E Pluribus Unum America will ultimately triumph over In [White] God We Trust America

My thought for the day.

Are Strangers a Benefit or a Cost?

If you trust the world, strangers add to your diverse treasure of interesting experiences.

If you fear the world, strangers cost you an expensive evaluation of their threat.

Celebrating Global Stability

My topic on WKYB this morning.

The Fund for Peace calculates a stability measure for almost every country in the world, every year.

This year, South Sudan is the least stable country.  This is not surprising, as they are in the midst of a civil war.

Finland is the most stable country, as it has been several times before in this ranking.

We tend to focus on the scary instability arising here and there in the world.

But the big picture is actually that the world is pretty stable - especially in NATO territories.  On this D-Day, that is something to celebrate.

Jane Jacobs Sees That Poverty is Normal. This is a Calvinist Insight

Jane Jacobs, the founding mother of the new urbanism, wrote a trilogy of books about cities.  She defined the field with The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and extended her insights in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.  I am reading my way through all three again.

I was struck this time by her critique of macroeconomics, which she describes as a "shambles."  Economics, she says, has long thought that prices and jobs were two ends of a seesaw - if one was up, the other had to go down.  This, they thought, was a basic rule of the market.  Their job as economists was to come up with the right balance of the two. Thus, the endless war of demand-siders and supply-siders.

However, writes Jacobs, in the '70s and '80s all economic theory was confounded by "stagflation" - high inflation and high unemployment.  Both bad options of the seesaw were up at the same time.

The true condition of humanity, Jacobs wrote, is that poverty is the norm - most people most of the time have lived with both high prices and high unemployment.

The great achievement of creative city economies is to create moments of innovation that drive prices down, and growth that drives employment up.  This achievement is not guaranteed, and cannot be sustained in any one place for long.

This, it seems to me, is a very Calvinist insight.  The normal condition of human beings in a fallen world is poor.  We are given a vocation within which to work in order to build up the world.  The work is hard and the prize is not guaranteed.  But the story of human existence shows that it can sometimes be done.

Jacobs was raised in a Calvinist family, though she became a very secular adult.  But perhaps this insight shows the long effects of her early training.

Moral Foundations are Natural, but Their Ethical Configuration is Cultural

I have been thinking about Jonathan Haidt's empirical work on moral foundations.  He offers (tentatively) that the six moral foundations that he has identified are natural.

Much of his work is on the consequences of the fact that liberals only embrace two of the foundations - care for the harmed and fairness (understood as equality) - as a legitimate basis for public policy.  Conservatives, by contrast, embrace all six, or at least five - adding sanctity, loyalty, and authority, and maybe liberty.

So how do things which are natural to all get grouped differently by some?

I embrace the distinction between individual morals and social ethics.  (Not everyone distinguishes the terms this way, but it makes sense to me, especially sociologically).

Ethics can helpfully be thought of as contrasting configurations of moral foundations to serve social ends.  Different visions of what society is leads to different ethical structures, even though they are made of the same natural moral material.

Women Can Close the Confidence Gap

My topic on WKYB this morning.

Last week I wrote about women selecting for confident men.

This week we look at the other side of that coin - why women are often less confident in their own abilities than they should be.

I blogged about this "imposter syndrome" previously, drawing on Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. 

More recently, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, two very high achieving television journalists, wrote about The Confidence Gap.  Women are more likely to read their failures as reasons not to do that thing again, whereas men are likely to see failures as learning experiences.  Women are more likely to ruminate on what they did wrong and whether other people noticed, while men are likely to move on and not dwell on it.  Women are more likely to hold back from trying new and bigger tasks until they feel 100% prepared, while men are likely to seek opportunities even if they only feel 60% prepared because they are confident in their abilities to figure new things out.

Moreover, women are likely to read men's expressions of confidence as they would read women - that is, if men seem fully confident, they must be fully prepared.  Women are more likely to apologize for their preparation, and attribute their success to luck no matter how prepared and competent they actually are.

The Spectrum of Spiritual Experience

This is an idea I am chewing on.  It came from a class discussion of the rise of the "spiritual, but not religious" category recently, especially among young people.

There is a spectrum of spiritual experiences.  At one end are mystics, who experience full oneness with a (the) spiritual entity.  At the other end are rationalists (maybe autistics?) who never experience it at all.

This may correspond with William James' categories of the twice born, one-and-a-half born, and once born.

Religious institutions exist to shape spiritual experience into ritual, and to form people who share ritualized spiritual experiences into a community.

Most people are in the middle of the curve, with a normal frequency and intensity of spiritual experience. If they trust religious institutions, they say they are "religious." If they do not, they say they are "spiritual, but not religious" or "nothing" because they lack the language to describe their experience.

This would mean that the increase in religious "nones" does not really mean a decline in the underlying experience that we read as religious, but a change in how we institutionalize that experience.

Women Don't Like Bad Boys. They Like Confident Men, Especially the Nice Ones

A study with the provocative title "Nice guys have more sex than bad boys" makes this larger point.

Women like confident men.  They like the confidence itself, and also like it as a sign of their ability to get resources.  Many women put up with arrogant confident men, and even selfish confident men - bad traits which they sometimes find out about too late.

But women prefer nice confident men the most.  They want the resources, and the sharing of those resources, in the joint project of raising a family.

Sex is part of the project, but not the main point.

Regulations are Protections, Taxes are Investments

George Lakoff is right - conservatives and liberals each have a compelling worldview, but conservatives have been better at framing theirs to appeal to the emotions of more Americans. Worse, liberals have let conservatives reframe the liberal worldview in an unflattering way.

Fighting back with reasoned argument alone misses the basic fact that we are emotional creatures first.

Lakoff names these contrasting worldviews as "strict father" vs. "nurturant parent."  These differences apply to family life and government equally. The different gender politics are also contained in the deliberate asymmetry between "father" and "parent."

At the government level, the liberal worldview sees regulations as protections, and taxes as investments. This is the kind of care for the whole that any good nurturing parent would do. The whole that is envisioned by liberals is all of the people in the nation, together.

Conservatives, by contrast, see regulations as limitations on freedom, and taxes as theft.  They want to toughen up each person under their charge to be personally responsible. The whole they envision is just us - our tribe, our kind, against all others.  The others are constantly trying to infiltrate our tribe, so we must be vigilant in punishing and expelling them, as well as any traitors who help the infiltrators.

There is a real difference in worldview, and each rests on a different metaphysic.  Worldviews grip us through our emotional stories first and most.

Americans are Happy to Pay Taxes

My topic on WKYB this morning.

One of the big books of popular social science this year will be Vanessa Williamson's Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes. She found that "being a taxpayer" is an important part of the identity of most Americans. Two interviews with her, explaining her findings, are here and here.

I would add that our sense of legitimacy of American democracy comes from the feeling that we all pay our bit.  This gives us a voice in what our government does, just as much as voting does.  Indeed, since many more people pay taxes than vote, our sense of democratic legitimacy comes more from being taxpayers than being voters.

What Williamson found is that the great majority of Americans are proud to pay taxes.  What makes them mad is if they think other people are not paying their fair share of taxes, especially if they pay no taxes at all.  This ire is directed at rich people and corporations first, and also, in some sectors, at illegal immigrants.  But there are also widespread misconceptions about who pays taxes, and for what.  We remember the income tax due to the hassle of filing, but forget the sales tax because, except for the poorest people, we don't think about is when we pay it.

While everyone pays taxes, groups differ in how many people they believe pay taxes.  The people who are maddest about our current tax system think, on average, that only 66% of people in this country pay taxes - including themselves.  On the other hand, the people who are least mad about our tax system think that the proportion of taxpayers is above 80%.

Paying taxes is a meaningful activity, which joins us with others in serving a cause larger than ourselves.  This is one of the key components of happiness.

Donald Trump is the Last Baby Boomer President

I am of the youngest cohort of Baby Boomers, born in 1960.  Donald Trump, from the other end of our cohort, is 70.  While the younger Boomers will still be in their prime in four years - and, at a stretch, still viable in eight years - I think the era of Boomer presidents is over.

Barack Obama was the first Gen X president.  "No-Drama Obama" exemplified many of the virtues of Gen X.  He was a little ahead of time, though, as far as straight generational succession would predict.  If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2008, I think she would have been the last Boomer president, and the normal time for the Gen X succession would have begun with this term.

The Silent generation, by the way, is the first in more than a century to have no presidents.  John McCain was probably their best shot, and Bernie Sanders was surely their last.

Kids Do Help Happiness, After All

Our topic on WKYB this morning.

The conventional wisdom was that kids made parents less happy than non-parents.

However, a new study is upending that conclusion. First, they distinguished parents with young children at home from people who had ever had children - the latter being a much more mixed group.

Second, they noted that, since the 1990s, the happiness of non-parents had gone down, whereas the happiness of parents had held steadier. A higher percentage of parents with kids at home started saying they were "very happy", compared to the percentage of non-parents who were very happy.

I read this evidence this way:

Parents generally think that raising kids is meaningful, though hard.

Thinking that what we do is meaningful is a big part of being happy.

Parenting is a specific kind of project, which focuses the mind on what we need to do and to have.

This explains one interesting tidbit of this new study: parents were more confident that they had the financial resources to be happy than were the non-parents.  I think this is not because parents had more money, but because they had a better idea of what money they needed.  Within the vast and varied group of non-parents are many people who do not have as specific a project for their lives, so they don't know what kind of resources they will need.  They can imagine all kinds of scary contingencies - and against our anxieties, no amount of money can ever be enough.

It makes sense to me that people raising kids are happier because they have a better idea of what they are trying to do - and they believe that doing that is, on the whole, happy-making.

We Are All Equally Shaped By Society

We are all products of socialization.

It is not that some people are socialized into gender roles, while others are free, or freed, to be natural.

Nature writes a rough draft of ourselves, then society and our own agency edits it.

People who learn to reject traditional gender roles learn that, just as much as their opposites do.

Some thoughts on reading student responses to Alison Wolf's XX Factor.  Students often write that "society" forces people into gender roles, as if they would naturally do something else.

The Virtues of Volunteer Firefighters

Volunteer firefighters are prime examples of altruism.  A study in Vermont found that "service to others" was far and away the main motivation for volunteering for the serious responsibility, vital training, and dangerous work of putting out fires in rural communities. The second motivation, though, was what the researchers called "image," or what sociologists usually call status.

Some people think desiring status for good works undermines their goodness.  Tocqueville, though, reminds us that American democracy works by mobilizing the citizens' sense of self interest - but self interest, rightly understood.  And that right understanding is that when I serve the community, I am also serving myself.  This does not undermine the virtue of serving the community.  Rather, it puts that habit on a more reliable footing.

Status is a gift we give to others out of justice - a sense that they truly deserve it. We would hope that, in a just community, they would do the same for us, when we truly deserve it, too.

The Vermont study made ingenious use of one local fact - volunteer firefighters could buy a special license plate with an emblem marking their role.  This was not needed to to their job. They often added lights and sirens to their vehicles to help clear their way to a fire.  Rather, the license plates were pure status markers.  And as such, they were good signals of civic virtue, which other people did honor.

The Kentucky Legislature Should Not Add "In the year of our Lord" to its Resolutions

The Kentucky legislature quietly voted to add "in the year of our Lord" to all their resolutions.

I think this is a bad idea.

Don't get me wrong - I am a church elder.

The state is not like any other institution.  It should not be run "like a business" or "like your household" or "like a church."  Those are all private institutions, which can have their own private rules. But the government has a mission to serve everyone, not just the majority.

I wish we had more government officials who understood that the government serves all the people, not just the people like them.  The state has to be religiously neutral for the good of the church, as well as to do justice to all the citizens who are not Christian.

What Really Works to Reduce Teen Pregnancy (and Abortion)

Colorado is leading the way in providing long-acting reversible contraceptives - LARCs - to teenagers.  These include intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implanted contraceptives, such as Norplant.  The state covers the high upfront cost.

The results have been dramatic - a 40% reduction in teen pregnancy, and a 35% reduction in abortions.

The Colorado plan builds on earlier experiments in St. Louis and statewide trials in Iowa.  Colorado added a "no wrong door" approach, to try to reach teens anywhere and everywhere they might be open to talking about birth and birth control.  In addition to the LARCs, this approach included comprehensive sex education.

I believe LARCs have the possibility of breaking down the polarization about sex and abortion.  Reducing teen pregnancy and reducing the demand for abortion is a cause we can all get behind.

Culture is Ultimately About Ideas, Which Is Why Religion Can Produce Culture in a Way that "Race" Cannot

The Good News About Global Poverty

The good news is that global poverty at the very bottom has been cut in half in the past generation.

The surprising news is that most people think global poverty is as bad as ever, and maybe getting worse.

Sure, there are still hundreds of millions desperately poor.  But there are now billions of people who are not.

In the 1970s the world changed from mostly very poor, to mostly not very poor.

And the even better news: desperate poverty keeps declining.

Right-Wing Movements Are About Nationalism, Not Economics

There are right-wing movements all over the world.  Some are in more market-oriented societies, some in strong welfare states, some in state-authoritarian economies.  Their economic policies, likewise, range from populist social provision to you're-on-your-own-Jack austerity.

What they have in common is ethnic nationalism.

The Trump vote was driven more by white racial resentment than by economic dislocation.

I believe other studies will find similar things about the rise of right-wing populism in other countries, as well.

"Low Education Whites Dying Younger" May Be a Statistical Artifact, Not A Real Worsening

It has been widely reported that low-educated whites have had increased mortality at younger ages, reversing the decades-long trend of all groups living longer in the U.S.  Indeed, the "decline of the white working class" has been the main explanation of who the Trump voters are.

However, this Slate piece points to another possible explanation: the "low-education white" population has changed over time, with the healthier getting more education (and thus moving out of the "less than high school" category).

This takes us into the statistical weeds, and is not a sure thing.  What might have happened is this:

White people who did not finish high school have always been less healthy than more educated white people.  Nonetheless, for a long time, white people of all levels of education have been living longer.  Recently, though, "less than high school whites" started dying younger.  This could mean that this whole group is actually dying younger - they are less healthy, are smoking, drinking, and taking drugs  more (especially opioids), and are committing suicide more.

However, it could also be that the healthiest part of the group of low-education white people used to stop before high school graduation, but now they finish high school.  Even if the overall longevity of these people stayed the same, by using "less than high school" as the dividing line, it appears that the least educated are also dying younger.

As evidence, this article cites a paper which found that if we look at the lowest quartile of whites, there has been no decline in longevity.  It could be that, a generation ago, much of the lowest quartile of whites did not finish high school, so these two categories were very similar.  Now, with more people finishing high school, the "less than" group is smaller and composed of the worst off (who die sooner), while a rising portion of the lowest quartile are now high school graduates.