Difficult Run

Migration and Terrorism

April 10, 2018August 18, 2017 by Walker

A new study examines the link between immigrants and terrorism:

In our recent work (Dreher et al. 2017) we provide a detailed analysis of how the number of foreigners living in a country has affected the number of terrorist attacks made by foreigners on citizens of their host countries. According to the raw data, in OECD countries between 1980 and 2010, for every million foreigners in the population, 0.8 terror attacks are committed per year, per country (there were 662 transnational attacks). While it is obvious that the number of attacks increases with the number of people living in a country (after all, with no foreigners in a country, no foreigners would commit any attacks), on average these numbers amount to about one attack by foreigners per year and host country, and 1.3 people die from these attacks in the average country and year.

Transnational terror is dwarfed in absolute numbers by the number of attacks made by the domestic population. In the 20 OECD countries that our sample covers, there were 2,740 attacks arising from the domestic population. In relative terms though, the picture is different – there were fewer than 0.18 terrorist attacks for every one million locally born citizens in a typical country and year. Overall, while the probability that foreigners are involved in an attack on the domestic population was much higher than the risk that citizens were involved in attacks on their own country, the risk associated with each additional foreigner was tiny.

In our statistical analysis, we investigate whether, and to what extent, an increase in the foreign population of the average OECD country would increase the risk of terrorist attacks from foreigners in a host country. We identify exogenous variation in the number of foreigners living in an OECD country using changes in migration resulting from natural disasters. These changes affected host countries differently, according to the specifics of each host- and origin-country pair.

Using data for 20 OECD host countries, and 187 countries of origin between 1980 and 2010, we find that the number of terror attacks increased with the number of foreigners living in a host country. This scale effect that relates larger numbers of foreigners to more attacks does not imply, however, that foreigners are more likely to become terrorists than the domestic population. When we calculate the effect of a larger local population on the frequency of terror attacks by locals, the effect is of a comparable size. We conclude that, in this period, migrants were not more likely to become terrorists than the locals of the country in which they were living.

To put these results in perspective, consider the expected effect of a decrease in the domestic population of 0.0002% (which is the average decrease in the domestic population of the 20 OECD countries we studied in 2015, according to the OECD). According to our model, this would have reduced the number of terrorist attacks by 0.00025 per country and year. The increase in the stock of foreigners living in these countries was 3.6% in the same year. According to our estimates, this would have created 0.04 additional attacks. We might argue that this hardly justifies a ban on foreigners as a group.

We find little evidence that terror had been systematically imported from countries with large Muslim populations. The exceptions were Algeria and Iran, where we found a statistically higher risk of being involved in terrorist attacks against the local population, compared to the average effect of foreigners from non-Muslim countries. In this light, the phrases ‘Muslim terror’ or ‘Islamist terror’ does not seem accurate or useful. Only 6% of the terrorist attacks in the US between 1980 and 2005 period were carried out by Muslims, and less than 2% of all attacks in Europe had a religious motivation between 2009 and 2013 (Alnatour 2017).

I’ve written before about how European labor laws may play a role in radicalization. The authors make a similar case for immigration bans:

Contrary to the expectations of many politicians and pundits, introducing strict laws that regulate the integration and rights of migrants does not seem to have been effective in preventing terror attacks from foreign-born residents. We rather find that repressing migrants already living in the country with these laws has alienated a substantial share of this population, which increases the risk of terror. Stricter laws on immigration thus have the potential to increase the risk of terror, at least immediately following the ban.

…Our results illustrate an important trade-off. While stricter immigration laws could reduce the inflow of (violent) foreigners and thus potentially the number of future terrorist attacks, the restrictions would also increase the probability that those foreigners already living in the country become more violent. Immigration bans, like those recently introduced in the US, would arguably increase the short-term risk of attacks, before potentially reducing risk when the number of foreigners in the population has decreased.

Last year, I linked to a Cato study on the likelihood of a foreign terrorist attack (TL;DR: it’s astronomically low). With Charlottesville in the news, this piece from Foreign Policy was particularly interesting:

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy.

Even as President Donald Trump continues to resist calling out white supremacists for violence, federal law enforcement has made clear that it sees these types of domestic extremists as a severe threat. The report, dated May 10, says the FBI and DHS believe that members of the white supremacist movement “likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”

…The FBI…has already concluded that white supremacists, including neo-Nazi supporters and members of the Ku Klux Klan, are in fact responsible for the lion’s share of violent attacks among domestic extremist groups. White supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement,” reads the joint intelligence bulletin.

The report, titled “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence,” was prepared by the FBI and DHS.

The bulletin’s numbers appear to correspond with outside estimates. An independent database compiled by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute found that between 2008 and 2016, far-right plots and attacks outnumbered Islamist incidents by almost 2 to 1.

Now, granted, when we consider that the Southern Poverty Law Center “estimates that [today] there are between 5,000 and 8,000 Klan members, split among dozens of different – and often warring – organizations that use the Klan name,” that’s a huge improvement over the 4 million in the mid-1920s. But I find it ironic that groups that worry about the influx of immigrants in part due to potential terror attacks are more likely to commit said attacks in recent years.[ref]Recent is important since Islamic terrorism still comes out on top when the last 3+ decades are considered. Either way, the chance of dying at the hands of a terrorist is still extremely small.[/ref]

Goodreads is my Cyberbrain

August 16, 2017 by Nathaniel

A Facebook friend posted a Quora answer to When people read hundreds of books a year, how much of them do they actually remember? I don’t know about “hundreds”, but I did read about 100 books in 2016 and chances are good I’ll break 100 again this year, too. Here’s the setup:

I read an embarrassing number of books (I’m in danger of having no life) but if I met you at a party (which I wouldn’t, because I have no life) and you mentioned a book that you’d read and I’d also read it, I might not admit it.

I’d lie because unless it was really, really special, I wouldn’t remember enough to talk about it intelligently.

The gist of the response thereafter is that it’s fine if you don’t remember the books you read, because (in this case) you can still harvest them for good ideas. And I think this is fine. It’s a perfectly valid reason to read books. Another valid reason would be the food analogy. You probably can’t remember (in any great detail) what you had for lunch last month, but it’s pretty important that you ate something right? Otherwise you’d starve. And so maybe books are kind of like food for your brain. Even if you don’t remember the specifics of any given meal, it still helps to have a high-quality diet. Another valid response.

But here’s one more: you can store what you remember about a book in your cyberbrain.

The idea of using computers–and especially the Internet / cloud–to augment human memory is an old one. And it’s not theoretical. It’s exactly what I do with my Goodreads reviews. I try to write a review of every book I read[ref]Including the ones I stop reading in disgust.[/ref] I also take lots and lots of notes in Evernote. Then, I promptly forget what I read. Sometimes I literally forget that I read a book at all. But when I go back and reread my reviews, a lot of my initial impressions come back.

Over my lifetime, I’ve certainly read thousands of books. And for the most part, I can’t remember them. I kind of have a big hole in my memory between the first few books I really loved as a kid in elementary school and middle school and the books that I started reviewing on Goodreads. In between, I really only remember a few books. The only exception is the ones I have on my shelves. If I pick up those paperbacks, I can basically always remember the overall plot and sometimes a surprising amount of detail. I just need the cues provided by the cover art–and maybe just the existence of a physical reminder–to trigger all those memories.

The Goodreads reviews are like that, but even better.

So review your books, kiddos. It’s like a diary of your literary life, and it can help you keep hold of memories that would otherwise be totally lost.

Minimum Wage Hikes and Automation Risks

March 29, 2018August 16, 2017 by Walker

A couple years ago, I wrote,

Other studies show that an increased minimum wage causes firms to incrementally move toward automation. Now, this too could be seen as a trade-off: automation and technological progress tend to make processes more efficient and therefore increase productivity (and eventually wages), raising living standards for consumers (which include the poor). Nonetheless, the point is that while unemployment in the short-term may be insignificant, the long-term effects could be much bigger. For example, one study finds that minimum wage hikes lead to lower rates of job growth: about 0.05 percentage points a year. That’s not much in a single year, but it accumulates over time and largely impacts the young and uneducated.

A couple new studies this year demonstrate the link between minimum wage hikes, automation, and job loss. As reported from AEI’s James Pethokoukis,

Now comes the new NBER working paper, “People Versus Machines: The Impact of Minimum Wages on Automatable Jobs” by Grace Lordan and David Neumark (bold is mine):

“Based on CPS data from 1980-2015, we find that increasing the minimum wage decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers. The average effects mask significant heterogeneity by industry and demographic group. For example, one striking result is that the share in automatable employment declines most sharply for older workers. An analysis of individual transitions from employment to unemployment (or to employment in a different occupation) leads to similar overall conclusions, and also some evidence of adverse effects for older workers in particular industries. … Our work suggests that sharp minimum wage increases in the United States in coming years will shape the types of jobs held by low-skilled workers, and create employment challenges for some of them. … Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that increases in minimum wage will give incentives for firm to adopt new technologies that replace workers earlier. While these adoptions undoubtedly lead to some new jobs, there are workers who will be displaced that do not have the skills to do the new tasks. Our paper has identified workers whose vulnerability to being replaced by machines has been amplified by minimum wage increases. Such effects may spread to more workers in the future.”

Three things: First this study is a great companion piece to a recent one by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo analyzing the effect of increased industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets: “According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent.”

Second, Lordan and Neumark note that minimum wage literature often, in effect, ends up focusing on teenager employment as it presents aggregate results. But that approach “masks” bigger adverse impacts on some subgroups like older workers who are “more likely to be major contributors to their families’ incomes.” This seems like an important point.

Third, some policy folks argue that it’s a feature not a bug that a higher minimum wage will nudge firms to adopt labor-saving automation. (Thought not those arguing for robot taxes.) The result would be higher productivity and economic growth. But perhaps we are “getting too much of the wrong kind of innovation.”

As the St. Louis Fed explains, “labor share declined 3.3 percentage points in advanced economies from 1980 to 2015”:

One of the explanations for the decline of the labor share has been an increase in productivity that has outpaced an increase in real wages, with several studies attributing half the decline to this trend.

This increase in productivity has been driven by technological progress, as manifested in a decline in the relative price of investment (that is, the price of investment relative to the price of consumption).As the relative price of investment decreases, the cost of capital goes down, and firms have an incentive to substitute capital for labor. As a result, the labor share declines.

The decline in the labor share that results from a decline in the relative price of investment has contributed to an increase in inequality: A decrease in the cost of capital tends to induce automation in routine tasks, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production and monitoring activities. These are tasks performed mainly by middle-skill workers.

Hence, these are the segments of the population that are more affected by a reduction in the relative price of investment. The figure below displays the correlation between changes in the advanced economies’ labor share and their Gini coefficients (which measure income inequality).

The Fed concludes,

Technological progress promotes economic growth, but as the findings above suggest, it can also reduce the welfare of a large part of the working population and eventually have a negative effect on economic growth.[ref]For more information on this last claim, see the recent research from the IMF.[/ref]

An important role for policymakers would be to smooth the transition when more jobs are taken over by the de-routinization process. At the end of the day, technology should relieve people from performing repetitive tasks and increase the utility of our everyday lives.

Some Thoughts on Culture and Doctrine

April 10, 2018August 15, 2017 by Nathaniel

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

One of the most distinctive elements of Mormonism is food storage. It’s not going to be at the very tip-top of anyone’s list of “What do you think about when you think about Mormons?” but it’s still up there. If we were playing Family Feud, it wouldn’t be the #1 survey response, but it would be on the board.
This is kind of funny when you contrast it with what the Church actually teaches about welfare. Here’s a quote from Elder Brown’s talk:

May I remind you of the six elements of personal and family preparedness, all of which should be taught.

They are: first, literacy and education; second, career development; third, financial and resource management; fourth, home production and storage; fifth, physical health; and sixth, social-emotional strength.

It’s so interesting to me that the stuff everyone thinks about first–food storage and practical self-reliance–is actually fourth on this list, and only one item out of six.
This is one of the reasons it’s so important to pay attention to General Conference every spring and fall, and why it’s beneficial to go back and read through these old ones: because what we think the message is and what the message really turns out to be are not always the same. The messages, priorities, and narratives we absorb from our social network have all been through many, many rounds of telephone.

If we want to get the information from the source, we need to listen to what the General Authorities tell us themselves, and we need to come to that with a willingness to revisit our preconceptions, assumptions, and paradigms to actually really hear that they’re trying to tell us.

—

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

Labor of Love by G
Welfare: At The Bishop’s Door by Jan Tolman
Love in the everyday by Marilyn Nielson

“Better never means better for everyone”

August 15, 2017 by Nathaniel

The Handmaid’s tale as a TV show is apparently a big deal. I don’t know about that. I really liked the book when I read it a few years ago, but I dreaded it being made for TV and haven’t checked the show out. Anyway, because the show is a big deal, I see lots of references to it on Facebook. Here’s one that stood out:

Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.

The line is from the book, and it made it into the show, too. Of course it did.

The sentiment is very, very far from unique. In fact, it’s pretty close to universal among the left-wing of American politics. It’s actually pretty common on the right, too, since it’s more about populism than it is about left/right ideology. It crops up all the time. Just as one more example, here’s another left-leaning author in another overtly ideological (but not nearly as aesthetically accomplished) book[ref]It’s A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. Here’s my review.[/ref]:

“Everybody’s history is one long slog of all the horrible shit we’ve done to each other.”
“It’s not all that,” Tak said. “A lot of it, yes, but there’s good things, too. There’s art, and cities, and science. All the things we’ve discovered. All the things we’ve learned and made better.”
“All the things made better for some people. Nobody has ever figured out how to make things better for everybody.”
“I know,” Tak said.

So, that’s one theory of human existence: in all of our history (and for hundreds of years into our imagined future) progress for everyone is impossible.

On the other hand, here’s the reality[ref]This is Walker’s favorite graph, btw.[/ref]:

The chart comes from Our World in Data’s article on extreme poverty.

I understand the idea of living in a fantasy world if the fantasy is better than reality. I can even understand extending this wishful thinking to fantasies that don’t actually seem very nice. That’s what conspiracy theories are all about, after all. Some people would rather believe in a world where things happen for a reason (and that reason is the Illuminati) rather than believe in a world where things are pretty random and chaotic because the Illuminati running everything is less scary than nobody running anything. OK. Not my cup of tea, but OK.

What I don’t understand is choosing to live in fantasy world that is so much grimmer than reality for no discernible benefit.

Which makes you wonder: what motivates this belief–contradicted by all available evidence–that universal improvement is impossible?

Alcoholism on the Rise

August 14, 2017 by Walker

From The Washington Post:

A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what’s colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s. One in eight American adults, or 12.7 percent of the U.S. population, now meets diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder, according to the study.

The study’s authors characterize the findings as a serious and overlooked public health crisis, noting that alcoholism is a significant driver of mortality from a cornucopia of ailments: “fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, stroke, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer and infections, pancreatitis, type 2 diabetes, and various injuries.”

Indeed, the study’s findings are bolstered by the fact that deaths from a number of these conditions, particularly alcohol-related cirrhosis and hypertension, have risen concurrently over the study period. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 88,000 people a year die of alcohol-related causes, more than twice the annual death toll of opiate overdose.

…The study found that rates of alcoholism were higher among men (16.7 percent), Native Americans (16.6 percent), people below the poverty threshold (14.3 percent), and people living in the Midwest (14.8 percent). Stunningly, nearly 1 in 4 adults under age 30 (23.4 percent) met the diagnostic criteria for alcoholism.

…The study’s data go only through 2013. If the observed trend continues, the true rate of alcoholism today would be even higher.

How is “alcoholic” defined? The study defined “alcohol abuse” with the following criteria:

Recurrent use of alcohol resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations at work, school, or home (e.g., repeated absences or poor work performance related to alcohol use; alcohol-related absences, suspensions, or expulsions from school; neglect of children or household).
Recurrent alcohol use in situations in which it is physically hazardous (e.g., driving an automobile or operating a machine when impaired by alcohol use).
Recurrent alcohol-related legal problems (e.g., arrests for alcohol-related disorderly conduct).
Continued alcohol use despite having persistent or recurrent social or interpersonal problems caused or exacerbated by the effects of alcohol (e.g., arguments with spouse about consequences of intoxication).

And “alcohol dependence” by the following:

Need for markedly increased amounts of alcohol to achieve intoxication or desired effect; or markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of alcohol.
The characteristic withdrawal syndrome for alcohol; or drinking (or using a closely related substance) to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms.
Drinking in larger amounts or over a longer period than intended.
Persistent desire or one or more unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control drinking.
Important social, occupational, or recreational activities given up or reduced because of drinking.
A great deal of time spent in activities necessary to obtain, to use, or to recover from the effects of drinking.
Continued drinking despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to be caused or exacerbated by drinking.

Why the rise?

“I think the increases are due to stress and despair and the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism,” said the study’s lead author, Bridget Grant, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. The study notes that the increases in alcohol use disorder were “much greater among minorities than among white individuals,” likely reflecting widening social inequalities after the 2008 recession.

Politicization and the Fall of Academia

April 22, 2018August 13, 2017 by Nathaniel

The ivory towers of King’s College London’s Maughan Library (Public Domain)

I’ve often met academics who seem mystified and horrified at the extent and depth of conservative animus towards academia. This excellent article does a great job of explaining (1) where this dislike comes from and (2) why it should concern everyone, and not just conservatives.

First:

Entire disciplines—Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, and the various interdisciplinary programs that end in the word “Studies” – have all become more strongly associated with a particular species of left-wing interpretation that now influences the broader discourse in journalism and on social media. In some departments, the social categories of analysis—race, class, and gender—have attained complete hegemony. The most recent convention of the Modern Language Association, the most prominent organization associated with the study of language and literature, hosted three times as many panels on post-colonialism as it did on Shakespeare.

Second:

Conservatives will point to statistics such as the imbalance in the ratio between registered Democrats and Republicans as evidence of a political imbalance. Students it is argued are only getting one side of the story. While this sentiment is certainly understandable, it ignores an element of the current phenomena that might be even more deleterious to student learning and thus all the more intractable. The problem isn’t simply one of political imbalance, an absence of parity between Left and Right voices, but the extent to which humanities departments have become politicized.

I’m a conservative (more or less), and so I have an interest in conservatives being able to get their message out. But–independent of that partisan concern which I cannot pretend I do not feel–I have a sincere, non-partisan interest in the quality of public discourse. The politicization of everything is corroding that discourse. When everything is evaluated first in political terms, the conversation often fails to ever get beyond those preliminaries. Battle lines are drawn over rhetoric, terminology, tone, and framing. What’s left is a zombie-discourse, the husk of a conversation serving as a thin veneer for power games.

It’s bad for everyone.

It’s especially bad for academia. If folks like those at Heterodox Academy don’t manage to hold onto a middle-ground position, I’m not sure what the future of the academy in the United States looks like, but it will likely be quite grim. Elite institutions are already much more about the perpetuation of elitism than education. When the academic content of academia effectively disappears, there will be nothing left except the quasi-covert apparatus of aristocracy.

What Does Scientific Research Say About the Infamous Google Memo?

April 3, 2018August 11, 2017 by Walker

I’m sure most of you have heard about the controversial Google Memo making the rounds throughout the media. Social psychologists Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt provide an excellent source[ref]Thanks to Megan Conley for linking to this on Facebook.[/ref] for those interested in browsing the academic literature on the subject. They provide both supportive and critical responses[ref]Update: Add this to the critical pile.[/ref] to the memo as well as highlight findings within the research that both agree and disagree with the memo’s assertions. Overall, they conclude,

1. Gender differences in math/science ability, achievement, and performance are small or nil.* (See especially the studies by Hyde; see also this review paper by Spelke, 2005). The one exception to this statement seems to be spatial abilities, such as the ability to rotate 3-dimensional objects in one’s mind. This ability may be relevant in some areas of engineering, but it’s not clear why it would matter for coding. Thus, the large gender gap in coding (and in tech in general) cannot be explained as resulting to any substantial degree from differences in ability between men and women.

2. Gender differences in interest and enjoyment of math, coding, and highly “systemizing” activities are large. The difference on traits related to preferences for “people vs. things” is found consistently and is very large, with some effect sizes exceeding 1.0. (See especially the meta-analyses by Su and her colleagues, and also see this review paper by Ceci & Williams, 2015).

3. Culture and context matter, in complicated ways. Some gender differences have decreased over time as women have achieved greater equality, showing that these differences are responsive to changes in culture and environment. But the cross-national findings sometimes show “paradoxical” effects: progress toward gender equality in rights and opportunities sometimes leads to larger gender differences in some traits and career choices. Nonetheless, it seems that actions taken today by parents, teachers, politicians, and designers of tech products may increase the likelihood that girls will grow up to pursue careers in tech, and this is true whether or not biology plays a role in producing any particular population difference. (See this review paper by Eagly and Wood, 2013).

Check out the research for yourself.

Corruption: Another Driver of Migration

April 6, 2018August 10, 2017 by Walker

“One issue frequently raised by migrants whom I have met in transit (most recently in Agadez, Niger) is the absence of a level playing field in their home country,” reports Richard Danziger at the World Economic Forum. “Without knowing the right people, being from the right community or having the money to buy their way into a job, they will never get ahead. This, in turn, is part of the broader problem of poor governance, which has resulted in everything from a sharp drop in the quality of education and other services; to investment in sectors that lead to impressive GDP growth indicators, but result in little by way of job creation. While an increasing number of countries across Africa are holding free and fair elections, democratically elected governments have yet to prove themselves truly responsive to the needs of vast swathes of the population. In countries where there is already a tradition of migration, for many, voting with one’s feet can appear more effective than a trip to the ballot box.”

Danziger continues,

There has been relatively little research on the issue of poor governance as a driver of migration. A recently published study by GIZ specifically examining the link between corruption and migration and forced displacement is a rare example of research into this sensitive subject…The concept of poor governance is very broad and can cover a multitude of areas of mismanagement or criminal activity horizontally across sectors and vertically across levels of management. Indonesians for example talk of KKN: the Bahasa acronym for Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism. It might perhaps be more useful to explain what is meant by good governance and here we can refer to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” More specifically 16.5, 16.6 and 16.7; address corruption, transparency and accountability, and inclusiveness and participation.

As for the link to migration, the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants refers to the promotion of the rule of law and the need to address marginalization and exclusion. It also refers to the SDGs and the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies, carefully sidestepping any mention of KKN or related abuses. Yet if we are to create a truly new and effective global migration framework there is a need for the Global Compact on Migration to include explicit reference to these issues.

I have an article currently under review at BYU Studies Quarterly on the subject of the Church and immigration. The more I read about the subject, the more I’m convinced I’m right.

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