A Pragmatic Zion

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Ephraim Moses Lilien, Zion, 1903. (Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I forgot that—after the Sunday afternoon session—the October 1975 General Conference had one more session to go: the welfare session. And this, my friends, is the most quintessentially Mormon thing ever.

Back in the day, my father[ref]Terryl Givens. He and my mum are kind of a big deal.[/ref] said in a PBS interview:

One of the hallmarks of Mormonism, and of Joseph Smith in particular, is the collapse of sacred distance. Joseph insistently refused to recognize the distinctness of those categories that were typical in traditional Christianity, the sense that there is an earthly and a heavenly, a bodily and a spiritual.

That stubborn refusal to see any distinction between spiritual and the physical, the practical and the ideal, the holy and the mundane, is one of the most distinctive attributes of Mormon faith, and also one of my favorite. We’re relentlessly effective at finding the sacred in basically everything. We’re as universalistic in our aspirations to find holiness everywhere as we are in our plans to save all mankind.

And so it is that we’ve got an entire session of General Conference dedicated to such mundane concerns as how to pick a career, the importance of budgeting, and the necessity of having enough food storage on hand. And yet at the same time, there’s the stubborn insistence that working out the nuts and bolts of practical self-sufficiency is a stepping stone towards reaching Zion.

I love it in part because it’s just deliciously paradoxical, and paradoxes are fun. But that’s at best an adolescent appreciation. There’s nothing deep or lasting in that regard.

What matters to me more is this: the only kind of Zion that could ever be realized—in practice—is one that is fundamentally pragmatic in conception. If anyone could ever build the kin of society we believe a Zion society to be—one with no distinction between rich and poor, and where the people are united in heart and mind—it would be practical people, willing to take every mundane step necessary in pursuit of their heavenly aspiration.

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

Unsatisfied Retirees

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Retirement may not be all it’s cracked up to be. A MarketWatch article reports,

More retirees than ever say they are “not at all satisfied” with retirement, according to a study published this year from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. The institute used data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study, collected from 1998 to 2012, in which more than 20,000 people are interviewed every two years.

The number of retirees reporting just moderate satisfaction with retirement increased from 31.7% to 40.9% and those who are completely unsatisfied with retirement climbed above 10%, up from fewer than 8% in 1998. Meanwhile, the number of retirees who say their retirement is “very satisfying” has dropped from 60.5% in 1998 to 48.6% in 2012 — the first time it’s ever dipped below half.

The study authors did not investigate the reasons behind these satisfaction dips, but other studies suggest that some of the reasons may be financial. Research published in 2004 by Constantijn Panis, who has a Ph.D. in economics and is also an expert in demographic issues, found that getting payouts from a pension was positively related to retirement satisfaction. But as the number of retirees drawing on traditional pensions declined — from 1980 to 2008, the proportion of non-government, salaried workers who got a traditional pension fell from 38% to 20% — retirement satisfaction may be dipping accordingly.

…Studies show that today’s retirees want more and varied activities in retirement, including flexible jobs, than did previous generations of retirees. Plus, surveys show that boomers — who are retiring in droves in recent years — are in general less happy than members of the so-called silent generation, and that may be reflected in these numbers.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the overwhelming majority report being satisfied with retirement. We shouldn’t create a crisis where there is none. Nonetheless, the uptick may be something we want to keep an eye on. In the Gallup-published Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter explore five elements to overall well-being:

  • Career Wellbeing – how one’s time is occupied.
  • Social Wellbeing – the strength of one’s relationships.
  • Financial Wellbeing – effectively managing one’s economic life.
  • Physical Wellbeing – having good health and enough energy on a daily basis.
  • Community Wellbeing – engagement with the area in which one lives.

In regards to Career Wellbeing, Rath and Harter reveal this significant point about the need to work:

One of the more encouraging findings [of one study] was that, even in the face of some of life’s most tragic events like the death of a spouse, after a few years, people do recover to the same level of wellbeing they had before their spouse passed away. But this was not the case for those who were unemployed for a prolonged period of time — particularly not for men. Our wellbeing actually recovers more rapidly from the death of a spouse than it does from a sustained period of unemployment. This doesn’t mean that getting fired will harm your wellbeing forever. The same study also found that being laid off from a job in the last year did not result in any significant long-term changes. The key is to avoid sustained periods of unemployment (more than a year) when you are actively looking for a job but unable to find one. In addition to the obvious loss of income from prolonged unemployment, the lack of regular social contact and the daily boredom might be even more detrimental to your wellbeing.

This is likely why the MarketWatch article encourages retirees to “find things you love to do” and “plan how to use your time.” Wise advice.

Is the EPI Correct About Wages and Productivity?

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Image result for epi wages productivity

The above chart from the Economic Policy Institute has become a staple in the “wage stagnation” debate. I talked about it before a couple years ago, but I thought I’d revisit it since there have been a couple responses to the EPI since then. Scott Winship, formerly of Brookings and now at the Manhattan Institute, writes,

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI)…has created a widely cited chart indicating that productivity rose 72 percent during 1973–2014 while median hourly compensation rose by a measly 9 percent. The implication is that rising inequality and declining employer generosity mean that policies that promote economic growth will fail to lift middle-class living standards and that more redistribution is necessary to assist working families.

In arriving at this conclusion, EPI makes numerous faulty methodological decisions. It understates growth in median hourly compensation by using a deficient inflation adjustment and by undervaluing benefits other than health insurance. It overstates the divergence between productivity and median hourly compensation trends by using different inflation adjustments for each. It includes imputed rents in national income, which exerts a downward pull on labor’s share of income. It includes the self-employed in its analyses, for whom it makes little sense to distinguish between labor income and capital income. And it includes government and nonprofit workers, whose productivity is not well measured (pg. 4).

Winship instead finds the following:

  • During 1973–2007, U.S. hourly compensation rose 71 percent, while productivity rose 74 percent.
  • In 1973, U.S. workers received 70 percent of the income produced by businesses; in 2007, they received 69 percent.
    • For the past 70 years, labor’s share of income has fluctuated—almost without exception—between 67 percent and 71 percent.
  • Since 1929, the U.S. business cycles with the highest productivity growth have also featured the highest growth in hourly compensation.
  • Male and female middle-class workers saw faster growth in pay during 1989–2000 and 2000–07 than during 1973–79, when productivity growth was slower.
  • Middle-class pay has not stagnated: during 1997–2011, productivity rose by 35 percent, aggregate compensation rose by 32 percent, median hourly compensation increased by 20 percent, median female pay climbed by 25 percent, and median male pay grew by 18 percent.

According to the Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk,[ref]Before dismissing Heritage as Koch-bought, right-wing hackery, it might be worth pointing out that 27% of the EPI’s funding comes from unions and its Board of Directors chairman is the president of AFL-CIO. Heritage isn’t my go-to source for much of anything, but this is the most in depth analysis I’ve read of the EPI’s claims.[/ref]

Academic economists largely reject this analysis and the conclusion that salary no longer grows with productivity. Harvard professor Martin Feldstein, the former president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that the apparent divergence results from comparing the wrong data. Using the correct data, he finds that pay and productivity have both grown together. Staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found the same result.

Even prominent liberal economists who have examined this question agree. Dean Baker, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, finds that pay growth tracks productivity growth when comparing the same groups of workers and using the same measure of inflation. Harvard professor Robert Lawrence served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers; he comes to the same conclusion. George Washington University professor Stephen Rose—a former Clinton Administration Labor Department official currently affiliated with the Urban Institute—likewise finds that the apparent gap between pay and productivity collapses under scrutiny. He concludes that productivity growth continues to benefit working Americans.

Most economists who examine the issue conclude that firms pay workers according to the value they produce.

In my view, one of the most glaring errors of the EPI’s methodology is the following:

EPI compares compensation for production and non-supervisory employees—which covers about five-eighths of the total economy—to the productivity of all workers in the economy. Economic theory does not predict that the pay and productivity of different groups of employees will necessarily track each other, especially in the presence of barriers to mobility.

Even abstracting from analytical errors, EPI can claim no more than that pay and productivity have grown differently among different groups of workers. EPI’s data say nothing about whether workers’ pay has grown in step with their own productivity.

Check out the full analyses by both Winship and (especially) Sherk.

On the United Debacle and Deliberation

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By now you’ve all heard about United Airlines forcibly removing David Dao from a flight. That happened on Sunday, April 9th,  and so over the past few days we’ve had time for the first-round “analysis” (United is the devil incarnate) along with the second-round “analysis” (United is angelic) and even quite a lot of third-round “analysis” (capitalism is the devil). But we’re only just now starting to get the kinds of analysis that don’t deserve the Bunny Quotes of Shame.[ref]Apparently this not a real thing. But, like the CAPS LOCK OF ANGRY, ANGRY DOOM, it should be.[/ref]

Or you could call them the Air Quotes of Shame, I guess.

Newsweek is running one of the first of these analyses, and it concludes that United may actually have violated their own contract when they forcibly removed Dao from his seat. The contract allows them to prevent passengers from boarding in the event of an oversold flight, but the problem is that the flight wasn’t oversold (for one) and that Dao was kicked off after boarding rather than being denied boarding (for another).[ref]Overselling is a common practice in the airline industry. Since out of a few hundred people who are buy tickets at least a couple won’t show up, the airlines sell a couple more seats than they have tickets to ensure their planes are as full as possible. However in this case, it wasn’t a matter of overselling, but rather of four United employees who needed to hitch a ride.[/ref] There are also provisions for kicking someone off a plan after they’ve boarded, but none of those provisions appear to apply in this case, either.

This is far from the last word. Jens David Ohlin, who wrote the piece, is a lawyer who’s read the contract, but he’s relying for his facts on news reports of what happened. He doesn’t have any more access to the facts than the rest of us. The “last word” is probably months or even years away, at the end of one or more lawsuits.

I wrote this post because I thought Ohlin’s analysis was interesting. But also because the whole “first post” syndrome is interesting in its own right. Over a decade ago, I spent way too much time on Slashdot.[ref]I just had to check to see if it still exists. It does.[/ref] It’s a social news site–kind of like a pre-Reddit with only one forum and centered on tech–and one of the little oddities is that whenever a new topic was posted there was an immediate rush of utterly useless replies that said only “first post” (or intentional misspellings thereof, sometimes with vulgar and offensive commentary added in for trollish fun.) The replies were utterly useless, the Slashdot filtering algorithms almost always rendered them invisible for most users, but still there were actual human beings out there who either frantically typed and clicked to try and earn that first post privilege or, perhaps more depressingly, spent their time writing macros or scripts to win the prize for them.

Well, the initial reactions to the United debacle–as with all such controversies–are basically wordier versions of the same thing, just content-free “first post” declarations. Don’t get me wrong, some of them were hilarious. The memes were great. (And some of the Slashdot first posts, every now and then, were funny too.) But nobody knew what they were talking about. Seriously, nobody. As far as I can tell, 5 days later, we’re just starting to get analysis that isn’t a total waste of time to read. So, referring to all the blog posts over the past few days, why do people write this stuff? Why does anyone read it?

Those are kind of dumb questions. People read this nonsense because they’re curious and impatient. And people write it because they want attention. I’m not immune. In 2015 I wrote two hot-take pieces[ref]Here’s one. Here’s another.[/ref] because I wanted to catch that viral wave. They were both shared widely on Facebook, but I noticed from the stats that only the headline of the first was shared. Practically nobody clicked the link to read my post. And on the second, as more facts came to light I realized my “analysis” had been exactly the kind of facile, self-righteous rush to judgment I usually deplored.

I had another encounter with hot-take fame earlier this year when I wrote a fairly negative review of the newest book in The Expanse series. I listened to the book right after it came out, wrote a review like I always do, posted it, and then was perplexed to see comments and likes start pouring in. It turns out that–just like with news stories–whoever gets the first reviews out for a new book gets the most attention. This is why there are so many people who cheat and write “reviews” weeks or months before the book actually comes out.[ref]Some of them have ARCs–advanced reader copies–but it’s obvious that most do not.[/ref] And–also just like with news stories–the hot takes break down into simplistic takes: 4- or 5- star raves and 2- or 1- star slams. As of right now, my review appears to still be at the top of the list of over 800 reviews. I doubt it would have done so well if I’d published the review later or published it with 3-stars.

So I get it, the temptation to write and to read rapid reactions is strong. But it’s also–usually–a waste of time. We can get more accurate info and more reliable, interesting analysis if we can just wait a few days. And if enough people do that, maybe we can find a way to curb first post syndrome.

 

“Why We Post” Project

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The Economist reported on a new project titled “Why We Post” that “refute[s] much received wisdom” regarding the use of social media:

  • Selfies: Are selfies guilty of “fostering self-regard and an undue focus on attractiveness”? “In Italy girls were indeed seen to take dozens of pictures of themselves before settling on one to post. In Brazil many selfies posted by men were taken at the gym. But at the British site, Dr Miller found, schoolchildren posted five times as many “groupies” (images of the picture-taker with friends) as they did selfies. Britons have also created a category called “uglies”, wherein the purpose is to take as unflattering a self-portrait as possible. And in Chile another unique genre has developed: the “footie”. This is a shot taken of the user’s propped-up feet, a sign of relaxation.”
  • Memes: Do memes “debase traditional forms of public debate…spreading far and wide with little context”? “In India they tend to focus on serious and religious issues; Trinidadian memes are more often send-ups of politicians. Yet in all cases Dr Miller sees meme-passing not as limiting what social-media users think and say, but as enabling discourse. Many users happily forward memes laced with strong ideological messages about which they would not dare to comment individually.”
  • Image: Are profiles “false fronts designed for the medium at hand”? Trinidadians “see online profiles as more representative of a person’s true self even than what is seen in real life. And, though the perceived loss through social media of the anonymity that once characterised online life causes much hand-wringing in the West, young boys and girls in Turkey see things differently. Social media permit them to be in constant contact with one another, in full view of their parents, but to keep their conversations and photos to themselves.”
  • Distraction vs. Education: “In rural China and Turkey social media were viewed as a distraction from education. But in industrial China and Brazil they were seen to be an educational resource. Such a divide was evident in India, too. There, high-income families regarded them with suspicion but low-income families advocated them as a supplementary source of schooling. In Britain, meanwhile, they were valued not directly as a means of education, but as a way for pupils, parents and teachers to communicate.”

The project “refutes the idea that social media are making humans any less human…The sceptics’ reaction to new technology seems equally deep-rooted. New means of communication from railways and the telegraph onwards have always attracted critics. Sooner or later, the doubters either convert, or die.”

The Health Benefits of Nuclear Power

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Image result for chernobyl diaries

Science writer Ronald Bailey has a brief write-up on some of the research regarding nuclear power and health outcomes:

A 2015 recent analysis by Israeli researcher Yehoshua Socol in the journal Dose-Reponse reconsiders the health consequences of the the Chernobyl accident. Socol argues that using even the most conservative linear no-threshold hypothesis to calculate cancer risk cannot distinguish any increase above normal background rates of cancer incidence and mortality. Assume 50,000 cancer deaths would result from Chernobyl’s radiation. Socol notes, assuming current mortality rates, that over the next 50 years some 50 million people (plus or minus 2.5 million) will die of cancer in developed countries. Given the annual uncertainty of 50,000 deaths per year, it would be impossible to detect what number, if any, of those deaths can be attributed to exposures to Chernobyl.

Socol concludes that “unlike the widespread myths and misperceptions, there is little scientific evidence for carcinogenic, mutagenic or other detrimental health effects caused by the radiation in the Chernobyl-affected area, besides the acute effects and small number of thyroid cancers. On the other hand, it should be stressed that the above-mentioned myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation caused, by themselves, enormous human suffering.”

A fascinating December 2015 study by European researchers in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres asked what would the health consequences to Europe if the continent had closed all of its nuclear power plants and switched to coal-fired generation between 2005 and 2009? They calculated that there would have been an increase of around 100,000 premature deaths annually owing to increased air pollution (most of them due to cardiopulmonary illnesses). If these calculations are correct, the number of deaths attributable to coal would have been three times higher than even the worst-case Chernobyl cancer scenario being pushed by activists. If the WHO’s estimates are right, coal kills at more than 1,000 times the rate of Chernobyl radiation.

Chernobyl was bad enough, but exaggerating its effects to further an unscientific campaign against nuclear power is ethically sleazy and may have the unintended consequence of killing more people than the activists claim they want to save.

There’s Hollywood, then there’s reality.

The Great Enrichment and Social Justice

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“The suddenness of the Great Enrichment is nuts,” writes Will Wilkinson at the Niskanen Center. “Graphs like this one actually conceal how nuts it is. Imagine a linear horizontal axis that is nothing but a flat line hovering above zero for, like, a mile. And then, about a second ago in geological time, wham! And here you are, probably wearing pants, reading about it on a glowing screen. Nuts is what it is.”

What caused it?

Joel Mokyr says it was the development of science and technology. Douglass North and his followers, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, say it was a matter of stumbling into the right political and economic “institutions”—of getting the “rules of the game” right. Acemoglu and Robinson say institutions need to be “inclusive” rather than “extractive.” They become more inclusive when ruling elites take a little pressure off the boot they’ve got on people’s backs (which they do mainly when cornered by effective collective action from below) and allow economic and political rights to expand. Deirdre McCloskey says the Great Enrichment came about from a shift in beliefs and moral norms that finally lent dignity and esteem to the commercial classes, their “bourgeois” virtues, and the tasks of trade and betterment. This revaluation of values was the advent of what has come to be known as “liberalism.”

Each of these views is part of the truth. The debate is mainly a matter of how beliefs and norms, institutions and incentives, scientific knowledge and technical innovation all fit together. Which are the causes and which are the effects? There’s no way to adequately summarize  the involuted nuance of the debate. But it’s not wrong to sum it up bluntly like this: humans rather suddenly got immensely better at cooperating and now a lot of us are really rich.

But you know what’s also nutty?

What’s nuts is that nobody kicks off a discussion of justice, distributive or social, with the fact of the Great Enrichment. Because the upshot of our best accounts of the most important thing that has ever happened to the human race seems to be that equalizing the distribution of rights and liberties, powers and prerogatives, respect and esteem led to an increase in the scope and productivity of cooperation, generating hugely enriching surpluses.

And these gains spurred further demands for and advances in inclusion and dignity—that is to say advances in giving people what they’re morally due, in virtue of being people—which led in turn to broader, more intensive, more creative cooperation, producing yet more enrichment, and so on. There appears to be a very happy relationship of mutual reinforcement between what is very naturally called “social justice” and the sort of enrichment that is known to produce longer, healthier, happier, human lives.

How come? Why doesn’t this mass improvement in the lives of millions get mentioned much?

The 20th century socialist-leaning left misdiagnosed the sources of the economic growth. The Great Enrichment was rooted in the exploitation of labor and the depredations of colonialism, while ongoing post-capitalist production was largely a matter of technology and rational state management. Poverty is toxic and the effects of widespread wealth are beneficial. But wealth in excess of potential-realizing sufficiency isn’t improving. Stable equality is improving, and brings out the best in us. Continuously rising market-led prosperity, on the other hand, encourages uncivic avidity and generates inequalities that undermine the amiable stability of egalitarian social justice.

The left-leaning 20th century literature on the distributive aspects of social justice as often as not treated wealth like manna from heaven. It’s as if the astonishing bounty of the Great Enrichment was something we’d just stumbled upon, like a cave full of naturally-occurring, neatly-stacked gold ingots in a newly-discovered cave beneath the village square. How do we divide up the gold among the villagers? Equal shares seems fair!

Or else wealth was something workers produced automatically by working only to have it stolen by the idle rich, who control the state’s goons. Or wealth was something that mechanical and social engineers could get together to produce with the right combination of workers and machines. Since it was no problem whatsoever producing more than enough for everybody (our best men are on top of it!), there was no good reason for anybody to have more than everybody else.

Wilkinson takes a swipe at both Rawlsian leftists and Hayekian libertarians, but especially the latter for their rejection of the concept of social justice. He concludes,

[M]any advocates of economic liberty…reflexively badmouth the welfare state with little regard for the possibility that the welfare state is an efficiency-enhancing institution that helps maintain popular support for relatively free markets by ensuring they more or less benefit everyone. Meanwhile, people who like social insurance, and worry about bad luck and the human costs of capitalist creative destruction—that is to say, mostpeople—turn away in contempt or bemusement from what’s advertised to them as the politics of freedom.   

More importantly, and more disastrously, rejecting the very idea of social justice, letting it harden into principle, hobbled classical liberalism’s ability to make the argument it has always been making, in less attractive terms, all along: that social justice is, first and foremost, a supply-side concept; that social justice is about the moral equality, respect, and rights that call forth cooperation and foster the creativity and cultivation of potential that generates ever larger surpluses, which, once they’ve been created, we can worry about divvying up; that social justice is a cause and effect of the Great Enrichment; that increasing social justice will make us greater and more greatly enriched.

It’s a potent and beguiling argument. It is an important argument. I’m convinced that it is, in broad strokes, a sound argument. The failure of our forebears to make it shouldn’t stop us from making it now.

I think he’s on to something.

What’s Behind Kindness?

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The site for the Greater Good Science Center at the UC Berkeley has an intriguing article examining a study on the motivations behind acts of kindness. Based on a statistical analysis called exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the researchers came up with four categories of human kindness:

  • Genuine kindness (benevolence)
  • Strategic kindness (maximizing gain and avoiding cost or loss)
  • Norm-motivated kindness (reciprocity, helping—and punishing—to uphold fairness)
  • Self-reported kindness

The article states,

The upshot? We’re all inclined towards genuine kindness to different degrees, partly as a function of how we generally feel—and perhaps surprisingly, how smart we are. Beyond genuine kindness, other kinds of kindness are influenced by age, sex, income—and whether or not we have children. By the way, their analyses do not reveal whether one person is more or less kind than another. Rather, they tell a story about where people’s kindness—however scant or abundant—is coming from.

Image result for have courage and be kind gif

The research indicates that how we “generally feel—that is, whether we’d characterize ourselves as having more positive or negative feelings in life—influences our tendency towards genuine kindness. For example, having a lower tendency to experience negative emotions is associated with more genuine kindness. In other words, if you’re not often in a bad mood, you’re more likely to behave kindly in an unrequited way.” Furthermore, those “who scored higher on a battery of cognitive, attention, and IQ tests also tended to be more genuinely kind—but no more, or less, likely to exhibit kindness based on strategic or norm-motivated concerns. Nor did they describe themselves as more kind.” Finally, demographics matter. “As people get older, genuine kindness falls. So does norm-motivated kindness. This doesn’t mean that older people are chronically less kind. It just suggests that they may be less concerned with reciprocity, fairness, and reputation—and their kindness hinges more on considering costs and benefits. The researchers observed a similar pattern for monthly income: As income increased, genuine kindness fell, which is consistent with a growing literature on the harmful effects on inequality on the privileged.” Perhaps surprisingly, “people who were parents also scored lower on genuine kindness, while showing no differences on any of the other kindness factors.” And while “women scored higher in self-reported kindness,” this “did not play out for genuinely kind behavior, which was actually more common in men.”

In short, the “study is important because it begins to systematically chart out the mental and behavioral underpinnings and contextual parameters of human kindness, to provide a theoretical blueprint for the growing community of research converging on age-old issues concerning human goodness and survival.”

TSA: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

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Is the TSA worth the cost? According to Vox, the answer is likely ‘no’. “The TSA’s inefficiency isn’t just aggravating and unnecessary;” writes Dylan Matthews, “by pushing people to drive instead of fly, it’s actively dangerous and costing lives. Less invasive private scanning would be considerably better. The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it’s attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren’t that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it hard to judge if the TSA is working properly — if no one tries to do a liquid-based attack, then we don’t know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks.”

In order to test the TSA’s effectiveness, Homeland Security officials “pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times. And 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA’s lengthy screening process. That’s a success rate of more than 95 percent.” Granted, the point of the security measures is “to make terrorists change their plans” rather than catch them at the airport. In short, “there’s basically zero evidence the agency has prevented any attacks”:

The TSA claims it won’t provide examples of such cases due to national security, but given its history of bragging about lesser successes, that’s a little tough to believe. For instance, the agency bragged plenty about catching Kevin Brown, an Army vet who tried to check pipe bomb-making materials. Brown wasn’t going to blow up the plane — the unfinished materials were in his checked luggage — but if the TSA publicized that, why wouldn’t it publicize catching someone who was trying to blow up the plane?

 The Government Accountability Office is also skeptical that the TSA is stopping terrorists. It concluded in 2013 that there’s no evidence the agency’s SPOT program, which employed 2,800 as of the study and attempts to scan passengers for suspicious behavior, is at all effective. Only 14 percent of passenger flaggings by TSA officers led to a referral to law enforcement. Only 0.6 percent of TSA flaggings led to an arrest. None of those arrests were designated as terrorism-related.

What about the most loathed TSA rules: the shoe removal requirement, and the ban on all but the tiniest containers of liquids? There’s never been any evidence that these are effective. Remember: We caught the people who tried to attack with their shoes and with liquid explosives, without these rules in place. Europe is gradually phasing out the liquid ban.

Beyond the lack of evidence in favor of the TSA, the agency may actually be leading to more deaths:

One paper by economists Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel Simon found that, controlling for other factors like weather and traffic, 9/11 provoked such a large decrease in air traffic and increase in driving that 327 more people died every month from road accidents. The effect dissipated over time, but the total death toll (up to 2,300) rivals that of the attacks themselves.

Another paper by the same authors found that one post-9/11 security measure — increased checked baggage screening — reduced passenger volume by about 6 percent. Combine the two papers, and you get a disturbing conclusion: In their words, over the course of three months, “approximately 129 individuals died in automobile accidents which resulted from travelers substituting driving for flying in response to inconvenience associated with baggage screening.”

This isn’t just one set of studies; there’s other evidence that 9/11 led to an increase in driving, which cost at least a thousand lives. The 129 deaths per quarter-year figure is, as Nate Silver notes, “the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.”

You can dispute the precise figures here; these are regression analyses, which are hardly perfect. But it stands to reason that having to get to the airport two or three hours before a flight reduces demand for flights relative to a world where you only have to arrive 30 minutes beforehand — particularly for flights on routes where a two- to three-hour wait dramatically increases travel time relative to driving, like New York to Washington, DC, or Boston to New York. That means more driving. That means more death.

That might be worth it for a system that we know for a fact prevents attacks. But there’s no evidence the TSA does…The solution is clear: Airports should kick out the TSA, hire (well-paid and unionized) private screeners, and simply ask people to go through normal metal detectors with their shoes on, their laptops in their bags, and all the liquids they desire. The increased risk would be negligible — and if it gets people to stop driving and start flying, it could save lives.

Heaven is Other People

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin’s Eve after the Fall. (MicheleLovesArt – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Walker’s encouragement, I’ve been reading Brené Brown recently. Brown is a shame researcher, and she defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”[ref]From her website.[/ref]

Not everything Brown says resonates with me. I don’t like the route she takes, but I do like the destination she’s aiming for. For example, above she says that shame involves “believe that we are flawed.” Well, we are flawed, so we have a pretty good reason for that belief! She also has an affirmation she repeats a lot: “I am enough.” I think that’s nonsense. She’s not enough, I’m not enough, no one is enough.

On the other hand, the rest of her quote is that, because we are flawed, we are “therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” And that, I agree, is a soul-destroying lie. Similarly, I don’t like the phrase “I am enough,” but I do like a very similar phrase that I think gets to Brown’s point: “I am a child of God.” Or, in the lyrics of my favorite band Thrice:

We’re more than carbon and chemicals
Free will is ours and we can’t let go
We can’t allow this, the quiet cull
So we sing out this, our canticle
We are the image of the invisible

We all were lost now we are found
No one can stop us or slow us down
We are all named and we are all known
We know that we’ll never walk alone

We’re more than static and dial tone
We’re emblematic of the unknown
Raise up the banner, bend back your bows
Remove the cancer, take back your souls
We are the image of the invisible

Though all the world may hate us, we are named
Though shadow overtake us, we are known

The theology is a little confused from a Mormon standpoint, but the sentiment is one we embrace. Because we are the offspring of God, we are worthy regardless of whether or not we’re flawed and regardless of whether or not we’re enough. That’s my only beef with Brown, really. I don’t like people trying to tell me that I’m good enough to love. What does “good enough” have to do with anything? I don’t have to earn the love of my Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother. That’s sort of the whole point.

King Benjamin told his people that “Ye cannot say that ye are even as much as the dust of the earth” and that—no matter how hard we try to obey God—we are “unprofitable servants.”[ref]Mosiah 2:21, 25[/ref] On the other hand, the Lord said, “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.”[ref]D&C 18:10[/ref]

This isn’t really a contradiction, in my eyes, and anyone who has had children can see how. The rugrats are useless, slimy, stinky, sleep-depriving monster who will as soon vomit or defecate on you as smile at you. And we love and cherish them with all our hearts. Children, especially very young children, are supremely “unprofitable.” They are little black holes that suck away our time and energy and youth. And they fill our lives with meaning.

So, this has been a long, long digression. Sorry, folks! Should have saved it for the book review!

The reason for this digression is that, although he never uses the term, Elder Hales’ talk We Can’t Do It Alone is all about shame. Because here’s the thing, the part about Brown’s definition that is in some ways the most important is the very end: shame “makes us [fee] unworthy of connection.”[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref] That’s what it all comes down to. As humans, we have a deep need to belong. And what shame does is convince us to abandon the attempt and settle for being broken and alone.

But, as Elder Hales says, “we did not come to this life to live it alone.” On the contrary, “the true nature of the gospel plan is the interdependence we have upon one another.” And what stops us? Shame. Again, he doesn’t use the word, but the concept is clearly identical to Brown. For example:

When we are marred spiritually or physically, our first reaction is to withdraw into the dark shadows of depression, to blot out hope and joy—the light of life which comes from knowing we are living the commandments of our Father in heaven. This withdrawal will ultimately lead us to rebellion against those who would like to be our friends, those who can help us most, even our family. But worst of all, we finally reject ourselves.

The heart of the Gospel, as we understand it, is the atonement. It’s unity. Shame, which is not the same as guilt[ref]Guilt, according to both the scriptures and also Brown, is a useful response to our own mistakes that encourages us to improve and do better in the future.[/ref], is the wedge shaped to break that unity, the lure that holds us back from the atonement, and we need to be—as Brown puts it—“shame resilient” in order to prevent it from stopping us or turning us aside from our mission to improve ourselves individually and collectively during our mortal sojourn.

Oh, and now for the brave, here’s Thrice’s song that I quoted earlier. Be warned, the message is fantastic but the rock is hard.

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