insiders) from the make-work-pay reforms. For voters, we find a strong positive correlation between the Sweden Democrats’ electoral success and the impact of the economic reforms and the financial crisis (i) across municipalities and (ii) across voting districts within municipalities. Putting this correlation into a formal regression model, we can add a myriad of control variables from register data and other data sources. The strong correlation with negative economic shocks is not affected by the stocks and flows of immigrants from different regions, or by immigrants having jobs or being welfare recipients in a geographic area. They are also robust to controls for crime rates, media reporting on immigration, and local political contextual variables (pg. 1-2).

The authors suggest that “the political left offers a slate of politicians skewed away from labor-market outsiders and vulnerable insiders towards secure insiders. Adding to this evidence, we find that wherever groups of economic losers (or the losses they incur) are particularly large, the Sweden Democrats offer them more over-representation relative to other parties. Another side of our explanation is that economic shocks triggers diminished trust in government, of which the established left parties form part (following e.g., Algan et al. 2017). We find some support for this in survey data. The rise in electoral support for the Sweden Democrats temporally coincides with a clear divergence in trust in government institutions, including political parties, between labor-market outsiders and insiders. It is intuitive that candidates who themselves share the economic traits of disgruntled voters may stand a better chance to credibly bridge this trust gap” (pg. 2).

While the Swedish experience may not be the same as the American one, I think the two resemble each other far more than they differ. For example, when Gallup polled Trump supporters in early 2016, they found that Trump’s

unconventional résumé and style have helped attract their support for his candidacy, more so than his positions on issues or specific policies. In fact, other than his signature issue of immigration, mentioned by 8% of his supporters, no other issue is named by more than half that many — with between 2% and 4% mentioning his ability to deal with terrorists, his financial planning and budget expertise, and his handling of the economy and employment…[I]t is his nonpolitician background that comes to mind first, not his positions on issues, when supporters are asked to explain why they want him as their party’s nominee…Republicans who support Trump’s candidacy like him for being an anti-politician, and Trump’s willingness to say things that flout conventional norms governing political speech may only strengthen his authenticity as an outsider.

Most Important Reasons for Supporting Donald Trump for Republican Nomination, February 2016

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the desire for a (perceived) anti-establishment, anti-elite outsider followed in the wake of the Great Recession.

Is a Pro-Capitalist Mentality on the Decline?

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Looks that away according to a Spring 2018 article in The Independent Review. Economist Carlos Newland constructs a Free-Market Mentality Index (FMMI) in an attempt to quantify the change in attitudes. He writes,

What is the basis on which institutional frameworks favorable to abundance or growth are built? For Michael Porter (2000), that basis is the economic culture or mentality of the population. Porter argues that to achieve sustainable growth a society must have an archetype of productivity, including a comprehension of the factors that influence the efficiency of the economy. These factors include an appreciation of competition, openness to globalization and international trade, an understanding that free markets benefit a majority of the society, and an awareness of the pernicious effects of government favoritism. Porter argues that without this paradigm it is probable that an alternate view may take root in a society, one that is more favorable to the existence of noncompetitive rents, such as those granted by protectionist economic policies. The optimal paradigm, Porter points out, should not be confined to the upper echelons of a society but instead should permeate its entirety, including the working class. If this diffusion is absent, reforms favorable to higher productivity will probably face political opposition (pg. 571).

In order to take a mental temperature so speak, Newland uses

items included in the World Values Survey (WVS), an ongoing international poll conducted from 1981 to 2014 (when the most recent survey was published; a current one is not yet available). The WVS is a global collaborative effort aimed at learning the opinions of inhabitants of many nations of the world about a large set of topics. Via the construction of a comparative index, I used three items included in the WVS to study the presence and degree of a free-market or capitalist ideology (henceforth used as synonyms) in these nations over the course of the past two decades. I defined this mentality as one favorable to competition, to the action of private enterprise, and to the view that economic interaction generates wealth. Although the basic WVS questionnaire includes many other assertions that reflect a capitalist mindset, the fact that the answers are available for only some countries reduces the set that can be employed. Only four of the six WVS editions published up to 2014 include all three of the questions that I used to compose the FMMI: 1990, 1996, 2006, and 2012. There are twenty-seven countries in the 1990 sample, a figure that grows to fifty-eight for 2012. The indicator is fragile and based on a very limited set of variables, but I believe it reflects, perhaps roughly, the relative attitudes in different countries toward free markets and their evolution over time (pg. 572).

The results? The table below

clearly shows that a strong downward tendency in the support of capitalism occurred in the world between 1990 and 2012, with the global FMMI falling by 24 percent. This fall has been gradual and continuous and therefore cannot be attributed to the occurrence of the Great Recession of 2007–9. When data are separated by groups of nations, the negative trend is very clear in the case of formerly Communist countries, Latin America, and Africa. The result for the Sinosphere is more ambiguous and diverse: the score for Japan has grown over time, China shows some stability, and the values for South Korea have fallen. Marks for Europe have generally decayed, and the same has happened for the United States (pg. 575).

What makes this disturbing is the FMMI’s “weak, but positive correlation” with the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The comparison between the two indexes “shows that in general countries with a high pro-capitalist ideology also have freer and more competitive economies: Taiwan, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Japan” (pg. 577). 

While the FMMI “is undoubtedly a rather crude measure,” it nonetheless “shows that an important global ideological shift has occurred since the late 1990s. From an initial situation of appreciation of the virtues of capitalism and competitive forces in the 1990s, much of the world has shifted to a greater faith in government intervention and regulation.” This is problematic, since the data also show that “a strong capitalist mentality coexists with (and probably generates) a favorable institutional framework, exemplified by many of the wealthiest countries in the world, such as the United States, Germany, and Japan” (pg. 579-580). Since institutions matter, this is a bit concerning. 

Demographics & Inequality: 2017 Edition

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Every year, economist Mark Perry draws on Census Bureau reports to paint of picture of the demographics of inequality. Looking at 2017 data, he constructed the following table:

incomeinequality

Once again, he concludes,

Household demographics, including the average number of earners per household and the marital status, age, and education of householders are all very highly correlated with household income. Specifically, high-income households have a greater average number of income-earners than households in lower-income quintiles, and individuals in high-income households are far more likely than individuals in low-income households to be well-educated, married, working full-time, and in their prime earning years. In contrast, individuals in lower-income households are far more likely than their counterparts in higher-income households to be less-educated, working part-time, either very young (under 35 years) or very old (over 65 years), and living in single-parent or single households.

The good news is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control (e.g., staying in school and graduating, getting and staying married, working full-time, etc.), which means that individuals and households are not destined to remain in a single income quintile forever. Fortunately, studies that track people over time indicate that individuals and households move up and down the income quintiles over their lifetimes, as the key demographic variables highlighted above change, see related CD posts here, here and here.

… It’s highly likely that most of today’s high-income, college-educated, married individuals who are now in their peak earning years were in a lower-income quintile in their prior, single, younger years before they acquired education and job experience. It’s also likely that individuals in today’s top income quintiles will move back down to a lower income quintile in the future during their retirement years, which is just part of the natural lifetime cycle of moving up and down the income quintiles for most Americans. So when we hear the media and progressives talk about an “income inequality crisis” in America, we should keep in mind that basic household demographics go a long way towards explaining the differences in household income in the United States. And because the key income-determining demographic variables are largely under our control and change dynamically over our lifetimes, income mobility and the American dream are still “alive and well” in the US.

Elsewhere, he reveals some rather good news from the same report:

These are his key takeaways:

  • The 1.8% gain in real median US household income last year brought median income to more than $61,000, the highest level ever recorded.
  • The income gain in 2017 was the fifth annual increase and the first period of five consecutive increases in median household income since the late 1990s.
  • Compared to 1975, the typical US household today has $12,464 more annual income (in 2017 dollars) or more than $1,000 more per month in real, inflation-adjusted dollars to spend on goods and services, many of which have become much more affordable today than in the 1970s (or weren’t even available then).
  • Adjusted for household size, which has been falling over time, real median household income per household member last year of $24,160 (in 2017 dollars) was the highest in history.
  • Real median income for married couples with both spouses working reached a new all-time record high last year of $111,000 and has more than doubled from $54,700 in 1963.
  • By three different measures — income shares of the top 5% and 20% and the Gini coefficient — there is no evidence of a significant rise in income inequality over the last 25 years; all three measures have been remarkably flat for more than two decades.
  • The share of US households with incomes of $100,000 or more (in 2017 dollars) reached a new record high of 29.2% last year, which is more than triple the share of households in 1967 with that level of income. At the same time, the share of US low-income households (real incomes of $35,000 or below) fell to a near-record low of 29.5%.
  • America’s middle-class is disappearing but into higher, not lower, income categories over time.

Diversity Is A Strength

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Earlier this year, I highlighted some research on diversity and its relation to the immigration question. The Washington Post had a recent piece on Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s less-than-subtle anti-diversity views. Within the article, the author highlighted several studies on how diversity contributes to organizational well-being. I thought I’d dive into these studies for your reading pleasure.

One study from Cloverpop, as reported in Forbes, 

analyzed approximately 600 business decisions made by 200 different business teams in a wide variety of companies over two years, using the Cloverpop decision-making database. The full research results on inclusive decision making are available for download if you’d like to dive in. To topline it, our research shows a direct link between inclusive decision making and better business performance:

• Inclusive teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time.

• Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions 2X faster with 1/2 the meetings.

• Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60% better results.

… According to the research, teams outperform individual decision makers 66% of the time, and decision making improves as team diversity increases. Compared to individual decision makers, all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time, while gender diverse teams do so 73% of the time. Teams that also include a wide range of ages and different geographic locations make better business decisions 87% of the time.

… We also found that diverse groups are more likely to encounter operational friction when executing business decisions. In short, less diverse teams make worse decisions, and then diverse teams struggle to put their decisions into action. The worst situation is to have an all-male team make a decision that is executed by a gender-diverse group. This worst-of-both-worlds combination underperformed by 15%. In contrast, our analysis found that the most inclusive decision-making and execution teams performed 60% better than average.

A 2014 study reviewed the relevant literature and found the following benefits of diversity (while admitting that managing diversity is difficult, but doable):

Diversity stimulates innovation and productivity and creates a world class culture that can outperform the competition.

A multicultural organization is better suited to serve a diverse external clientele in a more increasingly global market. Such organizations have a better understanding of the requirements of the legal, political, social, economic and cultural environments of foreign nations (Adler, 1991).

In research-oriented and hi-tech industries, the broad base of talents generated by a gender-and ethnicdiverse organization becomes a priceless advantage. “Creativity thrives on diversity” (Morgan, 1989).

Multicultural organizations are found to be better at problem solving, possess better ability to extract expanded meanings, and are more likely to display multiple perspectives and interpretations in dealing with complex issues.

Organizations employing a diverse workforce can supply a greater variety of solutions to problems in service, sourcing, and allocation of resources.

Employees from diverse backgrounds bring individual talents and experiences in suggesting ideas that are flexible in adapting to fluctuating markets and customer demands.

A diverse collection of skills and experiences (e.g. languages, cultural understanding) allows a company to provide service to customers on a global basis.

A diverse workforce that feels comfortable communicating varying poitns of view provides a larger pool of ideas and experiences (pg. 83).

Finally, a 2016 Harvard Business Review article provides a nice rundown of several important studies on diversity:

A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.

In a global analysis of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board.

… People from diverse backgrounds might actually alter the behavior of a group’s social majority in ways that lead to improved and more accurate group thinking. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scientists assigned 200 people to six-person mock jury panels whose members were either all white or included four white and two black participants. The people were shown a video of a trial of a black defendant and white victims. They then had to decide whether the defendant was guilty. 

It turned out that the diverse panels raised more facts related to the case than homogenous panels and made fewer factual errors while discussing available evidence. If errors did occur, they were more likely to be corrected during deliberation. One possible reason for this difference was that white jurors on diverse panels recalled evidence more accurately.

Other studies have yielded similar results. In a series of experiments conducted in Texas and Singapore, scientists put financially literate people in simulated markets and asked them to price stocks. The participants were placed in either ethnically diverse or homogenous teams. The researchers found that individuals who were part of the diverse teams were 58% more likely to price stocks correctly, whereas those in homogenous groups were more prone to pricing errors, according to the study, published in the journal PNAS. Diverse teams are more likely to constantly reexamine facts and remain objective. They may also encourage greater scrutiny of each member’s actions, keeping their joint cognitive resources sharp and vigilant.

… Greater diversity may also change the way that entire teams digest information needed to make the best decisions. In a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Katherine Phillips of Northwestern University and her team divided sorority or fraternity members into four-member groups, each of which had to read interviews conducted by a detective investigating a murder. Three people in every group, referred to as “oldtimers” in the study, came from the same sorority or fraternity, whereas the fourth, the so-called “newcomer,” was either a member of the same sorority or fraternity or a different one. The three oldtimers in each group gathered to decide who was the most likely murder suspect. Five minutes into their discussion, the newcomer joined the deliberation and expressed their opinion as to who the suspect was. It turned out that although groups with out-group newcomers felt less confident about the accuracy of their joint decisions, they were more likely to guess who the correct suspect was than those with newcomers who belonged to the same group.

…In a study published in Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice, the authors analyzed levels of gender diversity in research and development teams from 4,277 companies in Spain. Using statistical models, they found that companies with more women were more likely to introduce radical new innovations into the market over a two-year period.

In another study, published in Economic Geography, the authors concluded that increased cultural diversity is a boon to innovativeness. They pooled data on 7,615 firms that participated in the London Annual Business Survey, a questionnaire conducted with the UK capital’s executives that asks a number of questions about their companies’ performance. The results revealed that businesses run by culturally diverse leadership teams were more likely to develop new products than those with homogenous leadership.

Though you may feel more at ease working with people who share your background, don’t be fooled by your comfort. Hiring individuals who do not look, talk, or think like you can allow you to dodge the costly pitfalls of conformity, which discourages innovative thinking.

“How, precisely, is diversity our strength,” you ask, Tucker? See above. And see here, here, and here.