Kruse Kronicle

The Sandra Bullock Trade

New York Times: The Sandra Bullock Trade

Two things happened to Sandra Bullock this month. First, she won an Academy Award for best actress. Then came the news reports claiming that her husband is an adulterous jerk. So the philosophic question of the day is: Would you take that as a deal? Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? ...

... Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

This isn’t just sermonizing. This is the age of research, so there’s data to back this up. Over the past few decades, teams of researchers have been studying happiness. Their work, which seemed flimsy at first, has developed an impressive rigor, and one of the key findings is that, just as the old sages predicted, worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through.

For example, the relationship between happiness and income is complicated, and after a point, tenuous. It is true that poor nations become happier as they become middle-class nations. But once the basic necessities have been achieved, future income is lightly connected to well-being. Growing countries are slightly less happy than countries with slower growth rates, according to Carol Graham of the Brookings Institution and Eduardo Lora. The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness. On the other hand, it has become a much more unequal country, but this inequality doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness. ...

Allocation of Limited Resources. Part 2 (Two Communities)

I wrote in the previous post that markets are the most just and efficient way of allocating resources in mass society.  But as I noted at the end, markets are far from perfect. Neither are they appropriate for all forms of human interaction. I want to spend the rest of this series of posts discussing the limits of markets and exploring in what ways markets need to be supplemented.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that markets are not appropriate for all forms of human relationships. We have a growing tendency to think in terms of only two realities: Individuals and mass society. When I hear the word “we” among libertarians, I get a sense that “we” means the collective behavior of atomized individuals. When I hear “we” among liberals … as in I think “we” are obligated to care for the poor … “we” is frequently synonymous with “government.” But “we” don’t just exist as individuals or as mass society. We also exist as families, as neighborhoods, as worshiping communities, as members of voluntary associations, and so on. These societal institutions are intermediate (bigger than the individual and smaller than society) and intermediary (they help connect and facilitate aspects of human existence.)

Going at least as far back as Adam Smith, there has been an awareness that we exist as members of both face-to-face community (FFC) and mass society (which in economic terms I’ll refer to as commercial society (CS).) Early sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies wrote Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft  (roughly “Community and Society”) in 1887, attempting to work through the distinctions between the two. There have been many theorists sense who have characterized the two in various ways. In my estimation, much of it comes down information.

The family is probably the most elemental FFC. Imagine a multigenerational family living under the same roof. There is a married couple with three children ages 15, 12, and 6. The wife’s widowed father lives in the home along with the wife’s sister who is mentally impaired. The internal functioning of the household is not going to be on the basis of market transactions. Most of the members of this household are incapable of taking full financial responsibility for themselves. Most likely, the father and mother will be breadwinners for the household. The grandfather probably has retirement income and social security. There may be some government assistance for the sister.

Most living space will likely be shared communally, with each person assigned a private space according to their needs. Meals will like be prepared and shared communally. There will be a “needs” based allocation.

Parents will likely have chores for the kids to do and completion of those chores may be tied to an allowance. Certainly a minimal standard of good behavior will be expected to receive allowance. In other words there will be “cronyism” … you have to get in the good graces of the one with the resources to get what you want.

Other models of allocation may also come into play. Unless prior arrangements have been made, the one who gets to the TV first may be the one who chooses what program to watch … “first come, first serve.” Other resources may be divided by equal shares. There are many different allocation models like those we saw in the previous post that could apply in a family FFC for very legitimate reasons.

Now we could expand this model to, say, three families living communally. But we can only expand this model so far. When a community begins to have more than a few dozen people the FFC begins to breakdown. Essential to strong FFCs is the ability to have reasonably good knowledge about the other community members. Solidarity and accountability come through ongoing interaction. When more than a few dozen people are involved it is humanly impossible to have this level intimacy. Free riders begin to emerge who take advantage of the work of others. It is no longer possible to know enough about others to justly allocate resources based on individualized need. Some people become neglected.

It is impossible for society to function as a family writ large. So there are two options. One is for FCCs to become completely self-sufficient communities. While this may seem plausible at first, consider the creation of a simple pencil. If we are going to be self-sufficient communities making our own pencils, then we will need to find the graphite and process it into tiny graphite rods, collect wood and process it down to a pencil cylinder, find tin and process it into an eraser holder, collect and chemically process materials to form an eraser head, and then find the materials and dye to paint the pencil. Think of the number of hours expended by our small community of to create the pencils.

Now multiply this by countless products vastly more complex than a pencil. The computer you are using right now has components made from raw materials that come from as many as forty different countries. How will you make computers from local materials? And assuming you lived in one spot on earth where are all these materials are available, how likely is it that our tiny community would have the productive capacity to produce a computer … not to mention cars, medical devices, building products, power plants and an endless variety of things we take for granted?

The only other option is for FCCs to engage in trade with those outside the community. It is the only way to achieve this standard of living. How will that trade be coordinated? It means producing goods (or hiring your labor out to produce goods) that can be sold to generate income to purchase goods from others. We each put goods up for sale in the auction and then the supply and demand price mechanism provides a real time feedback loop of how much of which things people are wanting. Those that do the best at meeting demands get rewarded.

As noted, the auction method is the only allocation method that links production and allocation. If there were no market prices, and producers were not looking to make the best sell they could, how would we know how much of which things to make all across society? There is no practical alternative that works with any kind of efficiency and justice.

But to say that the auction, or the market, is the most efficient and just system does not mean that it will avert all inefficiency or injustice. Far from it. So what are the challenges and how do we create greater efficiency and justice within markets? Stay tuned.

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Tough Times Boost Wal-Mart's Allure

Wall Street Journal: Tough Times Boost Wal-Mart's Allure

CHICAGO—Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has won the support of dozens of church ministers in its long-running battle to expand in Chicago, a sign of how the recession has softened skepticism of the retailer in a community desperate for jobs.

The ministers, most of them African-Americans together representing thousands of congregants, are pressuring the city council to grant approval for a Wal-Mart "supercenter"—a store with a full grocery that also sells general merchandise—on the city's South Side.

Some of the same ministers as recently as last year opposed bringing the discount giant to the South Side, concerned that the company's pay was inadequate and that the store would hurt nearby businesses. But the need for jobs and tax dollars in the recession—along with a big push by Wal-Mart—has changed their minds.

The shift sets up a showdown between the ministers and another community group, largely financed by unions, that opposes the proposal, which remains stalled in the city council.

The proposed store would employ about 400 in a middle-class, largely African-American neighborhood at a development called Chatham Market. The 50-acre site is home to a Lowe's home-improvement store, a sandwich shop, two vacant multi-tenant buildings and clumps of chest-high weeds.

"The reality of the day…is that there's no other retailer willing to come to the community," said Alderman Howard Brookins, a Democrat whose ward includes the development. "The [Chatham] Market is dying. We've got to do something." ...

Related: Progressives Declare -No Jobs- are Good Enough For South-Side Residents

The Genesis of a People

Wall Street Journal: The Genesis of a People

A guide to understanding the world's first monotheistic religion.

Today, as Jews celebrate Passover and tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt during the traditional Passover ritual meal, the Seder, they will figuratively re-enact the story of their own creation as a nation. The transition from slavery to freedom—the wandering through the Wilderness, during which the Jews receive the Ten Commandments, and the eventual arrival in the land of Israel—is the dominant historical theme in Judaism. But as David Gelernter explains in "Judaism: A Way of Being," the Exodus can be understood as a metaphor for the creation of the world. Just as God parted the waters of the Red Sea to enable the Jews to flee Egypt and escape bondage, he first divided "the waters from the waters" to create the firmament and make an earthly place for life itself.

The Jewish experience, as Mr. Gelernter shows, echoes profoundly across the wider experience of humanity. "Judaism" itself is a wide-ranging book about the beliefs, practices and philosophy of the world's first monotheistic religion—a book that Jews and non-Jews alike will find well worth reading. Mr. Gelernter is not shy about explaining why everyone should care about Judaism. It is, he writes, "the most important intellectual development in western history. . . . . It has given morals and spiritual direction to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim society . . . and created the idea of congregational worship that made the church and the mosque possible." Mr. Gelernter organizes his book along four major themes or images, each intended to provoke answers to basic questions about Judaism.

With "separation" (between Jew and non-Jew, the Sabbath and the weekday, the holy and the impure), Mr. Gelernter explains why Judaism is not just a matter of finding a personal relationship with God but also of leading a life governed by Jewish law, which "covers everything from weddings to legal procedure in criminal cases." "Veil" is the image Mr. Gelernter uses to explain how Jews can relate to a God who is "abstract and indescribable." Like the curtains protecting the Torah in a synagogue, or the Western Wall, which shields the public from the Temple Mount (the site of the two, long-destroyed Jewish temples in Jerusalem), a sacred, translucent veil separates God from his people. The Jewish God is thus both ineffable and close at hand. "Perfect asymmetry" is Mr. Gelernter's phrase for explaining the structure of marriage and family in Jewish life and for defending, against charges of discrimination, a religion that usually forbids women to conduct public ceremonies. Finally, "inward pilgrimage" is his emblem for the effort to meet the challenge of theodicy—how a belief in God can be reconciled with the existence of evil.

Mr. Gelernter's most moving discourse concerns separation. He argues that "God uses separation as an act of sanctification." Indeed, the Hebrew word for "holy" (kadosh) is derived from the concept of separation or withdrawal: What is holy is set apart. The work of the creator—creation itself—is the ultimate act of separation, he notes, not merely the act of making order from chaos but even the separation of the individual from the womb. One of the most famous of all biblical commentators (Rashi) interpreted the exhortation in Leviticus to "be holy" as meaning "to separate oneself from immoral sexual conduct." The broader idea of separation implies a resistance to other ways of being—to the "inevitable rising tide of chaos in the universe." ...

Cheap Thrills (Do Without Projects)

Time: Cheap Thrills

Christopher Greenslate and Kerri Leonard, high school teachers outside San Diego, were griping about the rising cost of groceries when they decided to see what life is like for the billion people on earth who spend $1 a day on food. The couple's blog took off, and their book, On a Dollar a Day, hit stores in February. They're part of a growing population of consumers chronicling their efforts to do without, swearing off such things as riding in cars and buying clothes — or buying anything new at all. And they're not making these vows simply to save money. For some, the goal is spiritual cleansing. For others, it's to raise awareness of big issues like the environment. It's also a cheap way to gather good material. If a book deal comes out of it, so much the better.

High-profile books like last year's No Impact Man, which details one New Yorker's attempt to spend a year without having a negative impact on the environment, may be particularly popular now because of the Great Recession. It is no longer fashionable to flash bling. Today's monklike experimenters are flaunting what they don't have. (See how Americans are spending now.)

"It's like everyone is doing their own version of Lent," says A.J. Jacobs, the virtuoso of this self-as-guinea-pig genre. He has written about such odd and intermittently enlightening challenges as living strictly according to the Bible for a year, during which he followed the Ten Commandments as well as lesser-known rules like the ones prohibiting the shaving of beards and wearing clothing of mixed fibers. ...

The Coming Death of National Denominations

The Columbia Partnership: The Coming Death of National Denominations George Bullard

Many national denominational organizations in North America are dying. The causes and signs of their demise are obvious, but few are choosing to make wise decisions to morph into 21st century denominations. Too many are choosing to recommit to old patterns or suicidal patterns of denominational life.

The death of national denominations is not imminent; it is not coming in the next five to ten years. However, if current trends continue some national denominations could reach subsistence level within 25 years. The death of national denominational structures does not necessarily mean the death of the denomination itself or its regional or middle judicatory expressions. These latter expressions may thrive in some locations.

Here is a beginning list of things national denominations are failing to do or succeeding in doing to drag themselves down. What would you add to this list?

Denominations are dying because of their failure to do the following things. ...

... Denominations are dying because of their success in doing the following things. ...

From my vantage point of serving on the General Assembly Mission Council of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., over the last six years I think Bullard pretty much nails it.

Rancor Out of Control: Welcome to the Fourth Turning?

Are we in the middle of a "Fourth Turning" as described by William Strauss and Neil Howe? I know some of my readers roll their eyes at this stuff about generations but a couple of years ago I did an eleven part series (Index) on Strauss and Howe'€™s work, focusing primarily on their books Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy written in the 1990s. S&H don't believe that history repeats itself but it rhymes. They see a four part rhythm to events that are tied to recurring cycles of archetype generations. They believe we have entered a fourth turning in the past decade and that the fourth turning will play out through the rest of this decade. Characteristic of the fourth turning is a rancorous civil strife leading to a climactic set of events that sets in motion the consensus for the next several decades.

Two years ago I wrote a post "McCain vs Obama. A "Fourth Turning" Phenomenon?" I thought I would reprise a portion of it here:

At the core of S&H's thesis is the idea that there is a repeating cycle of four generational archetypes. Each generation consists of people born within approximately a twenty year period; give our take a few years. The types are the Hero, the Artist, the Prophet, and the Nomad, which repeat in that order. Every twenty years one archetype is dying off while society is giving birth to the successor version of the dying archetype. This is not to say that everyone in a given generation exhibits the characteristic of the archetype but in the aggregate, and in terms of the type leadership that emerges, the archetype gives each generation a distinctive feel.

About every twenty years there is an alignment where each generation is located overwhelming within a particular part of the lifecycle: childhood, young adult, mature adult, elderhood. This alignment signals a shift in the culture from one turning or "mood" into the next. There are four turnings that follow in succession: 1. High, 2. Awakening, 3. Unraveling, and 4. Crisis. (They can also be likened to spring, summer, fall, and winter.) The high comes in the wake of resolving a great crisis and is characterized by a civic spirit and general optimism. The Awakening is a period of spiritual awakening and turning more inward to address issues that have been suppressed in the previous Crisis and High periods. The Unraveling is an increasingly inward focused era where societal institutions begin to fray and come apart. Escalating rancor and coarseness become part of life. The Crisis usually features escalating societal division that finally gets resolved in the midst of addressing some major social crisis like a war or economic collapse. The resolution gives way to a new High and the cycle starts again. A complete cycle is called a saeculum. S&H would suggest we are in the first 5-10 years of a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era.

The four generations driving events in this Crisis era are categorized as follows:

• Silent Generation (Artist). Born 1925-1942
• Baby Boom Generation (Prophet). Born 1943-1960
• Thirteenth Generation or Gen X (Nomad). Born 1961-1981
• Millennial (Hero). Born 1982-2000?

The Prophet Generation, in this case Boomers, is the wild card in the Crisis era. Boomers were brought up to question things, were told they could accomplish anything, and were filled with visions of making a new and better world by their parents who had just endured tremendous crisis. They had a destiny to fulfill.

In youth, Boomers began challenging tradition with idealistic visions that ranged from the noble to the utterly narcissistic. As they moved into adulthood they became increasingly inward focused while still bending the world toward meeting their perceived needs. In the Crisis era, a prophet generation enters a stage of life where they begin to confront their own mortality. The kids are grown and there is a pressing awareness that all those idealistic visions of youth have not be realized. Suddenly the clock is running out. Urgent action is needed in order to fulfill the idealism they once felt in there youth.

Yet there is one problem: there are polar versions of what the new vision should look like within the generation. For instance, polls on controversial issues like, say, the Vietnam War, show that Boomers register the highest percentage of people who intensely feel the war was wrong. But Boomers also register the highest percentage of people who intensely feel the war was right. This dynamic tends to lead to a combative, winner-takes-all, take no prisoners mindset in the public square.

Meanwhile, the Boomers are sandwiched between two very different generations. The Silent generation (Artist) grew up in awe of the sacrifices and accomplishments of the G.I generation (Hero) that preceded them. But they often found themselves uneasy with the self-confident, often cold and mechanistic feel of the G.I. generation. They value the more humanistic and idealistic elements of the Boomers but are often disturbed by the Boomers disregard for what those before them have contributed and are particularly put off by the Boomers’ rancorous way of addressing problems. The Silent generation is the generation of consensus, bi-partisanship, and fair process.

Meanwhile, the Gen X generation (Nomads) have grown up in a time of decaying institutions and child neglect. While they were children, divorce increased and adults went off somewhere to find themselves. As the Fourth Turing unfolds. Gen Xers are evermore focused on what kind of world their children will inherit. They want them to have a better and more wholesome world than they grew up with. Societal institutions are not seen as allies and all of their energy is consumed with trying to make life work at the most elemental levels. They grow increasingly impatient with the grandiose idealism of Boomers and their antics, pushing things ever closer to the brink of chaos.

Finally, there is the Millennial generation (Hero) emerging on the scene. Boomers see this new generation as the folks who are going to partner with them in there idealistic visions, whichever variety of visions that may be.

What S&H suggest is that in the Fourth Turning, idealism is needed to surmount the Crisis problems. The Prophet generation often plays an important role in this respect but they are ever at the brink of spiraling out of control. The Artist generation and the Nomad generation act as a brake on the Prophet excesses.

So far in American history, the Artists and the Nomads were successful every time but one. That was in the 1860s. Idealistic Prophet abolitionists and Prophet Southerners succeeded in leading others into their idealistic crusades that resulted in the American Civil War. At the beginning of the war about 90% of congress was of the Prophet generation. In 1865 it was still 73%. In the two elections after the war, the Prophet generation dropped to 44%. S&H point out that this the only time in American history where the stats show an entire generation being voted out of office in such short order.

From Bush is a Nazi who secretly conspired to bring down the World Trade Center to Obama is a socialist who wants to kill babies, does this feel familiar? What do you think?

Questioning the Myth of the Invisible Hand

Adam Smith's Lost Legacy: Questioning the Myth of the Invisible Hand (Gavin Kennedy)

Dave Cohen writes (27 March) for Decline of the Empire

HERE

“Invisible Hand Goes Missing”

“For most of the last 3 decades, many influential economists embraced a theory that justified wholesale theft by the Finance industry because the magical powers of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand would always result in greater "efficiency" in the economy. It's as if Homo sapiens had suddenly stumbled upon a miraculous potion— this was framed as the efficient market hypothesis. Drinking this cleansing kool-aid would enable us to see clearly that Gordon Gekko was right, unfettered greed is good. Hundreds of years of economic history, and thousands of years of human history, could simply be tossed out the window. Move on, nothing to learn there.”

Comment

Yes, that just about sums up where the myth of the invisible hand has taken modern economics and Adam Smith’s good name with it.

Of course, Adam Smith did not say any of the things about the metaphor of ‘an invisible hand’ that is attributed to him, as pointed out on Lost Legacy scores of times.

Smith had no connection to allusions to ‘Homo Economicus’, Gordon Gekko’s ‘greed is good’, ‘efficient markets hypotheses’, or notions of ‘equilibrium’. In fact, the invention of Adam Smith from Chicago has hardly any connections with the Adam Smith from Kirkcaldy.

If more people came to realise this it would be much better for the practice of economic management and understanding.

It would be a start of Dave Cohen was to get up to speed on the derivation of the myth of the invisible hand, which has nothing to do with Adam Smith's use of the popular 17th-18th-century metaphor on two occasions only in his books, once in Moral Sentiments, 1759, and once in Wealth Of Nations, 1776 and neither case was about markets - I exclude his singular use of the metaphor in a student essay written when he was a student at Oxford on 'pusillanimous superstition' about Astronomy, 1744-50.

As Kennedy has pointed out many times, Smith mentions the "invisible hand" once in The Wealth of Nations. He is talking about the risk aversion that leads many local merchants not to engage in international trade are thus led, as if by an invisible hand, to benefit their community. Smith was not particularly enamored with business people nor their use of government power to create local monopolies for themselves. While he certainly grasped the incredible contributions of division of labor and trade, he was hardly a Chicago School free trader. You would have to look at something like Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (written 1705) to get something more akin to what has built up around the "invisible hand" mythology.

For an excellent readable article on the origins of the Invisible Hand metaphor see Kennedy's Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: From Metaphor to Myth.

Who do I Think I am?

Mrs. Kronicle and I have gotten sucked into NBC's new show Who do You Think You Are? The program takes a celebrity and traces a line of their family tree. So far Sarah Jessica Parker discovered she is a descendant of a women accused of being a witch at Salem, Emmitt Smith discovered he is a descendant of a wealth landowner and one of his slaves, Lisa Kudrow discovered how a great-grandmother died during the Holocaust, and Matthew Broderick learned about an ancestor who served in the Civil War.

For fun, I thought I would offer what is probably my most prestigious family line. This line dates back to my 9th great-grandparents. Assuming you have no overlap in your family tree we each have 2048 9th great-grandparents.

Generation 1

John Cotton (1585 Derby, England – 1652 Boston, MA)
Sarah Hawkridge (1601 England – 1676 Boston, MA)

John Cotton is considered by some to be the leading theologian of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony during its first twenty years. He fled England in 1633 ahead of authories who were after because of his nonconformist activities. He wrote extensively. He was invited to join the Westminster Assembly of Divines but eventually decided to stay put in New England and work to influence the Assembly through his writings.

Generation 2

John Cotton (1640 Boston, MA – 1699 Charleston, SC)
Joanna Rossiter (c. 1642 –1702 Plymouth, MA)

Generation 3

Josiah Cotton (1680 Plymouth, MA – 1756 Plymouth, MA)
Hannah Sturtevant (1687 Plymouth, MA – 1756 Plymouth, MA)

Generation 4

Theophilus Cotton (1716 Plymouth, MA – 1782 Plymouth, MA)
Martha Sanders (c 1716 Sandwich, MA –1796 Plymouth, MA)

 Theophilus Cotton formed a regiment that responded the attack of the British at Bunker Hill at the start of the Revolutionary War. It was also Theophilus who had the idea to move Plymouth Rock from the shore into town in 1774. Unfortunately, they split the stone in half. In 1859, the stone was returned to its original location with "1620" chiseled into it. My 2nd Great-Grandfather William Cotton Holmes (see below) records in his diary that he was present at that event.

Generation 5

Charles Dyer (1738 Plymouth, MA – 1786 At sea near Bermuda)
Bethiah Cotton (1750 Plymouth, MA—1837 Plymouth, MA)

Generation 6

Joseph Holmes (1775 – 1825 Plymouth, MA)
Martha Cotton Dyer (1777 – 1830 Plymouth, MA)

Generation 7

William Sargent Holmes (1811 Plymouth, MA –1894 Plymouth, MA)
Hannah Davie (1804 Plymouth, MA – 1874 Plymouth, MA)

Generation 8
 
William Cotton Holmes (1837 Boston, MA – 1932 Orlando, FL)
Louisa L Pierce (1843 Plymouth, MA – 1913 Harvey, IL)

William Cotton Holmes answered Lincoln's call for troops at the beginning of the Civil War. He ended up a company clerk with a unit in Washington D.C. through most of the war. He was at the battles of Antietam and Second Bull Run. William Cotton Holmes records meeting Lincoln and records seeing him at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in his diary. He was also in attendance at Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. William and Louisa were descendants of eight Mayflower passengers.

Generation 9

Carl Peter Kruse (1851 Ribe, Denmark – 1932 Omaha, NE)
Lucy Augusta Holmes (1870 Amity, MO – 1906 Harvey, IL)

Generation 10

Carl Holmes Kruse (1901 Harvey, IL – 1977 Bethany, OK)
Mabel Delphia Young (1906 Hartville, MO – 1994 Urbana, IL)

Generation 11

Carl W. Kruse
T. Marie Kruse

Carl was drafted into the Army in July, 1945. The Japanese heard he was coming and within days they surrendered. (Hey, its a family history. There has to be some embellishment.)

Generation 12

Michael W. Kruse

At a later date I think I'll post about some of my less reputable ancestors. But for now, what ancestors are in your family tree? Any particularly juicy stories?

Market Madness: Louisville TV Homes Score Big During NCAA Tourney

Nielsen Wire: Market Madness: Louisville TV Homes Score Big During NCAA Tourney

(Note: DMA = Designated Market Area)

For fans of NCAA basketball, it has been an upset-filled March Madness. But there are no surprises in household viewing patterns among the top markets tracked by Nielsen. More than a quarter of households in the Louisville, KY, market tuned into watch the University of Kentucky defeat Cornell on March 25. The Louisville market is once again the highest-rated DMA for NCAA tournament games, averaging a 16.6 household rating through the first two rounds. While Louisville is a mid-sized market with no pro sports teams, it dominates NCAA viewership and is at the heart of a “basketball belt,” an enthusiastic cluster of markets from Raleigh to Oklahoma City that boast nine of the top 10 DMAs in tournament viewing.

Louisville also has the highest average viewership for the NCAA championship game the past 10 years. Historically, viewership hasn’t wavered despite the fact that neither the University of Louisville nor the University of Kentucky have sent teams to the championship game since 1998. ...

... Further analysis shows that Louisville is more than just a college basketball town. When compared to the rest of the U.S., the “Derby City,” is roughly three times more likely to watch horse racing’s Triple Crown (including the Kentucky Derby, obviously) and is twice as likely to view the Indy 500 and Daytona 500. ...

Herding Democats

Source

This reminds me of a Will Rogers quote: "I don't belong to an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year

New York Times: Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year

The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession  have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.

The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax. ...

PCUSA Research Services Twitter Feed

For all your presby-twitterers out their, PCUSA Research Services started a twitter feed yesterday. Awesome! Look them up under PCUSAResearch.

Forest loss slows, as China plants and Brazil preserves

BBC: Forest loss slows, as China plants and Brazil preserves

The world's net rate of forest loss has slowed markedly in the last decade, with less logging in the Amazon and China planting trees on a grand scale.

Yet forests continue to be lost at "an alarming rate" in some countries, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 finds the loss of tree cover is most acute in Africa and South America.

But Australia also suffered huge losses because of the recent drought.

"It is good news," said the report's co-ordinator Mette Loyche Wilkie, a senior forestry office with FAO.

"This is the first time we've been able to say that the deforestation rate is going down across the world, and certainly when you look at the net rate that is certainly down.

"But the situation in some countries is still alarming," she told BBC News.

The last decade saw forests being lost or converted at a rate of 13 million hectares per year, compared to 16 million hectares in the 1990s.

However, new forests were being planted to the tune of more than seven million hectares per year; so the net rate of loss since the year 2000 has been 5.2 million hectares per year, compared to 8.3 million in the 1990s.

Globally, forests now cover about 31% of the Earth's land surface. ...

U.S. students' reading scores show little progress

USA Today: U.S. students' reading scores show little progress

WASHINGTON — In spite of high-profile efforts to improve the reading skills of the USA's poorest schoolchildren over the past several years, their reading abilities barely improved last year compared with 2007, results of a federally administered test show.

Reading scores essentially didn't budge in 2009, both for students overall and minority students, according to results issued Wednesday on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Fourth-graders' scores were unchanged at 221 points on a 500-point scale, and those of eighth-graders rose just one point, from 263 to 264.

Likewise, achievement gaps between white, African-American and Hispanic students changed only slightly since 2007, though in fourth grade, the difference between white and African-American students' scores has tightened six points since 1992. Overall, though, average scores in both grades have risen just four points since then. ...

From Socialism to Market Economy

Scot McKnight has a post I wrote posted at Jesus Creed today: From Socialism to Market Economy. Be sure to check Jesus Creed tomorrow for my post on happiness economics.

Allocation of Limited Resources. Part 1

Recently I finished reading James Halteman’s The Clashing Worlds of Economics and Faith published in 1995. It is a revised and expanded edition of his book Market Capitalism and Christianity, which I read in grad school back in 1988. It is written from an Anabaptist perspective and while I disagree with him at various points in the book, overall it is a helpful book.

One of passage I liked was Halteman’s discussion of the importance of markets versus other economic allocation processes. He writes:

“Picture yourself as owner of a gas station in a town bracing for a hurricane. You have only one hundred gallons left in your supply tank, and ten cars are lined up, each needing fifteen gallons.” (24)

What will you do? Haltemnan suggest six possible options:

First, you might use a first-come, first-served method. You could simply keep pumping until the seventh car exhausts the supply of gas. The remaining three cars get nothing. Whether the tenth car is an ambulance, or a police car, or driven by someone on their way to the hospital for emergency care, it will not be serviced. The first come first served method places the highest value on being early. People with a low cost of time can afford to line up early for the fuel.

A second system might be to allocate resources based on need. In this case you would ask all drivers how they intended to use the gas and then decide, either by yourself or through democratic process of voting or polling, how the gas should be divided. This system assumes that people have a generally accepted view of what need is and are prepared to live with the consequences of the allocation. Under this system, everyone has an incentive to appear most needy. If need is related to low income, there is incentive to be poor or at least to appear poor.

A third method of allocation is simply to give everyone in the line ten gallons of gasoline, irrespective of their place in line or their need. This system puts a high value on equal treatment of everyone, so there is no reason to be early in line or to project a position of need. But the system also faces the difficulty in maintaining equality when, after serving one customer or more, someone new joins the line.

A fourth way of solving the problem is cronyism. In this system, the supplier identifies his regular customers or friends and gives them fuel. This gives people incentive to seek friendships with people of power and wealth. Political patronage and conformity to the wishes of those with resources characterize a system based on cronyism.

Another allocative process is open conflict. If the people waiting for gasoline became irate and feared losing their source of transportation, fights could erupt and the victor could have the fuel. This chaotic approach usually erupts when a society’s institutional structures are so weak or unfair that people take matters into their own hands.

One other approach to resource allocation is the auction method, in which those who bid highest get the most gasoline. In this system, it is important to have enough money to bid to the level required to get the desired quantities of gasoline. Except for cases of inherited wealth or unmerited windfall income, one bids with money that comes from wages in the labor auction. Thus one’s work effort is directly related to the amount of gas one can buy. This link between allocation and production is unique among all the methods discussed.

In any large economy, virtually every method described above is used formally or informally. However, in an overall economy, one method or another dominates economic exchange. In the United States, the auction method prevails. The fact that bidders and sellers exchange freely makes this method appealing to a democratic tradition. In other parts of the world, where populations lack the sophistication and social support structures of low-cost communication, information, transportation, and political stability, the auction allocation mechanism works far less effectively. In societies with a tradition of centralized governmental power or a dominant leader, a method that relies on the leader’s choices – what we described as cronyism – is common.

No matter what system a society uses, it must deal with the forces of supply and demand. If an auction isn’t used, the people who wait in line pay in money plus time rather than just money. The king who allocates to his cronies pays in reduced political support from the masses, who pay in reduced political and personal choice. In short, a price is paid whenever scarce resources are allocated, though the effects differ depending on the method used. We generally prefer a system that minimizes this cost. (24-26)

A helpful feature of this thought experiment is that it shrinks the issues down to a problem we can easily get our heads around. Most would agree that the “first come, first serve,” “equal treatment,” “cronyism,” and “open conflict” options do not lead to an efficient or just distribution. But repeatedly people are drawn to attempts to substitute the “need” option for the market “auction.” Here, shrinking things down to ten people can radically understate the challenge of the “need” option. It is conceivable that we could get ten people together and work out who needs how much. But multiply that times millions of people. How could anyone possibly assess the ever fluctuating need for gasoline and allocate it justly? Now multiply these millions of people by millions of different products.  There is no “Great Mind” or supercomputer that can know needs, much less adjudicate between them.

The most efficient and just allocation system is for people to take responsibility for themselves, earn an income, and bid for what they need in an auction system. That brings what they need to their door. The changes in bid prices also inform the suppliers on what to produce. No other system can match the coordinating information system the auction creates.

Yet the market auction is not perfect. There are reasons why market intervention is needed. Stay tuned.

[Next] [Index]

X Woman: Not human, not Neanderthal, what is she?

Christian Science Monitor: X Woman: Not human, not Neanderthal, what is she?

Scientists have found evidence of what might be a 'new creature' that is neither Neanderthal nor human. X Woman could revise theories about human ancestors and when they left Africa.

A mystery female known as X Woman may add a new chapter to the story of human ancestors leaving Africa to inhabit much of the planet.

Genetic material from a pinkie bone discovered two years ago in Siberia is challenging scientists' understanding of when humans and their evolutionary brethren left Africa, and whether a distinct and previously unknown species might have existed.

Researchers estimate the age of the pinkie bone to be between 30,000 and 48,000 years old. At that time, Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans also lived in that region of Siberia, deep in the Altai Mountains.

But to the researchers' surprise, the bone's genetic signature contained many distinct features compared with those of the remains of Neanderthals or modern humans. Indeed, the team's DNA analysis suggested that the bone came from line of so-called hominins that last shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals and modern humans about 1 million years ago. The team dubbed this potential common ancestor X Woman.

By contrast, Neanderthals and modern humans last shared a common ancestor about 500,000 years ago, anthropologists say – making X Woman about twice as distant from humans on the evolutionary tree as from Neanderthals.

"This was absolutely amazing," says team member Svante Paabo, with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Whoever this was that left "Africa 1 million years ago is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far." ...

Wealth isn’t how much you earn

Christian Science Monitor: Wealth isn’t how much you earn

At age 25, Jim makes $100,000 a year. He’s constantly traveling for business. He has a large home in which he often doesn’t visit some rooms for months at a time. He eats out every single night. He drives a leased Lexus, which he updates every few years at the end of the lease. He buys a whole new wardrobe every six months, taking the leftovers to Goodwill. He spends everything he brings in.

At age 25, Bill makes $35,000 a year. He lives in a smaller home and doesn’t travel much. He makes most of his own meals at home. He drives a Toyota Corolla, which he owns free and clear. He wears clothes until they’re worn, then shops at Goodwill for replacements, often picking up Jim’s barely-worn clothes. At the end of the year, he usually has about $5,000 of his income left over, which he sticks into his stock investments which earn 8% a year.

In ten years, Jim’s net worth hasn’t grown a cent. In those same ten years, Bill has $72,000 in the bank.

At the twenty year mark, Jim’s net worth still hasn’t grown a cent. In those same twenty years, Bill has built up $228,098 in the bank.

At the thirty year mark, Jim’s still breaking even. Bill, on the other hand, has $566,416 in the bank.

At age sixty five, Jim hasn’t accumulated a cent and will be working for the man for the rest of his life. At the same age, Bill has $1.3 million in the bank and can do whatever he wants for the rest of his life – and probably already started doing that a few years earlier.

It doesn’t matter how much you earn. It matters how much you save. ...

Tears of joy, pain as national anthem plays at Indiana college

USA Today: Tears of joy, pain as national anthem plays at Indiana college

GOSHEN, Ind. — Rockets red glare, bombs bursting in air – these are the words that brought tears to the eyes of those who witnessed the historic first playing of the national anthem at Goshen College Tuesday afternoon.

Tears of pain for 22-year-old Marlys Weaver, a senior journalism student who hates the images of war she sees "in nearly every verse."

Tears of joy for 56-year-old Steven Shriner, a retired Air Force sergeant who proudly wears a red, white and blue cap.

They were among more than 100 people who gathered around the Goshen baseball diamond to hear the patriotic tune that had never been played at the Mennonite college that has always embraced its peace-loving, pacifist roots.

But as the 1,000-student campus has grown increasingly diversified – only 55% of students today are Mennonite, compared to more than 60% a few decades ago – the pressure to show allegiance to the flag has grown.

After a visiting fan complained a year ago and a conservative radio show picked up the story, Goshen embarked on months of passionate debate – exploring what it means to be a Mennonite in a society that embraces the flag – a debate that concluded Tuesday with the national anthem and the inaugural hoisting of the American flag down the first base line.

"I am not a Mennonite and I don't understand their reasons for not playing the anthem," said Shriner, a Methodist, who has worked at the college for 13 years. "And they don't understand my reasons for loving my country."

Weaver, who is editor of the campus newspaper, counters: "I believe we are called to follow Jesus's example of work and love." ...

I'm not Anabaptist or pacifist. I don't have a problem with playing the national anthem at a sporting event at a Christian college. However, I am one of those who believes the American flag should not be in the worship space and I am very uneasy about singing patriotic hymns in a worship service.

Wrapping Your Head Around the Health Bill

New York Times, Economix: Wrapping Your Head Around the Health Bill

On Tuesday, President Obama signed into law H.R. 3590 — the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [both pdf's]. ...

...What is one to make of these bills? Are they, as the president put it, a major step in the right direction, even if not the final chapter of American health reform? Or are they, as their critics have it, a government takeover of health care that deprives Americans of their freedom?

A problem with any such legislation is that it is hard to grasp in its entirety. In the original version, H.R. 3590 as passed by the Senate on Dec. 24, 2009, ran to some 2,400 pages, although with a very large font, triple spacing and huge left and right margins.

With normal margins the document probably would shrink to about 500 pages or so. But even in that form, the Senate bill would be a major opus and a remedy against insomnia for all but the truly dedicated reader.

To appreciate what the legislators crafting the bill tried to accomplish, anyone truly interested in this reform bill might start at the beginning, with Senator Max Baucus’s “Call to Action: Health Reform 2009” [pdf].

This 89-page, eminently readable white paper was composed by the senator’s staff of health policy analysts under the leadership of Liz Fowler, Ph.D. The paper draws extensively on a huge array of first-class research papers produced over the years by the health-services research community. It is a well-structured catalog of problems identified in that literature and on the mind of Senator Baucus and his staff members.

“Call to Action: Health Reform 2009” became the springboard for the bill that eventually emerged in the Senate (H.R. 3590), although that bill was the product of many political compromises and would hardly have been called the ideal envisioned by policy wonks.

As to the Senate bill itself, I would recommend to readers a summary of that bill, prepared by the Congressional Research Service. The Congressional Research Service is a bipartisan research arm of Congress.

This 24-page summary of H.R. 3590 is written in plain English. It can give any reader who actually cares to know what is in the bill a good grasp of its contents.

A similarly readable summary of H.R. 4872, the reconciliation bill passed by the House and now being debated in the Senate, can be found here [pdf]. That summary also is written in plain English, rather than the legalese of formal bills, although it should be kept in mind that the bill is merely a set of proposed amendments to H.R. 3590, the Senate bill.

I go to such length about the bills that will constitute United States Health Reform 2010 and to provide Web links to them in the belief that the time has passed for concerned citizens to let themselves be informed solely by pundits of various ideological stripes. Citizens should read at least the accessible summaries of the bills to become truly familiar with them. Think of them as a reading assignment in college. ...

Jewish Origins of Gnosticism

Euangelion: Jewish Origins of Gnosticism

I am becoming increasingly convinced that Gnosticism had a Jewish origin. After the Jewish revolts against Rome in 66-70 and 132-35 AD, Judaism went in one of two directions. Rabbinic Judaism that tried to compensate for the absence of the temple and expulsion from the land through a very manufactured micro-piety built on Torah and Halakah, and those that effectively tried to make Judaism palatable to the middle platonic zeitgeist by turning Judaism effectively into a pagan religion, i.e., Gnosticism. ...

The Democrats Rejoice

New York Times: The Democrats Rejoice  David Brooks 

I especially loved the last paragraph.

Parties come to embody causes. For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate. ...

... Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.

Today, America’s vigor is challenged on two fronts. First, the country is becoming geriatric. Other nations spend 10 percent or so of their G.D.P. on health care. We spend 17 percent and are predicted to soon spend 20 percent and then 25 percent. This legislation was supposed to end that asphyxiating growth, which will crowd out investments in innovation, education and everything else. It will not.

With the word security engraved on its heart, the Democratic Party is just not structured to cut spending that would enhance health and safety. The party nurtures; it does not say, “No more.”

The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem.

Nobody knows how this bill will work out. It is an undertaking exponentially more complex than the Iraq war, for example. But to me, it feels like the end of something, not the beginning of something. It feels like the noble completion of the great liberal project to build a comprehensive welfare system.

The task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin. We know what it will take. We will have to raise a consumption tax. We will have to preserve benefits for the poor and cut them for the middle and upper classes. We will have to invest more in innovation and human capital.

The Democratic Party, as it revealed of itself over the past year, does not seem to be up to that coming challenge (neither is the Republican Party). This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.

Last Supper growing by Biblical proportions

ABC News: Last Supper growing by Biblical proportions

The question of how the Last Supper would look if it were painted according to today's appetites has been answered by two academics in the US.
 
They analysed 52 of the most famous paintings of the Last Supper painted between the years 1000 and 2000 and found that the portions of food placed before Jesus and his disciples grew markedly. ...

... Over 1,000 years, the size of the main dish progressively grew by 69.2 per cent, plate size by 65.6 per cent and bread size by 23.1 per cent.

The growing size reflects the success of agriculture over the past 10 centuries, say the researchers.

"The last 1,000 years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food," said Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing and applied economics at Cornell University in New York.

"We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history's most famous dinner." ...

Geography of the Health Care Vote

New York Times

Isaac's Birthday Dilemma

This is a picture of Isaac and me watching March Madness this weekend. (Isaac tends to prefer teams like Cougars, Wildcats, and Tigers.) This week Isaac turns 18 years old!

You may remember that a couple of years ago I did a post about Isaac getting his own Walgreens prescription discount card. Well now it is time to get Isaac registered to vote. The problem is what party to choose. He is thinking Republicat because he believes in protecting his borders (Prowl softly and brandish sharp claws.) On the other hand, since he believes he has a fundamental right to shelter, food, and veterinary care he is considering becoming a Democat. Then again, since he doesn't like any authority telling he what to do, maybe he should be Libertabbian. Any suggestions?

Democracy Is a Pesky Thing

Newsweek: Democracy Is a Pesky Thing

... A good bit of the interview had been about the role of ideological bias in the media, and I had expressed my view that most Americans are completely capable of sorting through the conflicting viewpoints that come from various outlets in order to arrive at sound conclusions. Or, put more baldly, I do not think either Fox News or The New York Times runs the world. If the former did, then Barack Obama would not be president; if the latter were in control, then the president would not be having so much difficulty at the moment. Instead, the reality is—as usual—muddled.

One of the e-mailers from Charlotte took exception to this, writing that I was "out of touch" with the "average American" and was "overestimating the intelligence" of most folks, who are, in the e-mailer's view, "undereducated and biased."

It is generally safe to translate "biased" in such a context as "someone who does not agree with me." ...

... My point is that Americans who are engaged enough to vote or to contact their lawmakers are not as dopey or as easily led as the Charlotte e-mailer thinks. You cannot be for democracy when you are winning an argument and against it when you are losing one. Like free speech, democracy is pesky that way.

Nothing about government is easy. We are selfish, we have unreasonable expectations of government (we want it out of our lives, except when we don't), and we have abysmally short attention spans, but we are not dumb. And history suggests that in the end, after much trial and much error, we usually get it right. ...

Healthcare, Tradeoffs, and the Road Ahead

Greg Mankiw: Healthcare, Tradeoffs, and the Road Ahead

Well, it appears certain that the healthcare reform bill will become law. One thing I have been struck by in watching this debate is how strident it has been, among both proponents and opponents of the legislation. As a weak-willed eclectic, I can see arguments on both sides. Life is full of tradeoffs, and so most issues strike me as involving shades of grey rather than being black and white. As a result, I find it hard to envision the people I disagree with as demons.

Arthur Okun said the big tradeoff in economics is between equality and efficiency. The health reform bill offers more equality (expanded insurance, more redistribution) and less efficiency (higher marginal tax rates). Whether you think this is a good or bad choice to make, it should not be hard to see the other point of view.

I like to think of the big tradeoff as being between community and liberty. From this perspective, the health reform bill offers more community (all Americans get health insurance, regulated by a centralized authority) and less liberty (insurance mandates, higher taxes). Once again, regardless of whether you are more communitarian or libertarian, a reasonable person should be able to understand the opposite vantagepoint.

In the end, while I understood the arguments in favor of the bill, I could not support it. In part, that is because I am generally more of a libertarian than a communitarian. In addition, I could not help but fear that the legislation will add to the fiscal burden we are leaving to future generations. Some economists (such as my Harvard colleague David Cutler) think there are great cost savings in the bill. I hope he is right, but I am skeptical. Some people say the Congressional Budget Office gave the legislation a clean bill of health regarding its fiscal impact. I believe that is completely wrong, for several reasons (click here, here, and here). My judgment is that this health bill adds significantly to our long-term fiscal problems.

The Obama administration's political philosophy is more egalitarian and more communitarian than mine. Their spending programs require much higher taxes than we have now and, indeed, much higher taxes than they have had the temerity to propose. Here is the question I have been wondering about: How long can the President wait before he comes clean with the American people and explains how high taxes needs to rise to pay for his vision of government?

Amen! This sums it up for me very well.

Caution: Work in Progress-- a Theology of Work

Ben Witherington: Caution: Work in Progress-- a Theology of Work

I am working on a little book on work for Eerdmans.  I thought I'd test drive the Preface and see what you thought.  Let me know.  (BW3)

CAUTION--- WORK IN PROGRESS

I was leafing through a newspaper shortly before Thanksgiving and came across a great political cartoon.  It depicted two Indians carrying a dead turkey on a pole towards a table at which several New England Puritans were sitting, apparently waiting to eat their Thanksgiving dinner with the Natives.   The Indians were far enough out of earshot not to be heard when one said to the other "I don't care if they have a good work ethic, they are illegal aliens. They should go back to where they came from and enter the country legally and with our permission."  I laughed for a good while about that reversal of the common perspective we hear in America today about so many illegal aliens.  But the cartoon also alluded to something that it was assumed a broad audience would readily know all about--- the so call Puritan work ethic. 

There is something about Christianity, and particularly Protestant Christianity that seems to raise to a peculiar degree the issue of how we as a Christians should view work.  Is it a blessing or a bane, is it a duty or a privilege, do we work to live, or live to work?   Inquiring minds want to know.   One thing is for sure--- modern Americans, including many Christians have little or no understanding of what the Bible actually says about work, and it hardly informs their views on work vs. play, or career vs. retirement or other related subjects, subjects we intend to explore in this little study.  And in one sense, they can hardly be blamed-- Christian theologians have seldom addressed the topic of work! ...

Health Care Bill Passes 219-212

The health care bill passed by four votes tonight, 219 to 212. How does this stack up against similar major pieces of legislation?  In the past, major social security legislation had broad public support and passed with lopsided margins and bipartisan support in Congress.

Polls show that barely a third of Americans supported this bill. In Congress, no Republicans voted in favor and 34 Democrats voted against it in the House.Below are three graphs showing the vote breakdown by party on Social Security, Medicare, and the new health care bill:

Social Security Act 1935

Social Security Act 1935
House	Yes	No	Not Voting/Present
Democrats	284 (89%)	15 (5%)	20 (6%)
Republicans	81 (79%)	15 (15%)	6 (6%)
Other	6 (75%)	1 (12.5%)	1 (12.5%)
Total	371 (86%)	31 (7%)	27 (7%)
Senate
Democrats	60 (87%)	1 (1%)	8 (12%)
Republicans	16 (64%)	5 (20%)	4 (16%)
Other	1 (100%)	0	0
Total	77 (81%)	6 (6%)	12 (13%)

Social Security Act 1965 (Medicare)

Social Security Act 1965 (Medicare)
House	Yes	No	Not Voting/Present
Democrats	237 (81%)	48 (16%)	8 (3%)
Republicans	70 (50%)	68 (49%)	2 (1%)
Total	307 (71%)	116 (27%)	10 (2%)
Senate
Democrats	57 (84%)	7 (10%)	4 (6%)
Republicans	13 (41%)	17 (55%)	2 (6%)
Total	70 (70%)	24 (24%)	6 (6%)

Health Care 2010

Health Care 2010
House	Yes	No	Not Voting/Present
Democrats	219 (87%)	34 (13%)	0
Republicans	0	178 (100%)	0
Total	219 (51%)	212 (49%)	0
Senate
Democrats	60 (100%)	0	0
Republicans	0	40 (100%)	0
Total	60 (60%)	40 (40%)	0

Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen! UNI defeats the Jayhawks.

The UNI purple Panthers finally did what purple KSU Wildcats couldn't do in three tries this year. My in-laws live just outside Waterloo - Cedar Falls. I know there is celebrating happening there. Congrats to the Panthers!

Selective Emergence?

I have a post up at Jesus Creed today about emergence, emerging church, and economics. Feel free to join the conversation: Selective Emergence?

New Barnes & Noble CEO calls digital books 'the key to our future'

LA Times:  New Barnes & Noble CEO calls digital books 'the key to our future'

The elevation of online head William Lynch as the chain contends with lower store sales and a stock fight with billionaire investor Ron Burkle is seen by analysts as an embrace of the future.

Book giant Barnes & Noble Inc., in the midst of a heated stock ownership battle with Los Angeles billionaire investor Ron Burkle, has announced a major shake-up of its top management.

The world's largest bookseller said Thursday that it was replacing Chief Executive Steve Riggio with William Lynch, the head of its online division, in a move many saw as a sign that the company was embracing the changing nature of the book business.

"It's a technology person running a bookstore, and that's a big deal," said David Schick, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. "They don't have their head in the sand about what's going on out there. I think that's the single biggest take-away." ...

Job Description of the General Assembly Mission Council Chair

Many of you know that I was elected chair of the General Assembly Mission Council of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., last month. Several of you have asked me just what exactly it is that the chair of the GAMC does. Instead of explaining it to you I think this video clip pretty much sums it up.

A better mattress

Economist: A better mattress

Microfinance focuses on lending. Now the industry is turning to deposits.

IT IS hard for people in the rich world to imagine what it is like to live on $2 a day. But for those who do, the problem is often not just a low income, but an unpredictable one. Living on $2 a day frequently means living for ten days on $20 earned on a single day. The task of smoothing consumption is made more complicated if there is nowhere to store money safely. In an emergency, richer people might choose between dipping into their savings and borrowing. The choice for the great mass of the unbanked in the developing world is limited to whom to borrow from, often at great cost.

That they can borrow at all is partly due to the rapid growth of microfinance, which specialises in lending small amounts to poor people. Several big microfinance institutions (MFIs) also offer savings accounts: Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is a prominent example. But the industry remains dominated by credit, and the ability to save through an MFI is often linked to customers’ willingness to borrow from it. Of 166 MFIs surveyed in 2009 by the Microfinance Information Exchange, a think-tank, all offered credit but only 27% offered savings products. Advocates of a greater variety of financial services for the poor argue for more balance.

This may be on the horizon. More MFIs are becoming interested in the potential of savings, thanks partly to the global financial crisis. A majority of more than 400 MFI managers surveyed last March by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a microfinance group based at the World Bank, said that they had faced liquidity problems during the crisis (see chart). This, together with rising financing costs and exchange-rate fluctuations for those MFIs that rely on external finance, has prompted many “credit-only” MFIs to warm to the idea of funding at least part of their lending activity using local savings. ...

Can We Be Friends? (A woman asks a married man.)

Jesus Creed: Can We Be Friends? (A woman asks a married man.)

Gilbert Meilaender, in a well-known essay originally published in First Things, explored the classical issues surrounding an issue that emerged yesterday in our reposting of Carolyn Custis James' post. The issue is this: Can a married man be a serious "friend" with a woman who is not his wife? And, alternatively, can a married women be a serious "friend" with a man who is not her husband?

Meilaender explores this question through the lens of the classical world where there was a general and widespread conviction that men and women didn't do well as friends. Meilaender then explores the nuances of the question for a world that has changed dramatically: "Are there reasons why friendship between men and women may be more difficult to sustain than same-sex friendships?"

Yes, there are many differences between our world and the classical world, not the least of which is the gradual and greatly improved equalization of women in our culture and the education of women. But there remains the obvious: the sexualization of the other, and this often is expressed in terms of the man not being able to handle the woman's sexuality.

A scenario: your daughter or your son is now married, and delights in his or her spouse. Your son or your daughter come to you and says, "I have a close friend, of the opposite sex, who is not married. That person would like me to have coffee alone just to chat. Mom, Dad, what is your advice? What is your wisdom?"

Scenario two: what are the principles you use in your cross-gender relationships? Do you have any conscious principles? What are they? Any concrete lines over which you will not cross? ...

Great discussion at Jesus Creed.

What American Dream?

Forbes: What American Dream?

Fewer people in the U.S. believe they will ever achieve it.

More alarming may be the self-fulfilling prophecies that this skepticism cultivates. For the economy, people are more likely to hunker down and diminish any chance that consumer spending will restart the economy. For government, cynicism moves people away from the process, pushing political discourse further to the extremes and making government even more dysfunctional and less responsive that it already is.

None of this can be separated from rapid and all-encompassing technological change that is altering both our personal and institutional relationships. Inevitably, our institutions must change to keep up.

I am an optimist; in this case about America and its dream, and about those who will sort through and find solutions, the under-30 generation I call First Globals. What Winston Churchill said in 1947 is still true: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." It may take some time, but the generation that has grown up wired, connected and open to the world will make our institutions responsive again, and perhaps create new ones.

They will also keep the American Dream, and continue the path that defines it not as material, but as personal and spiritual fulfillment. Carpe diem. ...

Misaligned Incentives

National Review Online: Misaligned Incentives

What’s good for Democratic House leaders is bad for members.

The Democratic leadership’s struggle to pass the Senate health-care bill in the House looks like a great case study for political scientists. They have many examples of the leaders of a majority party trying to push controversial legislation through a balky chamber. But seldom have the political incentives of the party leadership and the party’s members been so differently aligned.

There is always some misalignment. Even when the party’s president and policies are widely popular, some of its House members will represent districts where that is not so, where they win because of personal popularity or historical tradition, constituency services or generous earmarking. Of the 253 current House Democrats, 45 represent districts that voted for John McCain. Even Democratic policies that are popular nationally aren’t popular in most of these districts.

But the Democratic health-care legislation is not nationally popular. Nationally, Pres. Barack Obama won 53 percent to 46 percent, but the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls shows disapproval of health care at 49 percent to 41 percent. Health care 2010 is polling 12 points behind Obama 2008.

To get an idea of what that means district by district, subtract 12 points from Obama’s percentage in each one. When you do that, you find that there are only 115 Democratic members in seats where the putative support for the health-care legislation is 50 percent or higher — 101 votes short of the 216 votes needed for a majority in a House with vacancies in four Democratic seats.

Members in these districts can vote yes with little or no political risk. Even so, two — one who is running for governor of Alabama, one who favors the abortion-funding ban lacking in the Senate bill — have said they’ll vote no. Another is threatening to do so because of the bill’s treatment of immigrants.

Pushing health-care legislation poses no threat to members of the leadership, all of whom represent such districts. And they tend to believe that passing a bill would be good for the nation.

More important, they believe that failure to pass it would be disastrous for their leadership positions. The aura of inevitability they have created by rallying majorities on one tough vote after another since January 2007 would disappear. Their political capital would go the way of the financial capital of Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers.

But the political incentives for the 138 Democratic members who represent districts where the health-care bills are unpopular are entirely different. What we are seeing is something like an irresistible force (a highly skillful leadership) meeting an immovable object (public opinion in most Democratic districts). One or the other will give. ...

UMKC's MBA coach finds success in the classroom, not on the court

Kansas City Star: UMKC's MBA coach finds success in the classroom, not on the court

Nice piece on the work my sister is doing.

Coaches Bill Self, Frank Martin and Mike Anderson are household names in the Kansas City area. But there’s another successful college coach who has nothing to do with dribbling, passing or shooting a basketball.

Sandra Kruse-Smith has been coaching students in UMKC’s Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration’s executive MBA program since 2005.

“I work with students to help them apply what they learn in the classroom to specific problems they may be facing at work,” she said.

Or as Joan Gallos, academic director for the program, put it: “We want to have a program that is relevant to our students’ career success, so what they learn on Saturday they can apply on Monday.”

A coach is so valuable in part because the program’s mission is different from that of a typical MBA, she said.

“What distinguishes an executive MBA is the emphasis on application and integration of knowledge,” Gallos said. “Every degree program teaches students various models and frameworks, best practices and understanding across various business disciplines. But even if you learn something, you may not necessarily be able to integrate it into your workplace. Translating theory into practice can be difficult.”

Leaders at the Bloch school were wrestling with that challenge in 2005 when they ran across “Developing Business Leaders for 2010,” a report published by the Conference Board.

“This report listed … qualities that are necessary to be successful and keep your career from derailing,” Kruse-Smith said. “The majority of those skills are related to interpersonal relationships and communications.” ...

More employers use tech to track workers

USA Today: More employers use tech to track workers

Almost every worker has done it: gotten in a little Facebook updating, personal e-mailing, YouTube watching and friend calling while on the clock.

Such indiscretions often went undetected by company management everywhere but the most secure and highly proprietary companies or governmental agencies. Not anymore.

Firms have become sharp-eyed, keenly eared watchdogs as they try to squeeze every penny's worth of their employees' salaries and to ensure they have the most professional and lawsuit-proof workplaces.

Managers use technological advances to capture workers' computer keystrokes, monitor the websites they frequent, even track their whereabouts through GPS-enabled cellphones. Some companies have gone as far as using webcams and minuscule video cameras to secretly record employees' movements.

"There are two trends driving the increase in monitoring," says Lewis Maltby, author of the workplace rights book Can They Do That? "One is financial pressure. Everyone is trying to get leaner and meaner, and monitoring is one way to do it. The other reason is that it's easier than ever. It used to be difficult and expensive to monitor employees, and now, it's easy and cheap." ...

Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?

Marginal Revolution: Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution?

... More generally, extended periods of economic growth require that technologies of defense outweigh technologies of predation.  They may also require that the successful defender, at the same time, has good enough technology to predate someone else and accumulate a sizable surplus.  Parts of Europe took a good deal from the New World and this may have mattered a good deal.

Building a strong enough state to protect markets from other states is very hard to do; at the same time the built state has to avoid crushing those markets itself.  That's a very delicate balance.  China had wonderful technology for its time and was the richest part of the world for centuries but never succeeded in this endeavor, not for long at least.

England was fortunate to be an island.  Starting in the early seventeenth century, England had many decades of ongoing, steady growth.  Later, coal and the steam engine kicked in at just the right time.  English political institutions were "good enough" as well and steadily improving, for the most part.

Christianity was important for transmitting an ideology of individual rights and natural law.  As McCloskey and Mokyr stress, the Industrial Revolution was in part about ideas.

There are numerous other factors, but putting those ones together -- and no others -- already makes an Industrial Revolution very difficult to achieve.  It did happen, it probably would have happened somewhere, sooner or later, but its occurrence was by no means easy to achieve.  The Greeks had steam engines, proto-computers, and brilliant philosophers and writers, but still they did not come close to a breakthrough.

One question is how long the Roman Empire would have had to last to generate an Industrial Revolution and don't mention the Eastern Empire smartypants.

If you are asking why the Industrial Revolution did not occur in the Mesozoic age, or other earlier times, genetic factors play a role as well.

As one commenter notes, let us not forget scientific-rationalism. The West arrived at the idea that nature operates in an ordered way. The West stopped anthropomorphizing  nature. Natural processes were not the workings of capricious gods or of fate. 

Another frequently overlooked aspect of Christianity was the valuation of human labor. More than 1,000 years ago Benedictine monks began fanning throughout Europe, functioning as economic development catalysts. They helped improve farming methods and in the development things like waterwheel technology. This valuation of the individual and his/her labor as opposed to seeing people merely as fodder for the King's agendas was critical.

Are married women less risk-averse? If so, why?

Vox: Are married women less risk-averse? If so, why?

Does marriage make people less averse to risk? This column argues that this is the case for women, but not for men. But married women's different attitude towards risk has fallen over time as the prevalence of marriage in society has faded. For women who work, marriage makes no difference. ...

... We interpret our results as follows. The initial emergence and subsequent decline of the marital status gap for women is the joint product of two forces which are often interconnected (see Stevenson and Wolfers 2007). The first is the increase in labour participation (see Figure 2), which drives a general tendency to the emancipation of all women, even those who are still outside the labour force. Emancipation also involves the ability to make financial decisions, so that we observe an increase of the fraction of married women, including housewives, who take charge. The lagged, cumulative impact of this process can explain the initial expansion of the marital status gap, as it widens the financial participation of women so that, at some point at the beginning of the 1990s, different preferences between married and single emerge.

In those days, married women could still count on a stable position within their marriage, so that their choices differ sharply from those of single women. The marital status gap peaks around 1998-2000. Subsequently, a second force comes into the picture, as documented again in Figure 2. Gradually, the previous decade has shaken the foundations of family structure, with an increase of divorces which has in turn eroded the perception of marriage as a safe asset. It is this devaluation of marriage which, consistent with our hypotheses, can explain the convergence of married women to the same preferences of single women.

How Men’s Overconfidence Hurts Them as Investors

New York Times: How Men’s Overconfidence Hurts Them as Investors

MEN and women invest differently, a growing body of research has found. And in at least one important respect, women may be better at it.

The latest data comes from Vanguard, the mutual fund company. Among 2.7 million people with I.R.A.’s at the company, it found that during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, men were much more likely than women to sell their shares at stock market lows. Those sales presumably meant big losses — and missing the start of the market rally that began a year ago.

Male investors, as a group, appear to be overconfident, said John Ameriks, head of Vanguard Investment Counseling and Research and a co-author of the study. “There’s been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they’re doing, even when they really don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.

Women, on the other hand, appear more likely to acknowledge when they don’t know something — like the direction of the stock market or of the price of a stock or a bond.

Staying the course and minimizing costs — selling high and buying low, if you trade at all — are the classic characteristics of good long-term, buy-and-hold investors. But during the financial crisis, the Vanguard study showed, men were more likely than women to trade — and to do so at the wrong times. ...

Food Security Index

Maplecroft: Maplecroft Food Security Index

The Gender Wage Gap, Around the World

Economix: The Gender Wage Gap, Around the World

... Across industrialized countries, men’s median, full-time earnings were 17.6 percent higher than women’s. The biggest gender wage gap was in South Korea and Japan, where men earn wages more than 30 percent higher than women, and was smallest in Belgium, where the gap is 9.3 percent.

In the United States, the typical full-time female worker earns 19 percent less than the typical full-time male worker.

Much of this gap can be explained by the types of jobs women choose to go into (or, perhaps, the types of jobs that are available to them).

As a progressive, Obama hews to the Wilsonian tradition

Washington Post: As a progressive, Obama hews to the Wilsonian tradition  George Will

... In a scintillating book coming in June ("The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris"), Peter Beinart dissects the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Edward House, Wilson's closest adviser, wrote an awful but indicative novel, "Philip Dru: Administrator." With the nation in crisis, Dru seizes power, declares himself "Administrator of the Republic" and replaces Congress with a commission of five experts who decree reforms that selfish interests had prevented.

Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

How gripped was Wilson by what Beinart calls "the hubris of reason"? Beinart writes:

"He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let's write down the basic rules, he suggested; 'then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.' It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn't get you very far, where reason could never be king."

Professor Obama, who will seek reelection on the 100th anniversary of Wilson's 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:

"I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that's not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people."

Note his aesthetic criterion of elegance, by which he probably means sublime complexity. During the yearlong health-care debate, Republicans such as Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee have consistently cautioned against the conceit that government is good at "comprehensive" solutions to the complex problems of a continental nation. Obama has consistently argued, in effect, that the health-care system is like a Calder mobile -- touch it here and things will jiggle here, there and everywhere. Because everything is connected to everything else, merely piecemeal change is impossible.

So note also Obama's yearning for something "academically approved" rather than something resulting from "a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people," a.k.a. politics. Here, too, Obama is in the spirit of the U.S. president who first was president of the American Political Science Association.

Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted. Like Princeton's former president, Obama's grievance is with the greatest Princetonian, the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, Class of 1771.

Constant techno communication brings lack of focus and loss of privacy

Kansas City Star: Constant techno communication brings lack of focus and loss of privacy

... Cyber-savvy experts view it as far more than that. It’s an example of how technology — and especially the growth in text messaging and live video chatting — is allowing people to keep in such constant communication that it has begun to radically change the sense of what it means for people to feel together, or alone, or apart.

Researchers even have names for it: “connected presence” or “persistent presence” — the feeling, through technology, that you are with someone when you are not.

“It’s having this sense, this ambient awareness, of your friends or family,” said Mary Madden, senior research specialist with the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. “Even if you’re not communicating or interacting, they have a sense of you being there and being OK, just by you being logged on.”

But the boom in constant connections also is raising significant concerns, from fostering poor focus and lack of independence to the real difficulty of cutting ties in an era of Facebook “friend” connections.

More privacy questions are sure to arise with the evolution of new phone applications. Foursquare or Gowalla now tell people where you are, using Global Positioning System satellites.

Some worry, too, about stalking, domestic violence and being connected to people who are truly unwanted.

“We are seeing persistent texting,” said Parry Aftab, a lawyer and executive director of WiredSafety.org, an Internet safety organization. “People wanting to know where you are at every hour of the day, who you are with. When does it go from, ‘I care about you,’ to ‘I’m a stalker, I’m a punching bag?’ There’s a thin line from what’s reasonable and what’s manic.” ...

Catholics embrace social media with limits

Kansas City Star: Catholics embrace social media with limits

Benedict XVI, the first pope with his own YouTube channel and presence on Facebook, is urging Roman Catholic clergy to use social media to communicate with parishioners and reach those outside the church.

"Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, Web sites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis," the pope declared in January in preparation for World Communications Day in May.

But the Catholic Church has policies that take the "social" out of social media. Parishes that use social media, such as Facebook, are instructed to disable the comment functions of those sites.

The Orlando Diocese's rules for the use of social media, enacted in August after six months of study and debate, expressly prohibit blogs because they imply two-way communication that encourages responses from the public, said Carole Brinati, a diocese spokeswoman.

"Blogging is 'I can comment on that,' and that is what we don't allow," she said. "Some people feel that is shortsighted, but that is our policy."

The purpose of the pope's push for social media is to get the church's message out to the people in as many ways as possible. It's not intended to spark debate; invite opinions and opposing points of view; or open a dialogue between church leaders and parishioners, Brinati said.

Churches have been riding the social-media wave for some time now. Many denominations reach out - either through their own Web sites or sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

By their nature, social media are wide open and egalitarian: Anyone with a keyboard and an opinion is entitled to join the conversation. That makes the incorporation of social media difficult for hierarchical religious organizations or denominations, said the Rev. Anthony Pogorelc, a research fellow at Catholic University's Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies in Washington.

"In some sense there is a tension between social media and traditional, hierarchical organizations like the Catholic Church," Pogorelc said. "With social media, everyone has a voice and can say what they want. In the system of the Catholic Church, more weight is given to the key spokespersons - the bishops or leaders of the church - and what they say." ...

Blogging and Facebook without out comments isn't social media in my book. It is a regularly updated web page but there is nothing social about it.

Comparing Presbyterians to other U.S. worshipers

Presbyterians Today: Comparing Presbyterians to other U.S. worshipers

Demographically, Presbyterians differ from worshipers in other congregations in four important ways:

• presbyterians are older. Eight in 10 Presbyterians (79 percent) but only seven in 10 other worshipers (69 percent) are age 45 or older.*
• More presbyterians are retired (40 percent; 29 percent); fewer are employed (48 percent; 58 percent).
• Fewer presbyterians have children living at home (34 percent; 43 percent); more are empty-nesters (40 percent; 31 percent).
• More presbyterians have at least a college degree (of those 25 years of age and older 58 percent; 47 percent).

On other characteristics Presbyterians are similar to other worshipers:

• Six in 10 are female (Presbyterians, 62 percent; others, 61 percent).
• Two-thirds are married (68 percent; 66 percent).
• One-quarter have household incomes of $100,000 or more (24 percent; 24 percent).
• large majorities were born in the United States (96 percent;
  90 percent).

Mark Chaves: American politics has become increasingly polarized. Has theology?

Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog: Mark Chaves: American politics has become increasingly polarized. Has theology?

This post is three months old but I just came across it at Presbyweb. Fascinating.

... In particular, in denominations with the highest profile national conflicts over including homosexuals in church life and leadership, are people more likely now to sort themselves into different congregations based on this issue? Are more and more churches self-consciously “liberal” or “conservative” than they used to be -- not because many people have altered their views in one direction or the other, but because these views are now more visible within some denominations, and so people’s opinions on the subject are more salient to their religious lives and decisions? ...

... We do not know exactly why a church leader who described his or her congregation for the NCS chose the theological category that they chose, so I can’t say for sure that this declining middle represents a response to national debates over homosexuality. Two additional facts, however, suggest that this might be what is behind this shift. First, there is no such trend for these three denominations (or any others) when we look at how their leaders describe the congregations’ political as opposed to theological leanings. So the declining middle in these denominations concerns something specifically theological rather than something broadly political. Second, Methodist congregations move in the other direction -- a significant increase in the percent of congregations described as theologically right in the middle. Perhaps this is because, although the United Methodist Church has fought about homosexuality as much as these other groups, the UMC’s national governing body, unlike national bodies within the Episcopal Church, the PC(USA), or the ELCA, consistently has voted on the conservative side of the issue.

In short, it seems that in the Episcopal Church, the PC(USA), and the ELCA, churches that lean in the conservative direction on homosexuality may have been pushed by national developments within these denominations to declare themselves to be more theologically conservative, even though their views may not have become more conservative over the last decade. If people within a denomination now are more likely to sort themselves into congregations based on those congregations’ stand on homosexuality, this could produce fewer churches with theologically middle-of-the-road identities. If churches are forced to choose sides on an issue, people will be more likely to choose churches based on which side they are on. ...