The Trade-Offs of Paid Leave

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With Trump’s budget proposing paid family leave, it’s worth considering the economics behind it. Economist and author Charles Wheelan explains in his fantastic book Naked Economics,

Economists study how we acquire information, what we do with it, and how we make ecisions when all we get to see is a book’s cover. Indeed, the Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized this point in 2001 by awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz for their seminal work on the economics of information. Their work explores the problems that arise when rational people are forced to make decisions based on incomplete information, or when one party to a transaction knows more than another.

…Consider a small law firm interviewing two job candidates, one male and one female. Both candidates are…eminently qualified for the position. If the “best” candidate for the job is the one who will earn the most money for the firm…then I will argue that the rational choice is to the hire the man…Women still bear the bulk of child-rearing responsibilities. Demographics suggest that both candidates are likely to start families in the near future. Yet only the female candidate will take paid maternity leave. More important, she may not return to work after having the child, which leaves the firm with the cost of finding, hiring, and training another lawyer.

Is any of this certain? No…The female candidate is punished because the firm has no information on her specific circumstances but good data on broad social trends. Is this fair? No. (And it’s not legal either.) Yet the firm’s logic makes sense (pg. 105-106).[ref]He goes on to point out that professional women that take the paid maternity leave and run impose a cost on other women by making firms more likely to discriminate against women. His solution?: “a generous, but refundable maternity package. Keep it if you want to come back to work, return it if you don’t” (pg. 107).[/ref]

Obviously, Wheelan is not endorsing discrimination, but simply laying out the economic factors that incentivize it. Over at The Week, AEI’s James Pethokoukis lays out some of the evidence for the theory above:

Even the best ideas have downsides, and it’s up to policymakers to deal with them. Paid leave is no different.

A 2017 study, by UC Santa Barbara economist Jenna Stearns, of maternity leave policy in Great Britain found that access increases the probability of women returning to work, while job protection benefits result in higher overall maternal employment rates and longer job tenure. Sounds good! But there’s a tradeoff: Expanding job protected leave benefits led to “fewer women holding management positions and other jobs with the potential for promotion.”

Likewise, a 2013 study by Cornell University’s Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found family-friendly policies indeed make it easier to balance work and family. But they also “leave women less likely to be considered for high-level positions. One’s evaluation of such policies must take both of these effects into account.”

Few economists would be surprised at these analyses. In a classic 1983 paper on mandated benefits like paid leave, former Obama economist Lawrence Summers explained businesses would offset higher benefits with lower pay or hiring workers with lower potential benefit costs. You know, tradeoffs.

Paid parental leave obviously has real upsides. But we can’t ignore the downsides either: Lower pay, stingier promotions, and a potential employer favoritism toward the childless.

The trade-offs may very well be worth it. But we need to at least be aware of what they are.

Are Mormon Women Depressed?

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Mormon women deal with depression at higher levels because of the absurd demands placed on them by their faith and culture, right? Maybe not. Jana Riess over at Flunking Sainthood writes,

Overall, about a fifth of currently-identified Mormons say they have taken or are currently taking medication for depression—21%. The numbers are definitely higher for Mormon women than for men. 27% of women say yes, almost twice the number of Mormon men who do (14.5%). 

…[But] the rate of Mormon women suffering from depression may actually be lower than the national average for women. The data on this is inconsistent, though; Timothy Heaton’s research has indeed found that “LDS women are significantly higher in depression than non-LDS women.” So there is no consensus here.

Second, there’s a known “gender gap” between men and women in the United States where mental health is concerned—and not just in Mormonism.

According to a publication of the Harvard Medical School, women “are about twice as likely as men to develop major depression,” based on a combination of genetic, hormonal, and emotional factors (and also the fact that even if men do develop depression, they are idiots about it they are less likely than women to seek the help they need). The World Health Organization has also found that depression is twice as common in women.

Bottom line, then: Mormon women appear to struggle more than Mormon men do with depression, or at least are getting treated for it nearly twice as often. This is not, however, an unusual or Mormon-specific gender dynamic.

But what are the factors that correlate with Mormon women who seek treatment?

  • Age doesn’t matter much: younger women are a little more likely to get treatment than older women.
  • Employment matters a little bit: unemployed women not looking for work–like stay-at-home moms–were a bit more likely to get treatment than full-timers and part-timers.
  • Politics matters: Democrats are more likely to take medication than Republicans.
  • Church activity matters: “very active” members are less likely to take medication than members who are “not active at all.”
  • Beliefs matter: A quarter of women who believe “all or most Mormon teachings” compared to 1/3 of women “who doubt or find some Mormon teachings hard to believe.”
  • Family size matters: “Women who have no children at all are a little more likely to take medication for depression than women who have one, two, or three children. In families of four or more children, women are also a bit more likely take medication. Overall, the women who were least likely to take medication for depression were those with one, two, or three children.”
  • Divorce matters: “Women who were divorced were almost twice as likely as married women to have taken medication for depression (41% vs. 23%). Never-married women fall in the middle at 34%.”

As Riess concludes, “The reality is nuanced and complex.”

Basking in Motivated Ignorance

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Vox covers the unsurprising results of a new study regarding political bias:

If you ever thought, “You couldn’t pay me to listen to Sean Hannity / Rachael Maddow / insert any television pundit you violently disagree with here” — you are not alone.

A study, recently published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology,essentially tested this very question.

Two hundred participants were presented with two options. They could either read and answer questions about an opinion they agreed with — the topic was same-sex marriage — or read the opposing viewpoint.

Here’s the catch: If the participants chose to read the opinion they agreed with, they were entered into a raffle pool to earn $7. If they selected to read opposing opinion, they had a chance to win $10.

And yet,

A majority — 63 percent — of the participants chose to stick with what they already knew, forgoing the chance to win $10. Both people with pro same-sex marriage beliefs and those against it avoided the opinion hostile to their worldview at similar rates.

…This is a key point that many people miss when discussing the “fake news” or “filter bubble” problem in our online media ecosystems. Avoiding facts inconvenient to our worldview isn’t just some passive, unconscious habit we engage in. We do it because we find these facts to be genuinely unpleasant. And as long as this experience remains unpleasant, and easy to avoid, we’re just going to drift further and further apart.

Similarly, the researchers found that “[l]istening to a political opponent isn’t as awful as getting a tooth pulled, but it’s trending in that direction. It’s certainly a lot more awful than taking a leisurely stroll.”

What’s worse is that “partisans were unfamiliar with [the opposing side’s] viewpoints. So it’s not the case that people are avoiding learning about the other side because they’re already familiar. What’s going on here is “motivated ignorance,” as Matt Motyl, one of the study co-authors calls it.” Vox laments,

This is the dark truth that lies at the heart of all partisan politics, and makes me pessimistic that Facebook or any other social networking site can really solve the problem of people filtering into their own content bubbles. We automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our worldviews. We’re simply quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it. It’s the reason why that — paradoxically — as we learn more about politics and politically charged issues, we tend to become more rigid in our thinking.

Just more evidence that politics makes us mean and dumb. Here are a few useful steps to help you escape your political echo chamber:

 

The Long-Term Impact of Immigrants

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“Immigration is one of the most controversial policy issues in the US and Europe today,” write the authors of a new economics paper.

The debate mostly focuses on the short-run effects of immigration: Do immigrants take jobs away from natives? Do immigrants increase pressure on public goods? Do immigrants increase crime and reduce social capital? Many researchers have attempted to address these questions by providing empirical evidence on the short-run, immediate effects of immigration (e.g. Kerr and Kerr 2016, Peri 2012, Peri and Sparber 2009, Card 2009, 2012). While understanding the short run is important, policymakers should also consider the long-run consequences if the welfare of our children and grandchildren are to matter. And yet, we know very little about the long-run impact of immigration.

In order to study this long-run impact, the researchers

examine migration into the US during America’s Age of Mass Migration (from 1850–1920) and estimate the causal effect of immigrants on economic and social outcomes approximately 100 years later (Nunn et al. 2017). This period of immigration is notable for many reasons. First, this was the period in US history with the highest levels of immigration. Second, the immigrants that arrived during this time were different from previous waves of immigrants. While earlier immigrants were primarily from western Europe, the new wave also included large numbers of immigrants from southern, northern, and eastern Europe who spoke different languages and had different religious practices (Hatton and Williamson 2005: 51, Daniels 2002: 121–137, Abramitzky and Boustan 2015).

In order to measure the effects, the authors developed “an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that exploits two facts about immigration during this period. The first is that after arriving into the US, immigrants tended to use the newly constructed railway to travel inland to their eventual place of residence (Faulkner 1960, Foerster 1969). Therefore, a county’s connection to the railway network affected the number of immigrants that settled in the county. The second fact is that the aggregate inflow of immigrants coming to the US during this period fluctuated greatly from decade to decade.”

Their findings?

We find that higher historical immigration (from 1860–1920) resulted in significantly higher incomes, less poverty, less unemployment, more urbanisation, and higher educational attainment today. The estimates, in addition to being statistically significant, are also economically meaningful. For example, according to the estimates for per capita income, moving a county with no historical immigration (i.e. during 1860–1920) to the 50th percentile of the sample (which is 0.049) results in a 20% increase in average per capita income today.

We also try to shed light on the mechanisms. We find that immigration resulted in an immediate increase in industrialisation.  Immigrants contributed to the establishment of more manufacturing facilities and to the development of larger facilities. We also found that immigrants contributed to increased agricultural productivity in the medium-run and to increased innovation, as measured by patenting rates of both immigrants and the native-born. These findings are consistent with a long-standing narrative in the historical literature suggesting that immigrants benefitted the economy by providing an ample supply of unskilled labour, which was crucial for early industrialisation. A smaller number of immigrants brought with them knowledge, skills, and know-how that were beneficial for industry and increased productivity in agriculture. Thus, by providing a sizeable workforce and a (smaller) number of skilled workers, immigration led to early industrial development and long-run prosperity, which continues to persist until today.

 

Gentle Practicality

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

In the Sunday morning session of the April 1976 GC, Elder Tanner talked about patriotism and stressed the importance of voting for honorable representatives:

…it is our duty to seek diligently for and support and uphold good, honest, honorable, and wise representatives to govern us.

Next, Elder Marvin J. Ashton spoke about families, and the need to be gentle, non-judgmental, and empathic.

One of the interesting things for me has been seeing the consistent personalities of some of the General Authorities from the 1970s that I never knew in my own lifetime. This wasn’t the first time Elder Tanner had stressed the need to vote based on character and honor, for example. And it was far from the first time that Elder Ashton had promulgated such a gentle, practical gospel. These themes go all the way back to one of the first talks I read in the GCO, his October 1971 talk Love of the Right where he stressed the importance of understanding why our young people are tempted by drugs instead of simply condemning those who become addicted:

If we as parents and friends advise our youth that drugs are bad, evil, and immoral, and yet we do not try to understand why our youth turn to this evil substitute for reality, then the drugs themselves become the issue and not the symptom of the greater issue of unhappiness. We need to know why our loved ones want to run from their present life to the unknown yet dangerous life of addiction. What causes a strong, lovely, vibrant young person to allow a chemical to control his or her behavior? What is there at home, school, work, or church that is so uncomfortable that an escape seems necessary?

This is a much more thoughtful approach than I had expected from a 1970’s era GC talk about drugs. And, in the year of reading since then, Elder Ashton has become one of my favorites. His talk from this session, Family Communications, is definitely worth reading. If we want to have meaningful communication within our families, this is what we must have:

  1. A willingness to sacrifice
  2. A willingness to set the stage
  3. A willingness to listen
  4. A willingness to vocalize feelings
  5. A willingness to avoid judgment
  6. A willingness to maintain confidences
  7. A willingness to practice patience

While explaining the fifth point, Elder Ashton quoted a familiar scripture in a way that was totally new to me. He described a son’s heartache when, moments after his father passed away in a hospital, his mother told him that his father had loved him. Later on, as he cried alone in the hospital room, a nurse tried to console him. The son wanted to tell the nurse:

“‘I’m not crying because my father is dead. I’m crying because my father never told me that he was proud of me. He never told me that he loved me. Of course, I was expected to know these things. I was expected to know the great part I played in his life and the great part I occupied of his heart, but he never told me.’”

Then Elder Ashton quoted Matthew 3:17 in a way I’d never heard before:

How significant are God’s words when he took the time to vocalize his feelings with, “This is my beloved Son,” yes, even the powerful communication, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

I always assumed that Heavenly Father’s introduction of His Son was exclusively for our benefit. It never occurred to me, until this moment, that the Father was not only delivering a message to us (“Hey, listen up.”) but also to His Son (“I love you and I appreciate you.”)

That changes things.

And it’s a pretty good example of how I’ve come to love and value Elder Ashton’s unique, gentle, and practical perspective. He became an apostle almost a decade before I was born. He died when I was a young man. I must have heard at least one of his talks in General Conference, but I have no memory of him whatsoever. I’m sad I missed him, but I’m glad I still have his words to read.

One day, when my time here is done, I will thank him in person.

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

What Are the Effects of Housing Constraints on Economic Growth?

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According to a new working paper, the effects are huge:

Image result for housingWe use data from 220 metropolitan areas in the US from 1964 to 2009 to perform two calculations. First, we quantify the effect of spatial misallocation. We find that most of the increased spatial dispersion in the marginal product of labor is due to the growing spatial dispersion in housing prices. In turn, the growing spatial dispersion of housing prices is largely driven by strict zoning laws in cities such as New York and the San Francisco Bay Area with strong productivity growth. We find that the increased spatial misallocation of labor due to housing supply constraints in cities with high productivity growth rates lowered aggregate growth by almost 50% between 1964 and 2009.

Second, we calculate the contribution of each US city to aggregate US growth and compare it to an “accounting” measure based solely on the growth of the city’s GDP. The difference reflects the effect of a city’s growth on the efficiency of labor allocation across cities. While the accounting measure suggests that New York, San Francisco and San Jose’s contribution to aggregate GDP growth between 1964 and 2009 is 12%, viewed through the lenses of our model, these cities were only responsible for 5% of growth. The difference is because the aggregate benefit of TFP growth in New York and Bay Area was in part offset by increased misallocation of labor across cities. In contrast, for Southern cities the accounting and model-based measures are the same. Due to an elastic supply of housing, much of the growth in the South took the form of employment growth, with no effect on misallocation.

We conclude that local land use regulations that restrict housing supply in dynamic labor markets have important externalities on the rest of the country. Incumbent homeowners in high productivity cities have a private incentive to restrict housing supply. By doing so, these voters de facto limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers (pgs. 2-3; bold mine).

We’ve blasted zoning laws here at Difficult Run several times before. Just one more reason to do so.

A Silent Voice (2016)

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This is part of What I’m Watching.

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Your Name set me on the path for highly-emotional, heart-tugging anime. A Silent Voice (also translated The Shape of Voice) has had some buzz surrounding it[ref]It recently won the Japan Movie Critics Award for Best Picture.[/ref]  and I’ve been waiting excitedly for it to become available. The story follows Ishida, an isolated and (at least briefly) suicidal teenager who is weighed down by remorse for his past bullying of former deaf classmate Nishimiya. His bullying eventually resulted in her transferring schools, leading Ishida’s friends and classmates to ostracize him despite their own participation in the bullying. In an effort to atone, he meets Nishimiya again and offers friendship. This sets them down a path of redemption, exploring themes of loneliness, bullying, friendship, forgiveness, suicide, and the deep-seated need for human connection.

I relish the way many anime enhance (exaggerate?) displays of human emotion. Even more so, I love the way I can be captivated by the most mundane aspects of everyday life and the small moments that build relationships. While there is a slightly romantic vibe in A Silent Voice between Ishida and Nishimiya, that’s not the focus (even though the trailer below makes it look like a teenage romance). At the beginning of the film, Ishida is shown blocking out the faces and voices of others, portrayed through the visible “X”s over people’s faces and the symbolic gesture of covering his ears.

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The film is less about romance and more about the healing between people and allowing oneself to become vulnerable enough to truly see and hear others. While it’s a tad too long and some of the characters remained underdeveloped, I found A Silent Voice incredibly moving. I was a blubbering mess by the end. Definitely worth checking out.

Do Immigrants Assimilate?

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“In the past,” writes one pair of economists,

new immigrants arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe, joining earlier waves of migrants from Britain, Germany and Ireland. Today, many immigrants hail from Latin America and Asia, entering a country that is already more diverse. Are fears that immigrants retain their own cultural practices and fail to fully join American society justified by the data?

In recent work with our co-author Katherine Eriksson, we study the cultural assimilation of immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), during which 30 million migrants moved from Europe to the US (Abramitzky et al. 2016). We trace out a ‘cultural assimilation profile’ with time spent in the US, using changes in the foreignness of names that immigrant parents selected for their children as a measure of cultural adaptation. Children’s names offer an attractive measure of the assimilation process, both because names carry cultural content and because naming is a pure choice for immigrant parents, unconstrained by financial limitations or by discrimination on the part of natives. In particular, we measure the relative probability that each first name was held by a foreigner versus a native in the 1920 Census, and use this to construct a Foreignness Index, a measure between zero (name only held by natives) and one (name only held by foreigners).

By this measure, we find that recent immigrants gave their children more foreign names than did long-standing immigrants, which we take to be evidence of cultural assimilation with time spent in the US.

This change in names yielded benefits for the children of immigrants:

We link over a million children of immigrants across historical Censuses from their childhood families in 1920 into adulthood in 1940, and find that children with less foreign names completed more years of schooling, earned more and were less likely to be unemployed. Children with less foreign names were also less likely to marry a spouse who was born abroad or who had a very foreign name herself.

To summarize,

Despite arriving with a distinct set of cultural practices (proxied here by name choices), immigrants closed half of their cultural gap with natives after 20 years in the US. By 1930, more than two-thirds of immigrants had applied for US citizenship and almost all reported some ability to speak English. A third of first-generation immigrants who arrived in the US before marrying and more than half of second-generation immigrants married spouses from different origins.

I’m really not all that worried about cultural diversity. But for those who are, looks like you don’t have much to fear from immigrants.

Full Moral Alchemists

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Caring about a loved one’s seemingly non-moral values may in fact moralize them according to a new study. The authors explain,

[W]e believe that many of our everyday moral anxieties center on cases where there is a conflict between our belief in any proposition (including morally neutral ones) and our belief that actions consistent with that proposition will upset someone we love. It is in this sense that love can lead to what we will call moral alchemy: caring for others (and indeed the moral obligation to do so) allows propositions with little or no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. To be very clear, our hypothesis is distinct from the claim that our moral values depend on the values of our close others; many researchers have investigated the degree to which our sense of moral value is affected by moral contagion, or social affiliation (see e.g., Eskine, 2013; Haan et al., 1968; Haidt and Hersh, 2001 ;  Hofmann et al., 2014). Here we are interested in cases where although our own opinion about the actual rightness or wrongness of the behavior may remain unchanged, we nonetheless assign the behavior an elevated moral status.

They provide the following examples:

We will start with a trivial example: the moral status of Pogs. (For those of you who were neither a parent nor child in the 1990’s, Pogs are collectible colored disks, originally from bottle caps.) Clearly in the world at large, if someone steps on a Pog, uses one to prop up a table leg, or publically disparages them on national TV, he is morally blameless. He is morally blameless even if he knows that Pogs are valued by millions of school children in his culture. Suppose however, your child comes up to you and says, ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Most of us would be (morally) appalled if you replied, ‘‘Pogs are stupid” and snapped a Pog in two.

Of course what is bad in this example is hurting your child’s feelings, not hurting Pogs. Nonetheless, we suggest that the effect of moral alchemy is to (locally) change the moral status of Pogs. You cannot disregard them as objects worthy of care and attention without insufficiently valuing your child’s values…All that matters is that you knew he cared about Pogs and you did not take his utilities as your own. Note that this is neither moral contagion nor moral duplicity: you do not adopt your child’s attitude of valuing Pogs for their own sake but neither do you merely act ‘‘as if” you care about Pogs when you do not. Rather, insofar as, and for as long as, failing to care about Pogs would be hurtful to your child, you represent Pogs as objects worthy of care (e.g., you would likely feel guilty about intentionally destroying a Pog, even in private).

…It is after all, uncontroversial that people value idiosyncratic things and that morality requires respecting things that others value. However, we suggest that taken together, these commonplaces of human psychology play a key and underappreciated role in real life moral dilemmas, moral learning and moral change. Consider a proposition less trivial than ‘‘Pogs are the best thing ever.” Consider ‘‘Academic achievement is important.” For the sake of argument, let’s presume that within a given cultural context, this counts as a value but not a moral one: everyone concerned accepts that mediocre students can be morally unimpeachable. Suppose however, that your parents are among those who care about this (non-moral) value. If you underachieve in school, rip up your homework, and refuse to study for tests, are those moral transgressions or not?

The researchers tested the hypothesis that non-moral concerns could be moralized based on close relationships with the following steps:

• participants rated how much they cared about a set of behaviors.

• Next they rated how much a close other or an acquaintance cared about different items from the set.

• On a third set of items, they rated “how most people” would judge the behavior.

• Experiment 1 looked at permissibility judgments.

• Experiment 2 looked at whether the behavior was seen as a norm, value, or moral.

Their results?

Experiment 1 suggested that failing to engage in a behavior is perceived as “more wrong” by third parties when someone you care about cares more about the behavior than you do. Experiment 2 suggests that the behavior may also be perceived as “more moral”. To the degree that positive behaviors exist on a continuum of importance, with conventions regarded as relatively unimportant, values as moderately important (insofar as their importance varies from person to person), and morals as extremely important, believing that a loved one cares more than you about a behavior elevates the significance of the behavior, making conventions somewhat more like values and values somewhat more like morals.

The results further suggest that this was not due to a general elevation of the status of positive behaviors in the context of thinking about a loved one. Relative to participants in the Distant Other condition, participants’ ratings in the Close Other condition were only higher when they believed the loved one cared more about that kind of behavior than they did themselves. This is consistent with the idea that concern for the interests of close others makes us treat some behaviors more seriously than we otherwise would because failing to so value them risks interpersonal harm.

…[C]oncern for the loved one added moral importance to behaviors perceived as more important to their close other than the self, leading participants to elevate the moral significance of these behaviors to third parties.

Looks like we’re all full moral alchemists.

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Priesthood Authority vs. Priesthood Power

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’ve made it to the Priesthood session of April 1976’s General Conference. Most of the talks were kind of blah for me, but President Kimball had a few interesting things to say:

Indecision and discouragement are climates in which the Adversary lives to function, for he can inflict so many casualties among mankind in those settings.

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The next bit stood out to me largely because of my research on the theology of work:

We hope you will make no less effort to fellowship those members and prospective members who are tradesmen and craftsmen. We must never come to feel in the Church that those who labor in the crafts and skills have somehow done less than they should. We are grateful, of course, for the many professional men in the Church and for those who are thought of as being in our white-collar occupations; but I want us to reach out more than we now do for the men—young and old—who labor in the so-called blue-collar skills, which are more essential to our society than many realize. Indeed, some of these skills are in short supply! Let us reach out in a special way to these men, for among them are many of our prospective elders whose strength and skills we need and whose families will fully affiliate only if these men come and join us in greater numbers.

I think there is something metaphysical about physical labor. Blue-collar work deserves more respect.

And finally:

Please avoid, even by implication, involving the Church in political issues. It is so easy, if we are not careful, to project our personal preferences as the position of the Church on an issue.

This was unexpected, especially given the recent debate over Mormon conservatism. But it’s a much-needed warning to not confuse political partisanship for discipleship.[ref]To be clear, I’m not accusing the authors of the Deseret News articles of putting politics before discipleship. I think politics should be influenced by religion.[/ref]

My favorite talk, however, was Elder Peterson’s. Look at the way he breaks down the difference between authority and power:

From [D&C 121:34-36] I understand that there is a difference between priesthood authority and priesthood power. Power and authority in the priesthood are not necessarily synonymous. All of us who hold the priesthood have the authority to act for the Lord, but the effectiveness of our authority—or if you please, the power that comes through that authority—depends on the pattern of our lives; it depends on our righteousness. Note again, “The powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness.”

…If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college. Ours, my young brethren, can be the power to stop evil thoughts of a group of boys gathered together in vulgar conversation. Ours can be the power to heal the sick and comfort the lonely. These are some of the important purposes of the priesthood.

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.

For me, this focus on priesthood blessing families is rooted in Joseph Smith’s temple theology. It is about solidifying relationships in eternity, calling on the power of connection and love that transcends death. The approved words by the approved representative (authority) fall short without the meaning intact (power). It makes little sense to speak of eternal relationships via authoritative rituals if the very essence of the relationship has fizzled. This is why Peterson highlights the following when it comes to holding authority:

Many are the brethren who do not understand what these sacred words [D&C 121:39-40] mean:

We must not be inconsiderate;

We must not command;

We must not be dictators;

We must not become puffed up in pride.

These things are toxic to relationships.[ref]Peterson also states, “May I also suggest to you that it is important for the brethren to develop the same concern for the training of girls as they have for the training of the priesthood boys.”[/ref] And toxicity erodes the very essence of what priesthood is supposed to maintain.