Building a Life Story

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

The first time I wrote in my journal was in the days immediately after my baptism when I was 8 years old. I still have the pages somewhere in a box, including the hand-drawn map of the different routes I could take when I walked back and forth from school.

I have started and stopped journals countless times since then because it’s one of those things that, as Elder Groberg reminded us in Writing Your Personal and Family History, good Mormons are supposed to do.

As much as I enjoy writing, there’s always been one big thing inhibiting me from keeping a journal more reliably, and it is this: I don’t know what the real story is. This isn’t some weird post-modern hang-up, so much as it is (as far as I can tell) a weird psychological hang-up. I never know how I feel about things. Interrogating my true feelings about the things that are going on in my life is like collecting mist with a butterfly net. I can record the brute facts of my life—I can draw the map and label the streets—but I can’t tell you what those facts mean. Not even, and perhaps most especially, to me.

My inner life is an optical illusion. It is a collection of lines that looks like the inside of a cube one moment or the outside of a cube the next. It is a picture of a rabbit for a blink, and then it is a picture of a duck. It is two faces; it is a chalice. It is an old lady; it is a young woman.

This is why I spend almost no time at all thinking about my past. My friends and family all remember so much more of the things that I’ve been through than I do. For me, the past is like a crime scene, and I am afraid to contaminate the evidence. I have a superstitious belief that there is a true story, an objective reality, and I’m afraid that if I try to hard to find it then I will only erase it.

I have a couple of binders somewhere that contain all the letters that I sent home while I was serving my mission in Hungary and all of the letters that people sent to me. I think the binders were a gift when I got home, but I’m not sure. I’ve never opened them. I’m not sure where they are. I don’t even like to look at the binders, let alone consider reading the pages inside. Because my mission was the one time in my life when I acted like I knew what was going on and when I told everyone how I felt about things, and I’m afraid that it was all lies. It was the hardest time of my young life, and I have vague recollections of writing relentlessly optimistic and happy letters despite feeling so depressed that it felt like physical pain on most days. The whole thing is wildly embarrassing to me. I acted like I knew what was going on. I had no idea. I have lived almost as many years after my mission as I lived before it, and I still have no idea what was going on or why it was so hard for me.

If writing a journal is about writing the real story of my feelings, then I can’t write a journal for the simple reason that I don’t know my own story.

And yet, I should. Write a journal, that is. Like Elder Groberg says, writing a journal “helps immeasurably in gaining a true, eternal perspective of life” and “should be a great motivation to do what is right.” I know that’s accurate: the reflection of writing about my life has helped me put things into perspective.

Maybe that’s the point?

I’m teaching the Old Testament in Gospel Doctrine this year, and it’s a mess. We just made the transition from Joshua to Judges, and I taught about how all the mass slaughter that supposedly happened in Joshua is pretty flatly contradicted by Judges. On the bright side: you don’t have to believe in a genocidal God.  On the downside: it’s hard to make sense of all the contradictions. In Deuteronomy, we’re told a Moabite will never enter the assembly of the Lord until the 10th generation. Ruth, the hero of the Book of Ruth, is Moabite and that makes King David 1/8th Moabite. And, while we’re on the topic, how do we reconcile the apparent gap between the miracle-laden Exodus story and the miracle-free story of Ruth and Boaz?

The one encouraging thing is that, as I read Elder Groberg’s talk, I realize that the Old Testament is a mess in a lot of the same ways that my own life story is a mess.

There may be one, true, ultimate truth about everything. Not just the objective facts of life, but the subjective ones as well. Maybe there is an absolutely true narrative. But if there is, we will never know it in this life. In this life, stories are things we make up. Fictional stories are based on imaginary facts. And real stories—including history—is made up based on true facts. But they are both made up.

I’m not sure if I have that right or not, but it sounds promising. At the very least, it’s worth giving a shot. I’m going to try writing in my journal again, and this time I’m not going to try and find a life story. I’m going to use the raw materials of my experiences to build one.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

The Economic Consequences of Gender Inequality

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BBC reports,

Saudi Arabia has issued driving licences to women for the first time in decades just weeks before a ban on female drivers is lifted. Ten women swapped their foreign licences for Saudi ones on Monday in cities across the country…”Expectations are that next week an additional 2,000 women will join the ranks of licensed drivers in the kingdom,” a statement from the Saudi information ministry said. It added that the 10 women who had collected their new Saudi licences had “made history”. “It’s a dream come true that I am about to drive in the kingdom,” Rema Jawdat, who received a licence, was quoted as saying by the ministry. “Driving to me represents having a choice – the choice of independent movement. Now we have that option.” The lifting of the driving ban was announced last September and is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s programme to modernise some aspects of Saudi society.

Saudi Arabia is an extreme case of gender inequality. But what is the economic impact of gender inequality? Here are some major findings from a May 2018 World Bank report:

  • Globally, women account for only 38 percent of human capital wealth versus 62 percent for men. In low- and lower-middle income countries, women account for a third or less of human capital wealth.
  • On a per capita basis, gender inequality in earnings could lead to losses in wealth of $23,620 per person globally. These losses differ between regions and countries because levels of human capital wealth, and thereby losses in wealth due to gender inequality, tend to increase in absolute values with economic development. For these reasons, in absolute terms the losses are largest in OECD countries.
  • Globally, for the 141 countries included in the analysis, the loss in human capital wealth due to gender inequality is estimated at $160.2 trillion if we simply assume that women would earn as much as men. This is about twice the value of GDP globally. Said differently, human capital wealth could increase by 21.7 percent globally, and total wealth by 14.0 percent with gender equality in earnings.

Read the full report here.

What Kind of Inequality?

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According to a new working paper, “While population-weighted income inequality increased until the third quarter of the 20th-century, inequality in social dimensions has declined since WWI. Furthermore, the contrast between inequality in terms of income and human development (Figure 4) is striking and challenges the idea that per capita income provides a good predictor of welfare trends.”

Nobel economist Angus Deaton wrote, “Inequality is often a consequence of progress” (pg. 1). And yet, income fails to capture a complete picture of absolute living standards. This should make us consider what kind of inequality we are concerned about.

The DR Book Collection: Catch-Up #5

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

I’m once again behind on my book reviews, so here’s a list of the books I’ve read recently, their descriptions, and accompanying videos.

Image result for a universe from nothingLawrence M. Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012): “Bestselling author and acclaimed physicist Lawrence Krauss offers a paradigm-shifting view of how everything that exists came to be in the first place. “Where did the universe come from? What was there before it? What will the future bring? And finally, why is there something rather than nothing?” One of the few prominent scientists today to have crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing. With a new preface about the significance of the discovery of the Higgs particle, A Universe from Nothing uses Krauss’s characteristic wry humor and wonderfully clear explanations to take us back to the beginning of the beginning, presenting the most recent evidence for how our universe evolved—and the implications for how it’s going to end. Provocative, challenging, and delightfully readable, this is a game-changing look at the most basic underpinning of existence and a powerful antidote to outmoded philosophical, religious, and scientific thinking” (Amazon).

Image result for alive at workDaniel M. Cable, Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018): “In this bold, enlightening book, social psychologist and professor Daniel M. Cable takes leaders into the minds of workers and reveals the surprising secret to restoring their zest for work. Disengagement isn’t a motivational problem, it’s a biological one. Humans aren’t built for routine and repetition. We’re designed to crave exploration, experimentation, and learning–in fact, there’s a part of our brains, which scientists have coined “the seeking system,” that rewards us for taking part in these activities. But the way organizations are run prevents many of us from following our innate impulses. As a result, we shut down. Things need to change. More than ever before, employee creativity and engagement are needed to win. Fortunately, it won’t take an extensive overhaul of your organizational culture to get started. With small nudges, you can personally help people reach their fullest potential. Alive at Work reveals:

  • How to encourage people to bring their best selves to work and use their greatest strengths to help your organization flourish
  • How to build creative environments that motivate people to share ideas, work smarter, and embrace change
  • How to enhance people’s connection to their work and your customers
  • How to create personalized experiences that help people feel a deeper sense of purpose

Filled with fascinating stories from the author’s extensive research, Alive at Work is the inspirational guide that you need to tap into the passion, creativity, and purpose fizzing beneath the surface of every person who falls under your leadership” (Amazon).

Image result for saints slaves and blacksNewell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, & Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People Within Mormonism, 2nd ed. (Greg Kofford Books, 2018): “Originally published shortly after the LDS Church lifted its priesthood and temple restriction on black Latter-day Saints, Newell G. Bringhurst’s landmark work remains ever-relevant as both the first comprehensive study on race within the Mormon religion and the basis by which contemporary discussions on race and Mormonism have since been framed. Approaching the topic from a social history perspective, with a keen understanding of antebellum and post-bellum religious shifts, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks examines both early Mormonism in the context of early American attitudes towards slavery and race, and the inherited racial traditions it maintained for over a century. While Mormons may have drawn from a distinct theology to support and defend racial views, their attitudes towards blacks were deeply-embedded in the national contestation over slavery and anticipation of the last days. This second edition of Saints, Slaves, and Blacks offers an updated edit, as well as an additional foreword and postscripts by Edward J. Blum, W. Paul Reeve, and Darron T. Smith. Bringhurst further adds a new preface and appendix detailing his experience publishing Saints, Slaves, and Blacks at a time when many Mormons felt the rescinded ban was best left ignored, and reflecting on the wealth of research done on this topic since its publication” (Greg Kofford).

Image result for out of poverty powellBenjamin Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2014): “This book provides a comprehensive defense of third-world sweatshops. It explains how these sweatshops provide the best available opportunity to workers and how they play an important role in the process of development that eventually leads to better wages and working conditions. Using economic theory, the author argues that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement has agitated for would actually harm the very workers they intend to help by creating less desirable alternatives and undermining the process of development. Nowhere does this book put ‘profits’ or ‘economic efficiency’ above people. Improving the welfare of poorer citizens of third world countries is the goal, and the book explores which methods best achieve that goal. Out of Poverty will help readers understand how activists and policy makers can help third world workers” (Amazon).

Do Minimum Wage Hikes Decrease Non-Wage Benefits?

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Economist Art Carden writes at Forbes,

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by the economists Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer should make us pause and question the wisdom of higher minimum wages. The economists explore how minimum wages affect the probability of employer-provided health coverage and find that a chunk of the increased earnings for workers who get higher wages will be offset by a reduction in employer-provided health coverage.

…[T]here’s a lot more to a job than wages. People want work that is meaningful or enjoyable. They might especially value safety, comfort, or flexibility. People can also get a lot of non-wage benefits like health coverage, scholarship opportunities, and paid vacation. Workers can (and do) “buy” these perks by accepting lower wages than they would require if the job weren’t as pleasant, meaningful, or safe or if the fringe benefits weren’t as good.

In short, workers don’t live on wages alone, and minimum wages might not change what workers get paid but rather how they get paid. Minimum wages mandate that cash wages take up a bigger part of employee compensation.

He continues,

Clemens, Kahn, and Meer are limited by available data, so they can’t measure everything comprehensively. They narrow their focus to the relationship between minimum wages and employer-provided health coverage and find that for Very Low wage workers (e.g. food service), about 9% of increase in earnings due to a $1 per hour increase in the minimum wage is offset by the lower probability of employer-provided health coverage. For Low Wage workers (e.g. retail sales), its 16%. For Modest Wage workers ( clerks and food service supervisors), it’s 57%—which is unsurprising since workers with higher wages get a smaller bump from minimum wage increases.

When it comes to worker pay, total compensation must be considered, not just wages.

Does Political Ideology Taint Perceptions About Expertise?

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Need more evidence for political hooliganism? Check out the findings from a recent working paper:

Here, we ask whether (dis)similarity in political views interferes with the ability to learn about another person’s competency in an unrelated task (specifically categorizing [geometric] shapes) in a situation in which it is in people’s best interest to learn who excels in the task in order to turn to them for assistance. In the first part of our experiment, participants had an opportunity to learn whether others (i) had similar political opinions to theirs and (ii) how well they did in a task that required learning about shapes. After rating others on these two characteristics, they completed the second part of the experiment, where they decided to whom to turn to for advice when solving the shape task. They were rewarded for accuracy on the task and thus had an economic incentive to turn to the participant who was most skilled at the task. 

We find that (dis)similarity in political views interferes with the ability to make an accurate assessment of people’s expertise in the domain of shapes, which leads to two central outcomes. The first is that people chose to hear about shapes from others who are politically like-minded, even though those people are not especially good at the shape task, rather than to hear from people who excel at the shape task but have different political opinions. The second is that people are more influenced by those with similar political opinions, even when they had the opportunity to learn that those by whom they are influenced are not especially good at the task they are solving. We suspect that these findings are replicated in the real world of political behaviour, and that they help explain a range of phenomena, including the spread of fake news (Friggeri, Adamic, Eckles, & Cheng, 2014; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017), conspiracy theories (Del Vicario et al., 2016), polarization (Druckman, Peterson, & Slothuus, 2013; Prior, 2007), and insufficient learning in general (Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000; Yaniv & Milyavsky, 2007) (pg. 3-4).

Perhaps this is another contributor to the death of expertise.

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Says the liberal/conservative layman to the conservative/liberal astrophysicist.

Is Partisanship Driven By Misperceptions About Party Makeup?

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Hooligans = the rabid sports fans of politics

Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan describes political “hooligans” in this way:

Hooligans are the rabid sports fan of politics. They have strong and largely fixed worldviews. They can present arguments for their beliefs, but they cannot explain alternative points of view in a way that people with other views would find satisfactory. Hooligans consume political information, although in a biased way. They tend to seek out information that confirms their preexisting political opinions, but ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their preexisting opinions. They may have some trust in the social sciences, but cherry-pick data and tend only to learn about research that supports their own views. They are overconfident in themselves and what they know. Their political opinions form part of their identity, and they are proud to be a member of their political team…Most regular voters, active political participants, activists, registered party members, and politicians are hooligans.[ref]Against Democracy, pg. 5.[/ref]

What’s more, voters are overwhelmingly—at times astonishingly—ignorant. Here’s another study demonstrating this sad state of affairs (from an earlier draft):

Across five studies, we find that people overestimate the degree to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups, often vastly so. Even in cases where these groups comprise just a sliver of the population, people report that these groups constitute upwards of 40% of the party they “fit.” And when people are given information about these groups’ shares in the population, the bias in their estimates doesn’t decline, suggesting that people rely on representativeness when making judgments about party composition.

Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, all overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in both the major parties. Partisan differences, although statistically significant, are relatively small compared to the overall magnitude of these misperceptions. Even more strikingly, those most interested in politics hold the most skewed perceptions of party composition. One plausible explanation for both of these results is that mediated, impersonal information drives these misperceptions. However, all the evidence we have presented on this point is descriptive. Additional research is needed to assess the extent to which media shape these perceptions.

These misperceptions are also consequential. Experimental evidence suggests that beliefs about out-party composition affect perceptions of where opposing-party supporters stand on the issues. These findings provide a potential explanation for why people tend to overestimate the extremity of opposing partisans. In future extensions, we plan to further investigate whether beliefs about party composition explain the striking finding that people also overestimate the extremity of co-partisans (Ahler 2014; Levendusky and Malhotra 2015). Misperceptions about out-party composition also lead partisans to feel more socially distant from the opposing party. Building on work by Hetherington and Weiler (2009) and Mason and Davis (2015), who find that partisan animus is related to party composition, we experimentally show that people’s beliefs about party composition affect their feelings towards the opposing party.

…The experimental findings support the notion that orientations toward constituent social groups affect how people feel toward the parties, among other things. However, they also show that beliefs about shares of various groups in the parties matter. Thus, while the group identity account makes a compelling case that partisanship is a relatively stable, affective attachment, work in this tradition must grapple more thoroughly with the social cognitions (and cognitive biases) that are relevant to how people reason about politics.

This is especially the case because partisans overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in their own party. For instance, many lower- and middle-class Republicans think that their party contains far more rich people than it actually does. This suggests that many partisans like their own parties to the extent they do—a great deal, with average ratings exceeding 80 on the thermometer scale (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012)—despite believing that the party has a greater share of groups to which they tend not to belong than it actually does. Green, Palmquist and Schickler (2002, p. 8) suggest that partisans choose parties based on “which assemblage of groups” looks like them. While this may still be true, the data suggest that people identify with parties based on which groups they like.

Finally, and most broadly, this research furthers our understanding of people’s perceptions of mass collectives and how these perceptions shape individuals’ own political attitudes. Mutz (1998) describes impersonal influence as the effect of people’s perceptions of what others are experiencing, or what others believe, on their own attitudes and behaviors. We take this one step further and assert that people’s perceptions merely of who belongs to a collective can be a source of impersonal influence—and in this case, a catalyst for partisanship in American politics (pg. 27-28).

I’ll say it again: politics makes us mean and dumb.[ref]Vox agrees.[/ref]

Does Economic Marginalization Breed Radicals?

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A few years ago, I linked to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by economist Hernando de Soto that declared “economic hope” to be “the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.” A couple years later, I discussed the possibility that strict labor laws–and the unemployment it produces–was a major contributor to radicalization in Europe. In short, the lack of economic opportunity breeds extremism.

Recent evidence appears to support this hunch.

Many point to U.S. drone strikes as a causal factor in Islamic radicalization. However, a brand new study argues the contrary, concluding,

Although U.S. drone strikes in Muslim countries might play a role in the radicalization or violent extremism of co-religionists around the world, the available evidence does not support the assertion that drones are “fueling the fires of homegrown radicalization” in Western societies or that these unmanned aerial vehicles are the new Guantánamo.

…The radicalization of individuals in the Somali diaspora, especially in the state of Minnesota, illustrates the role of U.S. policies targeting Muslim communities at home; personal factors, such as conflicted identities among young Somali Americans; and their nationalist desire to evict foreign troops from Somalia, a desire that recruiters from the al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabaab have been able to exploit. My brief examination of the social science literature on the drivers of Islamist militancy among Muslims in European countries similarly points to domestic factors such as an identity crisis among some young Muslims, state policies of marginalization and discrimination, and the role of radical preachers and terrorist recruiters who leverage these vulnerabilities for recruitment (pg. 83-84; emphasis mine).

This is further confirmed by a recent World Bank paper:

Exploiting individual-level education information for these fighters, we link the size of a contingent of fighters to the economic conditions faced by workers in their countries of residence who have the same level of education, by distinguishing primary, secondary and tertiary education. Beginning non-parametrically, we document a correlation between the within-country relative unemployment rate faced by workers from a specific country and education level and the corresponding relative number of recruits. We then conduct panel regressions in which we estimate the impact of unemployment on the propensity to join the terrorist group, controlling for country and education-level fixed effects. The estimated coefficients indicate that higher unemployment rates are a push factor towards radicalization, especially for countries at a shorter distance to Syria, with an elasticity of 0.25; a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to 42 additional Daesh recruits. The elasticity steeply decreases further away from Syria and becomes both economically and statistically insignificant past the average distance of 2,500 km. The results are robust to the inclusion of education-specific wage rates, strengthening the case for a causal interpretation of these results (pg. 1-2).

I’m reminded of the famous quote by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas: “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions [of economic growth] are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else” (pg. 5).

Goals Gone Wild…Again

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Image result for gooooaaaallllA few years ago, researchers from Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, and the University of Arizona argued that goal setting was “overprescribed” and featured “powerful and predictable side effects” (pg. 6). While acknowledging past research demonstrates that “specific goals provide clear, unambiguous, and objective means for evaluating…performance” and thus “motivate performance far better than “do your best” exhortations” (pg. 7), the researchers found that this intensity of focus on goals can lead to tunnel vision and poor, often unethical decisions. Examples include Sears in the early 1990s, whose sales goals for its auto repair staff led to overcharging and unnecessary repairs. Revenue-based rather than profit-based goals at Enron helped lead to the company’s destruction. A challenging goal (a car “under 2,000 pounds and under $2,000”) coupled with a tight deadline at Ford in the late 1960s brought about the easily-combustible Pinto, many deaths and injuries, and expensive lawsuits. These narrow goals crowded out not only ethical behavior, but the broader purpose of the goals themselves. Quality, in essence, is often sacrificed for the quantifiable. Short-term gains are pursued rather than long-term health and growth. Furthermore, such narrow goals create “a focus on ends rather than means…[The researchers] postulate that aggressive goal setting within an organization increases the likelihood of creating an organizational climate ripe for unethical behavior“ (pg. 10). Narrow goals decrease satisfaction, even with high-quality outcomes, which have negative effects on future behavior. They can also inhibit learning and experimentation with alternative methods, undermine cooperation, and harm intrinsic motivation.

Further research supports these findings, including an October 2017 paper. As reported over at Ethical Systems,

Goal setting is often a subject of discussion about behavioral ethics and internal programs.  We’ve seen in recent cases such as at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen how cheating and lying become the norm when performance goals are not reasonably achievable.  Recent evidence in a paper by Niki den Nieuwenboer, João da Cunha, and ES collaborator Linda Treviño shows the internal dynamics and processes that lead directly to cheating behaviors.  

The researchers, one of which was embedded inside the company, observed managers and sales staff over 15 months at a large (10,000 employees) telecommunications company.  The company had established goals for its desk sales teams designed to motivate productivity, including a target for sales as well as sales-related work, such as making cold calls to customers, and gathering information about potential customers, among other planning activities.

For the senior leaders at the company, these targets were part of a broader– and cost-lowering — strategy of shifting sales staff from the field towards desk jobs.  The field staff cost the company $225 more per customer contact than the sales teams working at desks.  The aim was thus to incentivize desk people to improve efficiency and reduce costs in the long-run.

However, because the desk sales team cheated the internal systems, the company didn’t actually gain the cost savings that it thought it had.  The apparent success of the desk sales team (based on false information) led to upper management reducing the number of field staff sales numbers, which undermined an important sales channel at the firm.

The misconduct was uncovered inadvertently. Originally, one of the researchers was embedded inside the company to observe the implementation of a sales-related IT system.  As he observed and interviewed employees about their use of the system, the scope of the research was soon expanded to include unethical behaviors. He observed that both middle managers and frontline sales staff were aware that the sales goals were unreachable, and that sometimes sales staff tried to push back on pressure from their managers.  When sales targets didn’t budge, the managers got creative to solve their goals, devising strategies to induce the sales staff to cheat the internal systems.  Manager pay was directly tied to whether their direct reports met performance goals hence the need to game the system to safeguard their income.

The managers took advantage of “structural vulnerabilities” in the system. For example, they changed rules such as expanding the definition of “sales calls” so that more types of calls counted towards that goal – case in point, they counted internal calls and emails as “external” sales calls. Some also just logged fictitious information for calls that never occurred.  Other manipulations involved devising IT and administrative schemes that allowed the desk sales teams to take credit for work done by the field sales teams. Additionally, to satisfy the requirement that sales plans be developed for customers, some simply were told to copy and paste plans across various customers, because they knew that very few of them would actually be verified.

Manipulating strategies to meet targets became the norm at the organization.  While employees in the unit were aware of these practices, the managers worked to ensure that word of the deceptive practices didn’t get out to senior leaders or to other units.

To tweak the Keynes/Hayek rap battle a tad, quotas are a means, not the ends in themselves.