Kruse Kronicle

Wal Mart: Retailing At Technological Inflection Point

Barrons: Davos: Wal Mart: Retailing At Technological Inflection Point

... “More and more the customer is shopping with a cell phone to check prices,” for example, he said. The use of “site to store,” is growing, too.  Site to store refers to customers who buy on line and then come to the store to pick up the merchandise to avoid delivery charges.

 “There might be an inflection point this year” in the use of various technological modes of buying, with the uptake curve accelerating, he said. Price transparency will increase across numerous retail channels as a result, he added.

Well, given that Wal Mart is usually the low price leader, investors might conclude that the increasing use of technology by consumers should play into Wal Mart’s hands.

Why Americans Are More Religious Than Europeans

Huffington Post: Why Americans Are More Religious Than Europeans

Religion declines with economic development. In a previous post that rattled around the Internet, I presented a scholarly explanation for this pattern: people who feel secure in this world have less interest in another one.

The basic idea is that wealth allows people to feel more secure in the sense that they are confident of having their basic needs met and expect to lead a long healthy life. In such environments, there is less of a market for religion, the primary function of which is to help people cope with stress and uncertainty.

Some readers of the previous post pointed out that the U.S. is something of an anomaly because this is a wealthy country in which religion prospers. Perhaps taking the view that one swallow makes a summer, the commentators concluded that the survival of religion here invalidates the security hypothesis. I do not agree. ...

...In my own (as yet unpublished) research on this question, I have looked at several other facets of the security hypothesis that go some way toward explaining why Americans remain more religious than their European cousins.

The conclusions are not very flattering so far as the quality of life in this country is concerned. In her recent book, Third World America, Arianna Huffington made the case that this country is regressing to the inequitable conditions more typically found in a far poorer country.

Despite having great wealth, the riches are unevenly distributed. Such income inequality is typical of developing countries and it has worsened considerably in recent decades. Moreover, we lack the well-developed welfare state found in Europe that serves to redistribute wealth and provides a safety net for the poor. ...

... The bottom line, then, is that Americans feel far less secure economically, and in relation to their health and well-being, than would be expected given the overall wealth of the country in terms of GDP per capita. This existential insecurity provides a fertile ground for religion. Scholars might appeal to historical factors such as the Puritan founders but history counts for little in these matters given that virtually every country has a devout past. ...

My reponse in a comment  was:

You might do well to read a book like Larry Witham's, "Marketpla­ce of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion," or Robert B. Eckland, Jr. et al's "The Marketplac­e of Christiani­ty," or any number of other books that touch on the same topic.

Unlike most European societies, the USA has had a "free market" economy for religion. Religions and denominati­ons, and their institutio­ns, must compete for adherents since none of them have monopolist­ic power or the coercive power of the state. That creates a mix of vibrant adaptive competitor­s. This is different from the monopolist­ic and subsidized religious environmen­t in Europe. As a nation with monopolist­ic religion becomes wealthier, I think it likely that society will become more secularize­d. Not so where there is open competitio­n.

The Central Question of the Biblical Narrative

Daniel Kirk, NT professor at Fuller Seminary, wrote a post recently about issues stemming for 1Corinthians 15. Within it he wrote:

...The story Paul tells is one in which the earth has been subjected to other powers: God had originally subjected it to people, but people ceded that rule to the likes of sin, of death, of the spirit of this world, of the prince of the powers of the air.

Thus, the question the whole biblical narrative must answer: will God’s plan–God’s plan to have humans rule the world, enthroned as the kings over God’s kingdom–come to fruition, or will Satan, in the end, prove too powerful?

While we tend to think of God definitively answering that and finishing that story with Jesus’ resurrection and enthronement, Paul sees another climactic episode ahead. ...

Kirk goes on to discuss the submission of all power and authority by the Son to the Father but I loved the way he frames the central question ... the conflict to be resolved ... of the biblical narrative in the second paragraph.

 

Tax Justice

PBS Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly: Tax Justice

Watch the full episode. See more Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

 

 

Understanding the Rise of China

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of "When China Rules the World," he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.

Camera obscura

Economist: Camera obscura

The relationship between speed cameras and road deaths.

Identifying a billion Indians

Economist: Identifying a billion Indians

Reliable identity numbers could create many opportunities for business.

IN A small village north-west of Bangalore, peasants queue for identities. Each man fills in a form with his name and rough date of birth, or gets someone who can read to do it for him. He places his fingertips on one scanner and stares at another. A photograph of his face is snapped. These images are uploaded to a computer. Within a few weeks he will have an identity number.

The Indian government is trying to give all 1.2 billion Indians something like an American Social Security number, but more secure. Because each “universal identity number” (UID) will be tied to biometric markers, it will prove beyond reasonable doubt that anyone who has one is who he says he is. In a country where hundreds of millions of people lack documents, addresses or even surnames, this will be rather useful. It should also boost a wide range of businesses.

So far the process has gone smoothly. More than 1m people have been enrolled since October, and the pace is accelerating. It needs to: 1m is less than 0.1% of the population. The scheme presents difficulties both for the people in charge, many of whom were recruited from software firms, and for the private contractors who are doing much of the work. How do you ensure that the data are accurate? How do you build a robust database containing biometric information about more people than any other? How do you deal with peasants whose fingerprints are unreadable after years of manual work? (Adding moisture to their fingertips helps.)

When an individual is enrolled, his biometric data must be compared with everyone else’s to ensure there is no duplication. Sometimes the workers who show people how to place their fingers on the scanner accidentally scan their own fingerprints. As enrolments hit a peak of about 1m a day, the system will need to carry out a staggering 14 billion matches per second.

This mighty task has been awarded to private contractors in an unusual way. There are three vendors: Accenture and L-1 Identity Solutions of America, plus Morpho of France. The firm that does the fastest, most accurate job gets 50% of the work; the others get 30% or 20%. This allocation is frequently reassessed, so if the second-best firm starts doing better, it picks up some work from the leading firm. This keeps everyone sharp.

One database, many possibilities

The government’s aim is to improve services and reduce corruption. A shocking two-thirds of the subsidised grain that the government allocates to the poor is either stolen or adulterated. When middlemen say they have delivered so many bags of rice to so many thousands of peasants, there is no way to tell if they are lying. But if each peasant has to scan her irises every time she picks up her ration, it will be harder to scam the system. Similar controls could be used to curb voter fraud.

A reliable way of identifying people would also smooth financial transactions. ...

Measuring growth from outer space

Aid Watch: Cool Maps: Measuring growth from outer space

For many of the world’s poorest countries, figures measuring economic growth are unreliable, and in some cases they don’t exist at all.  In an NBER working paper, Brown University professors J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil came up with an interesting proxy for GDP growth: the amount of light that can be seen from outer space.

The really stark map is this one of North and South Korea:

How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory

Wall Street Journal: How Apple Foot-Dragged to Victory

Steve Jobs's formula for success: Don't Rush.

...Let's try out a hypothesis: Mr. Jobs's slowness is the key to Apple's success. His focus on the device, his emphasis on perfecting the user experience, meant holding back, not overreaching. The iPod would only be a music player. The iPhone and iPad would be Web-browsing devices that wouldn't play most of the video on the Web. Apple TV remains "a hobby" (his words) because there's no way yet to deliver an acceptable user experience. And notice that each of these device categories had been around for five or 10 years by the time Apple entered (clobbered) them.

Mr. Jobs has been the great withholder. If Apple were looking to encapsulate his wisdom in two words, it could do worse than "speed kills." It kills user experience by trying to deliver more than can be delivered beautifully.

Of course, this fundamental strategy orientation might now change. Apple has allowed itself to be drawn into a battle for mobile-platform market share with Google's Android. Apple's management is increasingly focused on growing an ecosystem rather than on creating devices. The Microsofting of Apple may be at hand, the company becoming a feckless and inefficient user of capital as it seeks to protect itself on every front from every perceived threat to its privileged position. Before long, Apple might even need a Steve Jobs to come back and save it again.

4 in 10 US Adults Have Step Relatives

Marketing Charts: 4 in 10 US Adults Have Step Relatives

More than four in 10 American adults (42%) have at least one step relative in their family, according to a nationwide Pew Research Center survey. The highest percentage report having a step or half-sibling (30%), followed by living stepparent (18%), and stepchild (13%). ...

... Most adults who have step relatives feel a stronger sense of obligation to their biological family members than they do to their step kin. Among adults who have both a living parent and a living stepparent, 85% say they would feel very obligated to help out their parent, while 56% say they would feel a similar sense of obligation toward their stepparent.

Parents feel almost as obligated to their grown children as adult children feel to their aging parents. Overall, 77% of parents with at least one grown child say they would feel very obligated to help that child if need be.

Among adults who have both a grown biological child and a grown stepchild, the biological child exerts a stronger pull. Nearly eight in 10 (78%) of these parents say they would feel very obligated to provide assistance to a grown child. Closer to six in 10 (62%) say they would feel equally obligated to their grown stepchild.

Similarly, adults are more inclined to come to the aid of their biological siblings than they are to assist their step or half siblings. Among those who have both biological siblings and step or half siblings, 64% say they would feel very obligated to a sibling who was in serious trouble. Only 42% say they would feel very obligated to provide assistance to a step or half sibling.

However, even though step relatives trail biological relatives in each of these measures, they do slightly better overall than a “best friend” (39%).

Global Poverty Falls Below One Billion

The Brookings Institution: Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015

... How many poor people are there in the world and how many Are there likely to be in 2015?

To calculate the number of people in the world living in extreme poverty, we update the World Bank’s official $1.25 a day poverty estimates for 119 countries, which together account for 95 percent of the population of the developing world. To do this, we take the most recent household survey data for each country, and generate poverty estimates for the years 2005 to 2015 using historical and forecast estimates of per capita consumption growth, making the simplifying assumption that the income distribution in each country remains unchanged.

Global poverty figures are then calculated by adding together the number of poor from each country. (See the Appendix for a full account of our methodology.) Our results indicate that the world has seen a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past six years, and that this trend is set to continue in the four years ahead. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010. Looking ahead to 2015, extreme poverty could fall to under 600 million people—less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today. Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.

When measured as a share of population, progress remains impressive, but is more in line with past trends. In the early 1980s, more than half of all people in developing countries lived in extreme poverty. By 2005, this was down to a quarter. According to our estimates, as of 2010 less than 16 percent remained in poverty, and fewer than 10 percent will likely be poor by 2015.

The first Millennium Development Goal defines a target (MDG1a) of halving the rate of global poverty by 2015 from its 1990 level. In an official report prepared for the U.N. MDG conference this past September, the World Bank stated that we are 80 percent of the way toward this target and are on track to meet it by 2015, though the Bank warned that “the economic crisis adds new risks to prospects for reaching the goal.”3

Our assessment is considerably more upbeat. We believe that the MDG1a target has already been met—approximately three years ago.4 Furthermore, by 2015, we will not only have halved the global poverty rate, as per MDG1a, but will have halved it again.

Over the past half century, the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest countries, have seen dramatic improvements in virtually all non-income measures of well-being: since 1960, global infant mortality has dropped by more than 50 percent, for example, and the share of the world’s children enrolled in primary school increased from less than half to nearly 90 percent between 1950 and today.5 Likewise there have been impressive gains in gender equality, access to justice and civil and political rights. Yet, through most of this period, the incomes of rich and poor countries diverged, and income poverty has proven a more persistent challenge than other measures of wellbeing.6 The rapid decline in global poverty now underway—and the early achievement of the MDG1a target—marks a break from these trends, and could come to be seen as a turning point in the history of global development. ...

Here are some interesting charts and graphs:

  

I particularly liked this graph:

Nigeria will soon have more poor people than India.

What's Wrong With This Picture

 

Snopes verified

(HT: Marginal Revolution)

 

 

Why Business is Stuck on Income Inequality

Harvard Business Review: Why Business is Stuck on Income Inequality

... This underscores a bigger dilemma facing the business community. The big rise in economic inequality over the past four decades is partly the result of impersonal economic forces — technological change, mostly — but political decisions have played a crucial role as well. Financial market deregulation, tax-code changes, and all manner of other policy choices in the have promoted inequality in the U.S., as Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrated pretty convincingly in their 2010 book Winner-Take-All Politics. And similar moves were made in much of the rest of the world.

Who pushed for these changes? Well, businesspeople, of course. Often for very good reason: to spur economic growth, to increase a particular country's economic competitiveness, even to promote personal freedom in the face of a stifling government. But pendulums always swing too far. Economist Mark Thoma put it well earlier this month:

There is an equivalent of a Laffer curve for inequality, but the variable of interest is economic growth rather than tax revenue. We know that a society with perfect equality does not grow at the fastest possible rate. When everyone gets an equal share of income, people lose the incentive to try and get ahead of others. We also know that a society where one person has almost everything while everyone else struggles to survive — the most unequal distribution of income imaginable — will not grow at the fastest possible rate either. Thus, the growth-maximizing level of inequality must lie somewhere between these two extremes.

Assuming we're near or have passed that growth-maximizing level of inequality, in the U.S. at least, the business community as a whole would be better off if the trend toward inequality slowed or reversed. But business people are accustomed to pushing for policies that tend to increase inequality, and are loathe to reverse their stances on tax rates, free trade, and free financial markets. As a result, businesspeople who worry about inequality have over the years tended to focus on improving educational opportunities. But you can't say those efforts have made a noticeable dent in the inequality trend.

Business folks would seem to be stuck. They need a more equal distribution of wealth and income to continue thriving. But it doesn't seem to be in any businessperson's immediate interest — and in many cases contradicts deeply held beliefs — to make the sort of decisions or support the sorts of government policies that might halt the trend toward more inequality.

As I've posted before, inequality among the bottom 99% of the population has not changed that much in the last thirty years. The change is with the top 1%, especially the top .1%. I think poor regulation of the financial markets is a key piece of this.

Before The Great Divergence: The modernity of China at the onset of the industrial revolution

Vox: Before the Great Divergence: The modernity of China at the onset of the industrial revolution

China has been one of the world’s most dynamic economies in recent decades, but how did it fall so far behind? This column argues that the industrial revolution occurred in Europe rather than China because European entrepreneurs were eager to adopt machines to cut down on high labour costs. China didn’t “miss” the industrial revolution – it didn’t need it.

One of the big debates in economics is about the causes of the arguably most dramatic change in development trajectory in (recent) world history, the industrial revolution. 

•  
  • Before about 1800, growth did occur, but it was mainly “extensive”, leading to more people but almost no growth in income per capita. 
  • After about 1800 this changed, and growth became (increasingly) “intensive”, focused on an almost continuous growth of GDP per head. 

There is consensus about the fact that this change in growth pattern started in northwestern Europe, and gradually spread to large parts of the western and, after a lag, eastern and southern world.

Why this happened, and where it happened are topics of heated debate among historians. The recent “Chinese miracle” – fabulous growth since about 2000 – has had an important impact on this debate.

•  
  • How could the Chinese economy, which is clearly capable of dramatic economic change (in view of what happened since 1979), manage to “miss” the industrial revolution of the 19th century?
  • How developed was China in the 18th century, when it was (under the Qing) experiencing a long period of economic stability and development? ...

... Mixed modernity

This detailed comparison results in a very mixed picture of Chinese economic modernity compared with that of Western Europe. Yes, the Yangzi delta had a relatively advanced economy, with high levels of agricultural productivity and urbanisation and a high degree of structural transformation; we can accept this part of Pomeranz’s thesis. But this did not imply that it was “ready” for an industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution was a process of mechanisation in which expensive labour was substituted for by machines driven by coal – as Bob Allen (2009) has demonstrated. Chinese factor costs were not at all conducive to such a change.

Whereas entrepreneurs in Europe were very eager to develop new technologies that increased labour productivity via the capital-labour ratio, Chinese businesses barely had any incentive to do so. That the industrial revolution emerged in England was therefore not accidental or the result of luck, but the long-run effect of its fundamentally different factor prices, reflecting its different economic and institutional trajectory.

 

 

Poll: Churches are fans of Facebook, social media

Baptist Press: Poll: Churches are fans of Facebook, social media

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--Churches are turning increasingly to social networking tools as ministry aids and Facebook is by far the most popular tool, according to a new study by LifeWay Research.

The survey of 1,003 Protestant congregations was conducted in September and sponsored by LifeWay's Digital Church partner, Fellowship Technologies. It found that 47 percent of churches actively use Facebook.

The second most popular way of networking is through the tools included in church management software packages, actively used by 20 percent of congregations. Three percent use MySpace, 2 percent a church-specific package like Cobblestone, Unifyer, or The City, and 1 percent use Ning.

However, a full 40 percent of churches do not use any social networking tools. ...

Churches Find End Is Nigh

Wall Street Journal: Churches Find End Is Nigh

The Number of Religious Facilities Unable to Pay Their Mortgage Is Surging.

ROSEVILLE, Calif.—Residential and commercial real-estate owners aren't the only ones losing their properties to foreclosure. The past few years have seen a rapid acceleration in the number of churches losing their sanctuaries because they can't pay the mortgage.

Just as homeowners borrowed too much or built too big during boom times, many churches did the same and now are struggling as their congregations shrink and collections fall owing to rising unemployment and a weak economy.

Since 2008, nearly 200 religious facilities have been foreclosed on by banks, up from eight during the previous two years and virtually none in the decade before that, according to real-estate services firm CoStar Group, Inc. Analysts and bankers say hundreds of additional churches face financial struggles so severe they could face foreclosure or bankruptcy in the near future.

"Churches are the next wave in this economic crisis," says Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a non-profit civil-rights group, who works with pastors around the country to help churches negotiate better terms with their bankers.

Religious denominations of all kinds have suffered in recent years as donations have declined, with many Catholic parishes closing and synagogues merging their congregations. But the property-financing problems have been concentrated among independent churches, which while seeking to expand lack a governing body to serve as a backstop to financial hardship. ...

Selected European Homicide Rates for 500 Years

IEA doubles global gas reserves estimates

BBC: IEA doubles global gas reserves estimates

The world may have twice as much natural gas than previously thought, according to the rich nations' think tank the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The world may have 250 years of gas usage at current levels thanks to "unconventional gas" from shale and coal beds, Anne-Sophie Corbeau, senior gas expert at the IEA told BBC News.

Estimates may even be revised upwards.

Studies are underway into newly-recoverable sources, Ms Corbeau said.

But she stressed that the totals were highly uncertain, and depended on price, technology and the accessibility of supplies.

"The gas story is huge," she told BBC News.

"A few years ago the United States was ready to import gas. In 2009 it had become the world's biggest gas producer. This is phenomenal, unbelievable." ...

Peter Leithart: Christian Empire, Christian Mission

Postost: Peter Leithart: Christian Empire, Christian Mission Andrew Perriman

In a chapter on “Christian Empire, Christian Mission” in Defending Constantine Peter Leithart challenges the view of John Howard Yoder—widely accepted amongst modern theologians if not amongst historians—that Constantinianism was a fundamental departure from the intention of Jesus and the New Testament. Leithart’s analysis suggests that it is not so far-fetched to see a theologically coherent development, embodied in the missional self-understanding of the early church, between the initial New Testament impetus and the eventual merger of church and state. ...

... The argument here becomes very interesting. In Yoder’s view the proper model for the church’s relation to empire is to be found in Jeremiah’s instructions to the diaspora community in Babylon:

Jews were to “seek the salvation of the culture” of Babylon by accepting their dispersion as a call to mission. They were to retain their separate identity by adherence to a peripatetic moral and liturgical life—they defined themselves by a “text which can be copied and read anywhere,” centered their worship on “reading and singing the texts,” established places of worship without priesthoods wherever ten households gathered, maintained their international unity by “intervisitation, by intermarriage, by commerce, and by rabbinic consultation,” found the “ground floor of identity” in “the common life, the walk, halakah,” and confounded kings and emperors “with the superior wisdom and power of the one authentic God.” There was no “Jewish emperor,” and they were not to hope for one; their leaders might be in king’s palaces, but it would be as “intermediaries” between “the community and the Gentiles.” (294)

This is an “invigorating” vision, as Leithart notes; and as “a historical thesis, it accurately describes the experience of the church in the first three centuries” (295). It is even a “key vision that should guide the twenty-first-century Christian response to empire in a world after Christendom”. But it does not tell the whole story. Jeremiah hoped for a renewed Davidic dynasty; Daniel prayed for a return from exile; there is no criticism of the programme of Ezra and Nehemiah; and Isaiah ‘goes so far as to designate the temple-building Persian emperor Cyrus as Yahweh’s “Christ” and “shepherd” (296). The biblical vision does not leave the people in perpetual exile. ...

I just purchased the book. After reading some the discussion about the book, it is quickly moving up my "to read" list.

Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

Guardian: Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality, say a rising number of academics.

The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.

But Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.

The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. ...

This is all just nonsense ... at least that is what everyone on Facebook told me. ;-)

Forced sharing leads to disappointment, bad behavior at church picnic

FortWayne.com: Forced sharing leads to disappointment, bad behavior at church picnic (HT: Victor Claar and his mom)

When I was 12 years old, the Youth of First Christian Church had a picnic at Honor Heights Park in Muskogee, Okla. The good ladies of the church brought loads of potato salad, baked beans and coleslaw, but every child knew the real action was in the sack lunch Mom had packed with their favorite delight. Our mom had fried some chicken.

That was a real treat for us as she opposed fried food on general principle long before such health concerns were fashionable. I had the breast pieces, my younger brother, Robert, got the drumsticks, and sister Susan got the thigh pieces.

Just before the prayer was to be given, the Rev. Wilbanks made an admonition that went something like this: You young folks should not be greedily holding on to your own sack lunches; rather you should empty your sacks and contribute the contents to the common table — after all, sharing was the Christian way.

I was horrified. ...

... We economists constantly remind the public and policymakers that private-property rights are essential in generating incentives for production of goods and services. But an additional point is warranted: The absence of private-property rights inevitably discourages good manners and deportment in the distribution of goods and services. Social behavior reduces to the lowest common denominator of 12-year-old boys.

The Cost of Artificial Light - 1750 BCE to Present

These two charts were created from data presented in Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. Note that both graphs are using a logarithmic scale.

The second chart is saying the time worked to earn one hour of light fell from 50 hours to half of a second.

 

The rich and the rest

The Economist: The rich and the rest

What to do (and not do) about inequality.

... In fact, much of the recent hand-wringing about widening inequality is based on sloppy thinking. The old Davos consensus of boosting growth and combating poverty is still a better guide to good policy. Rather than a sweeping assault on inequality itself, policymakers would do better to take on the market distortions that often lie behind the most galling income gaps, and which also impede economic growth.

Begin with the facts about inequality. Globally, the gap between the rich and the poor has actually been narrowing, as poorer countries are growing faster. Nor is there a monolithic trend within countries (see article). In Latin America, long home to the world’s most unequal societies, many countries—including the biggest, Brazil—have become a bit more equal, as governments have boosted the incomes of the poor with fast growth and an overhaul of public spending to improve the social safety-net (but not by raising tax rates for the rich).

The gap between rich and poor has risen in other emerging economies (notably China and India) as well as in many rich countries (especially America, but also in places with a reputation for being more egalitarian, such as Germany). But the reasons for this differ. In China inequality has a lot to do with the hukou system of residency permits, which limits internal migration to the towns; by some measures inequality has peaked as rural labour becomes more scarce. In America income inequality began to widen in the 1980s largely because the poor fell behind those in the middle. More recently, the shift has been overwhelmingly due to a rise in the share of income going to the very top—the highest 1% of earners and above—particularly those working in the financial sector. Many Americans are seeing their living standards stagnate, but the gap between most of them has not changed all that much.

The links between inequality and the ills attributed to it are often weak. ...

...Viewed from this perspective, the right way to combat inequality and increase mobility is clear. First, governments need to keep their focus on pushing up the bottom and middle rather than dragging down the top: investing in (and removing barriers to) education, abolishing rules that prevent the able from getting ahead and refocusing government spending on those that need it most. Oddly, the urgency of these kinds of reform is greatest in rich countries, where prospects for the less-skilled are stagnant or falling. Second, governments should get rid of rigged rules and subsidies that favour specific industries or insiders. Forcing banks to hold more capital and pay for their implicit government safety-net is the best way to slim Wall Street’s chubbier felines. In the emerging world there should be a far more vigorous assault on monopolies and a renewed commitment to reducing global trade barriers—for nothing boosts competition and loosens social barriers better than freer commerce.

Such reforms would not narrow all income disparities: in a freer world skill and intellect would still be rewarded, in some cases magnificently well. But the reforms would strike at the most pernicious, unfair sorts of income disparity and allow more people to move upwards. They would also boost growth and leave the world economy more stable. If the Davos elites are worried about the gap between the rich and the rest, this is the route they should follow.

I will also reprise this graph from Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income. The Gini Coefficient is a measure of inequality where 1.00 equals perfect inequality and 0.00 equals perfect equality.

Compensated Work is Ministry

Acton PowerBlog: The Sheep and the Goats: Work and Service to Others

Jordan Ballor offers some good insights drawing on the work of Lester DeKoster.

... One reflexive response to this claim is to argue that when we do work for money, when we profit from our labor, we are really serving ourselves and not others. ...

...The concept of work being at once remunerative and service-oriented is not totally foreign to us. We tend to think, at least generally, of those in “public service” as working for the good of others even though they receive a paycheck. The same typically goes for doctors and teachers, as well as for a host of other jobs. But if it is the case that these kinds of professionals can legitimately be said to serve others (even though they are paid to do so), why is not the same true for the entrepreneur, the waitress, the garbageman, the farmer, the babysitter, or the factory worker? The fact that our work is “salable,” as DeKoster puts it, is one important piece of evidence that what we are doing is actually of use to someone; enough use, in fact, for them to compensate us for it.

This perspective on work and service as understood in the parable of the sheep and the goats also provides us with other norms for judging whether our work is true service or not. One measure, as we have said, is whether someone finds our work to be valuable enough to pay us for doing it. But given the corruption of human nature, people will pay us to do all kinds of things that are not good for them (or for us). So beyond mere “salability” of our work we must judge it by its orientation and effects. Does our work actually help others? Is it for their good that this work is done? Does it foster independence or dependence? Does it humanize or dehumanize? Does it feed addiction or satisfy legitimate appetite? By necessity, then, things that are inherently harmful, such as the distribution of illegal drugs, pornography, or abortion, are ruled out of bounds. But there are innumerable ways that otherwise valid service or work can be undermined by human sinfulness.

Even so, whether it is giving someone something to eat or drink, something to wear or somewhere to live, or any of the other myriad ways we serve one another in daily life, all legitimate forms of serving others, whether paid in wages or not, are valid ways to serve Christ. The key to this perspective, writes DeKoster, is to understand that our daily work is “the form in which we make ourselves useful to others, and thus to God.”

Was Governer Bentley Wrong About "Brothers and Sisters?"

Politics Daily: Was Governer Bentley Wrong?

Alabama's new governor, Robert Bentley, has apologized for saying on his inauguration day that he regarded only committed Christians as his brothers and sisters.

"If anyone from other religions felt disenfranchised by the language, I want to say I am sorry," Bentley, a Republican, told the Associated Press and other news agencies Wednesday. "I am sorry if I offended anyone in any way."

There was an important context for Bentley's Monday statement. It came at a Martin Luther King Day event at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery -- where King once served as pastor. Speaking in the language of his faith, Bentley told those in the pews: "Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister -- and I want to be your brother." In the same speech, he promised to be a governor for "all of the people." ...

From a political standpoint, this may not have been an appropriate remark for the context. But from a theological standpoint, and from what I read in this brief quote, the Governer is correct. The idea of "the universal brotherhood of man" is a persective that came with the Enlightenment and later. In the New Testament, the fictive family metaphor of "brothers (and sisters)" is reserved only for those who have become part of the baptised community. Pull out a concordance of the Bible and you will see what I mean.

A particularly interesting use of the metaphor is in Jesus' parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:40:

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'"

Who does "brothers" refer to here? The passage is often interpreted as a universal brotherhood of man reference ... Jesus is in brotherhood with the suffering of the poor and outcast and whatever we do to them we do to Jesus. In a discussion at Jesus Creed awhile back, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight pointed out that the universal brotherhood idea was foriegn to the New Testament. Jesus is referring to his brothers (Christians) being sent out to other nations and their treatment at the hands of those people. How the brothers are recieved is what determines who are labled the sheep and the goats.

So Bentley is theologically correct. But he might have added that the mission "brothers and sisters" have been given by their Father is to lay down their lives for those who are not yet brothers and sisters so that they may see a glimpse of their Father in heaven and be drawn into the family.

How I built a toaster -- from scratch

More than 50 years ago, Leonard Reed wrote his classic essay, I, Pencil, in which he illustrates the amazing complexity of producing even the simplest artifacts of daily life. So complex is the process that no one person knows how to go from raw materials to a pencil. But by thousands of people specializing in various tasks and then engaing in trade with each other, items that would take incalcualbe hours for us to make individually are inexpensively available to us.

Thomas Thwaites updates this analogy with his now famous attempt to build a toaster from raw materials to finished product. Here is his presentation at TED. As you watch, think about not just your toaster but about all the items around where you are now sitting. Think about trying to make them on you own. You soon begin to see what an incredible thing the market economy is.

Here is a shorter version of the story.

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

Bloomberg: U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

...Meanwhile, the perception is that American children live a relatively easy life and coast their way through school. They don't do any more homework than they have to; they spend an extraordinary amount of time playing games, socializing on the Internet, text-messaging each other; they work part time to pay for their schooling and social habits. And they party. A lot. These stereotypes worry many Americans. They believe the American education system puts the country at a great disadvantage. But this is far from true.

The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.

My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S.The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining. ...

The Good Old Days Before the Industrial Revolution

A frequent meme I encounter when talking about economic issues is how destructive industrialization and capitalism has been to human flourishing. We once lived in an Edenic serenity, in tune with nature and with each other. But humanity rebelled, embracing market ideologies and industrialization. Now we have wrecked human life and the planet. We must repent and restore what we had before.

I've just begun reading Matthew Ridley's The Rational Optimist. He offers this wonderful tale to highlight the absurdity of this type of thinking:

This should not need saying, but it does. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.

Oh Please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet the meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Fathers’ jacket cost him a month’s wages but it is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy.

If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break down the world into bits, it is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. …(12-14)

Idealistic nostolgia also plays into warped perspectives on current development issues. Middle class Westerners learn of factories in Malaysia where workers are working 14 hours a day in hot and dirty environments. The reaction frequently is one of outrage that people would be "made" to work in those conditions. While it is true that some people are rounded up by governments and compelled to work in such factories in some places, in the great majority of cases, people are choosing to work in the factory. They are in fact communicating with their feet that their lives in "rustic Eden" is more of a hell then the factories.

Are there challenges in our world economy? Unquestionably. Has the rise of industrialization and market economies created problems? Certainly. Should we not have a little ambivalence about the lives of people making the transtion into an industrialized world? No ... we should have a lot of ambivalence. But we have to reflect on these questions in light of the good that has emerged and the good that is emerging, and without nostolgic visions of the past.

 

DJIA, CPI, and U. S. History - 1913 to Present

Check out this graph by Joshua Brown at Christian Science Monitor.

Reconciliation is not the core mission of the people of God - Redux

Last week I published a post, Reconciliation is not the core task of the people of God. It highlighted an excerpt from Armand Larvie’s book After Sunday and stimulated some great discussion. This post is a more detailed presentation of my point of view. Here is my thesis:

The primary mission of the people of God is not to be the church’s bridge to the world for doing reconciling works of evangelism and justice. The primary mission of the people of God is the cultural mandate (a.k.a. creation mandate) and it is the role of the church to equip the people of God for reconciliation within the context of their primary mission.

What do we mean by mission?

I used the word “task” in the title of the post. A better word is mission. Mission means being sent for a purpose by another.  

What do we mean by the cultural mandate?

The cultural mandate is in Genesis 1:26-28. Humanity is commanded by God to “fill the earth,” and to “rule” and exercise “dominion” over the earth. Creation is not complete and as God’s agents we are to bring the earth to fullness. The cultural mandate includes improvement of human flourishing and the development of all the attendant institutions and spheres of activity that entails.

What is the significance of the cultural mandate?

The cultural mandate functions within the context of a larger narrative. Two metaphors give context to the mandate: Temple and Kingdom

Temple

John Walton, in “The Lost World of Genesis One,” does a masterful job of showing that Genesis 1 is related to Ancient Near East (ANE) cosmologies. Like ANE cosmologies, Genesis One is not about how things were made. It is about the functions things serve and who assigns them their function.

The narrative begins with a functionless earth. The first three days establish three basic functions:

Day 1 = Night and Day mark TIME.

Day 2 = The vault above the earth is where WEATHER takes place.

Day 3 = The land emerges and provides for AGRICULTURE.

Other ANE cosmologies. Then God installs functionaries:

Day 4 = The sun and moon are installed to actually carry out the function of marking time.

Day 5 = The sky and sea are populated with functionaries that serve to fill the earth.

Day 6 = The land is populated with functionaries that serve to fill the earth.

But the climax of the sixth day is God creating his ultimate functionaries who bear his image and have responsibility for all that has been created:

Gen 1:26-28

26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." 27 So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

As Walton points out, the earth is portrayed as God’s temple. We are God’s chief functionaries in the temple. At the end of this story, in ANE fashion, God inhabits his temple and enjoys all he has made.

Several things are unique about the Hebrew narrative. First, God does not emerge from primordial chaos. God simply “is.” Everything in heaven and earth is functioning under his command. Second, the creation is not complete. The earth is not filled and there is work to be done in subduing creation and bringing it to higher ends as God’s agents/functionaries in the temple. Third, ANE cosmologies offer competitive gods vying for dominance. Humans are created largely as slaves to carry out the dirty work of these capricious characters. In the Genesis narrative, humans are esteemed as God’s primary agents/functionaries at work in his temple. (Also see Psalm 8)

The biblical narrative is not one of restoration to a garden. It begins in a garden and ends in a city (New Jerusalem), the primary symbol of human learning, government, art, and commerce. Humanity shares God’s creative qualities. Humans are  to transform matter, energy, and data from less useful forms to more useful forms in sustainable ways in community with God and each other as God’s agents in his temple. That temple mission is marred by sin but fully redeemed at the consummation of the new creation.

Kingdom

The cultural mandate includes the language of “rule” and “dominion.” The Psalmist writes about humanity, “You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.” (Ps 8:6.) This evokes the imagery of a Kingdom. Kingdoms have four essential components: king, subjects, domain, and ethical code.

What we have in Genesis One is God as King. Humans are God’s vice-regent subjects who rule as his agents. The rest of the beings in created order are the subjects of humanity. The earth is the domain. A code and a mission are given.

In subsequent chapters, humanity rebels and turns to false kings, or idols. As Christopher Wright (Mission of God) so eloquently illustrates, God’s response is to rebellion is to develop a covenantal triangle to reconcile humanity to himself and reestablish his kingdom. That triangle is God, the Israelites, and the land of Israel. The Torah becomes the code. God’s mission is to expand the triangle until the Israelites expand to encompass all of humanity and the land of Israel expands to encompass all the land.

Jesus speaks repeatedly of the “Kingdom of God.” That Kingdom of God is not an ethereal community of like-minded people in a disembodied state who have warm feeling toward God. In its consummated form …

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever." Rev 11:15b

It is a Kingdom with a King, subjects, and a domain. As we learn elsewhere, it is a Kingdom with a code that has as its base:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31

But also, as with Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, it is a Kingdom that has vice-regents, exercising dominion over creation:

2 Tim 2:11-12a

The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; …

Rev 5:9-10

They sing a new song: "You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth."

Rev 22:5

And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

So over what subjects will the elect reign? They will reign over the created order. We are back to Genesis One and the cultural mandate.

The metaphors of temple and kingdom are pretty much the same in the ANE world as religion and government were not separate spheres. The two metaphors are two aspects of the same thing in the ancient mind.

The primary mission of the people of God.

The primary mission of the people of God is to reign over creation in holy communion with God and with each other. Caring for the earth, bringing it to fullness, and working the cultural institutions that bring flourishing to the earth and to humanity is what we do first and foremost.

But in this time between rebellion and the consummated new creation, there is a supplemental but essential call: The mission of reconciling the world to back to God and restoring humanity to functionary status in God’s temple-kingdom. Yet, reconciliation is not the primary mission. It is the essential work that restores people to community and to their primary mission.

Armand Larive explains in After Sunday that Soren Kierkegaard once likened the liturgy to theater. (143) There are three roles in worship: God, congregation, and officiant (pastor). There are three roles in theater as well: Actor, prompter, and audience. So how would these roles line up with each other in worship?

Larive writes  that most would say that the minister is the actor … performs the sermon, sacraments, and prayers for the people (To this I think we can add the choir or the praise band.) The congregation is the audience for the performance. God is the prompter, prompting the minister in his performance. But in reality, the actor is to be the congregation. God is the audience. The pastor is the one prompting the people in their acts of worship of God. The first scenario is a breed of clericalism. The second sees the people of God as the central actors in worship.

I would extend this analogy even further. We do not only worship as the gathered people of God on Sunday. We worship each day as the people of God dispersed in the community through our daily response to the cultural mandate. But because of the clerical notion of worship, the worship we do in living out the cultural mandate is emptied of meaning. We learn on Sunday that reconciliation and praising God is something done by professionals for the “lay” Christians. The work of the pastor is to recruit extension agents from among “lay” Christians to take aspects of Sunday worship into the world. The pastor and church structures may even devise reconciling works of justice and recruit the “laity” as their extension agents to perform these as well. But the fitting of pipes, balancing of debit and credits, stocking of shelves, debugging of programs, researching of markets, and so on, … all elements of the cultural mandate … have no intrinsic value. The context of our daily lives is emptied of worshipful value except as it exists as a platform to be “lay” extension agents “professional” Christians and the ecclesial structures, namely evangelism and rectifying injustice.

Throughout the week, God is the audience to acts of worship offered him by the people in their response to the cultural mandate. The people are the actors. The pastor is the prompter who equips and encourages the people to be a reconciling presence as they go about their primary mission of the cultural mandate.

So as I said at the start:

The primary mission of the people of God is not to be the church’s bridge to the world for doing reconciling works of evangelism and justice. The primary mission of the people of God is the cultural mandate (a.k.a. creation mandate) and it is the role of the church to equip the people of God for reconciliation within the context of their primary mission.

[Update: No sooner had I posted this than I saw a tweet about this article at Remnant Culture, The Redemptive Road Trip: Church Is Not a Gas Station. The author is summarizing a book by David VanDrunen, Living in God's Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture. This is a perfect description of clericalism I referrenced from an Evangeclical perspecitve. Progressive versions tend to reduce mission down to communities of justice but both see virtually no intrinsic value in the day to day work of the people.]

Dr. King and Climate Change

There is an interesting article today at ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) by Jarrod McKenna of World Vision Australia, titled What would Martin Luther King Jr do? Christians and climate change. He draws parallels between the churches complicit participation in racism and complicity in climate change. He concludes:

“Today I believe those words are just as applicable to the church regarding climate change and how it affects the poor. To stand with the poor and take real action on climate change might not be safe, nor politic, nor popular. But the dangerous witness of Martin Luther King Jr calls us to dare to go the way of the cross, because, in the words of Dr King, conscience tells us it is right.”

 I appreciate his passion but I want to offer some additional thoughts.

First, racism and the production of CO2 gases are not in the same category. Racism, practiced individually or corporately, is always wrong. But consider this scenario. A family living in rural Montana decides to grill outside on hot August day. Their neighbor ten miles down the road decides to do the same. There is nothing morally suspect about their individual behavior. Now transfer this scenario to Manhattan in New York City, with thousands of people per square mile. Half the population decides to grill out. Now you have a problem. Morally neutral actions done individually can lead to unintended consequences when done as a community. That leads to iterations of societal/economic adjustment as we confront the new realities. This is characteristic of any growing and adaptive human community. The problem is less one of moral failing and much more one of addressing unanticipated outcomes.

Second, McKenna repeats the frequent assertion that climate change will disproportionately hurt the poor. I’m skeptical. In the 1970s, we read government reports by scientists prediciting the exhaustion of energy resources and the collapse of agriculture by 2000, with devastating consequences for the world’s poor. Decades ago there was a meme that had lead headlines from different newspapers that began with “The World Ends Tomorrow …” The Wall Street Journal headline would read, “The World Ends Tomorrow, Stock Market Reaction Mixed.” Or the Christian Science Monitor, “World Ends Tomorrow, But It’s All in Your Mind.” The liberal Washington Post would read, “World Ends Tomorrow, Poor and Elderly to Suffer Most.” What the last headline was mocking was the predictable political tactic to frame every issue as disproportionately impacting the poor in order to leverage support for another agenda. This strikes me as the latest iteration of that tactic.

But let’s presume for a moment that the coming impacts of climate change are disproportionately bad for the poor. Then the solution is not to have any poor people! With increased wealth and a sound economic system comes greater resources and greater ability to adapt. Consider that that average Mexican living in 2005 had a higher standard of living and life expectancy than a Brit living in 1955. Consider that the percentage of people living on less than a dollar a day (inflation adjusted) was 39% in 1970 but it is 18% today … and that happened during a period when the world population doubled. Slamming the brakes on the world economy to address climate change would certainly have a negative economic impact on the wealthy but it would have a more devastating impact on the world’s poor … definitely more so than questionable prognostications about circumstances thirty, fifty, and one hundred years away. It would damn the world’s poor to poverty for generations that is as bad as, or worse than, they are experiencing now. From the perspective of the poor, halting the world economy is a bit like depriving people of food because they might one day die of food poisoning.

I don’t know what Dr. King’s response to climate change would be. I’d like to think it might by similar to my agenda: Partner with poor people in wiping out poverty while being prudent with adaptive challenges that come with growth and innovation. Such prudent actions might include transition to nuclear power and the use of natural gas as we later transition to other forms of energy. But moralistic campaigns to combat “climate sinners” only tend to spawn moralistic campaigns against “climate demagogues.” Likening climate change issues to racism may make us feel particularly righteous, but what we need are more civil venues for finding common ground and managing risks. There is an unfortunate tendency among too many Christian activists to press discussions about adaptation into frameworks of sinner and saint, oppression and justice, fall and redemption. Not every societal problem is of the quality of racism and Dr. King’s tactics for combating racism are not the default option for all future challenges.

Business Fights Poverty

businessfightspoverty.com

 

The Half-Full Glass of Economic Mobility

Greg Mankiw: The Half-Full Glass of Economic Mobility

When people look at data on economic mobility, they see different things.  For example, it is well known that if your father had high income, you are more likely to have high income than if you father had low income.  According to this study (which I found thanks to a pointer by Paul Krugman), the elasticity of son's income with respect to father's income is about 0.5 in the United States.  How do you interpret this fact?

Some people might be tempted to see it as evidence against equality of opportunity. ...

... But what strikes me about that 0.5 number is not how large it is but how small it is.  As I understand it, that 0.5 estimate is roughly the correlation between father and son income.  That means that the fraction of variance of son's income explained by father's income--that is, R-squared--is only 0.25.  This last number is sometimes called the "heritability" of a characteristic. ...

... The bottom line: In light of the heritability of talent, it would be shocking if we did not find some significant heritability of income.  And that would be true even if equality of opportunity were perfect.

One further thought: The study cited above points out that economic mobility is greater in some European countries.  That fact does not surprise me, as those are nations with less inequality.  Moving up and down a short ladder is a lot easier than moving up and down a tall one.

2011 Index of Economic Freedom

The 2011 Index of Economic Freedom report is out.

There's Nothing So Old as the Recently New

Wall Street Journal: There's Nothing So Old as the Recently New

Watching friends learn kite-surfing last week, equipped not only with new designs of inflatable kites shaped like pterodactyls but new kinds of harnesses shaped like medieval chastity belts and even new helmets shaped like Elizabethan sleeping caps, it occurred to me that nothing becomes obsolete so fast as something new. For it is pretty clear that the rise of kite-surfing, invented in the late 1990s, is slowly killing wind-surfing.

Wind-surfing, invented in the 1970s, is not yet as moribund as the fax, which was invented at about the same time, but it may be heading that way. As recently as 2005, wind-surfers were scoffing at the upstart kite-surfers, arguing that their pastime was slower, more cumbersome and more dangerous. (I remember scoffing at email's inferiority to fax in the days when you had to call to alert somebody to check for an incoming email.)

Now kite-surfing equipment packs smaller and costs less than wind surfing's, the skills are easier to learn, the speed is as great—greater in light winds—and it can be done on land in the form of kite-karting. People have already crossed hundreds of miles of ocean by kite-surfing, from the Canaries to Morocco, for example, and from Tasmania to Australia.

My point is that new technologies threaten young technologies more than they threaten ancient ones. Kite-surfing may kill wind-surfing, but it will not affect sailing. Email eclipsed fax more than it did letter-writing. Social networking is overtaking telephoning, but not partying. In the era of Kinect, Space Invaders is dead, but poker is thriving. In competition with jets, airships have largely died out, but ships have not. Refrigeration killed the newfangled ice trade, but old-fashioned pickling, smoking and curing continued. ...

... It follows that obsolescence more probably beckons for the things that have changed our life most recently, rather than for the things that are already old. My generation finds it hard to believe that email will die, but the young barely touch it, preferring Facebook, Twitter and text. I suspect rather than go extinct, email will evolve into something more compatible with text and social networking. And perhaps we may be permitted a wry smile at the certain prospect that the young will in turn be marooned with obsolete habits and terms like Facebook, Twitter and text.

Environmentalism as Religion - Joel Garreau

The New Atlantis: Environmentalism as Religion - Joel Garreau

One of my favorite books in graduate school was Garreau's Nine Nations of North America. While neither a sociologist nor a demographer, his journalistic eye offered powerful insights into regional cutlures. In 1991, he published Edge City, talking about the tansformation of cities going into the 21st Century. I haven't yet gotten to Radical Evolution, which deals with the convergence of technology and biology. The following linked article is serverl months but I just discovered it. Here is how he begins his lengthy article in The New Atlantis:

Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.

The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.

For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism. It has become “the religion of choice for urban atheists,” according to Michael Crichton, the late science fiction writer (and climate change skeptic). In a widely quoted 2003 speech, Crichton outlined the ways that environmentalism “remaps” Judeo-Christian beliefs:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

In parts of northern Europe, this new faith is now the mainstream. “Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are nonreligious and don’t worship Jesus or Vishnu, don’t revere sacred texts, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world’s great faiths,” observes Phil Zuckerman in his 2008 book Society without God. Instead, he writes, these places have become “clean and green.” This new faith has very concrete policy implications; the countries where it has the most purchase tend also to have instituted policies that climate activists endorse. To better understand the future of climate policy, we must understand where “ecotheology” has come from and where it is likely to lead. ...

Some other interesting excerpts:

... Our uniquely Western approach to the natural world was shaped fundamentally by Athens and Jerusalem. The ancient Greeks began a systematic philosophical observation of flora and fauna; from their work grew the long study of natural history. Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian teachings about the natural world begin with the beginning: there is but one God, which means that there is a knowable order to nature; He created man in His image, which gives man an elevated place in that order; and He gave man mastery over the natural world:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. [Genesis 1:28-29]

In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. This belief in progress was inherent in modern science, which, wedded to technology, made possible the Industrial Revolution. Thus was the power to control nature achieved by a civilization that had inherited the license to exploit it.

To White, this was not a positive historical development. ...

And ...

... More recently, the late analytic philosopher William P. Alston outlined in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy what he considered the essential characteristics of religions. They include a distinction between sacred and profane objects; ritual acts focused upon sacred objects; a moral code; feelings of awe, mystery, and guilt; adoration in the presence of sacred objects and during rituals; a worldview that includes a notion of where the individual fits; and a cohesive social group of the likeminded.

Environmentalism lines up pretty readily with both of those accounts of religion. As climate change literally transforms the heavens above us, faith-based environmentalism increasingly sports saints, sins, prophets, predictions, heretics, demons, sacraments, and rituals. Chief among its holy men is Al Gore — who, according to his supporters, was crucified in the 2000 election, then rose from the political dead and ascended to heaven twice — not only as a Nobel deity, but an Academy Awards angel. He speaks of “Creation care” and cites the Bible in hopes of appealing to evangelicals.

Selling indulgences is out of fashion these days. But you can now assuage your guilt by buying carbon offsets. ...

And ...

Allenby, writing in a 2008 article on GreenBiz.com, continues:

A recent study from the Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development argues that males have a disproportionately larger impact on global warming (“women cause considerably fewer carbon dioxide emissions than men and thus considerably less climate change”). The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that those who suggest that climate change is not a catastrophic challenge are no different than Hitler.... E.O. Wilson calls such people parasites. Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman writes that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

The sheer volume of vicious language employed to recast social and cultural trends in terms of their carbon footprint suggests the rise of what Allenby calls a dangerous new “carbon fundamentalism.”

Some observers detect parallels between the ecological movement and the medieval Church. “One could see Greenpeacers as crusaders, with the industrialist cast as the infidel,” writes Richard North in New Scientist. ...

And ...

... That is the essence of Michael Crichton’s 2003 speech. “Increasingly,” he said, “it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief.” Environmentalism, he argued, has become totally divorced from science. “It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.” ...

... Leftists also sometimes disparage environmentalism as religion. In their case, the main objection is usually pragmatic: rationalism effects change and religion doesn’t. So, for instance, the Sixties radical Murray Bookchin saw the way environmentalism was hooking up with New Age spirituality as pathetic. “The real cancer that afflicts the planet is capitalism and hierarchy,” he wrote. “I don’t think we can count on prayers, rituals, and good vibes to remove this cancer. I think we have to fight it actively and with all the power we have.” Bookchin, a self-described revolutionary, dismissed green spirituality as “flaky.” ...

And ...

... A deeper concern is the expansion of irrationalism in the making of public policy. Of course, no policy debate can ever be reduced to matters of pure reason; there will always be fundamentally clashing values and visions that cannot be settled by rationality alone. But the rhetoric of many environmentalists is more than just a working out of those fundamental differences. The language of the carbon fundamentalists “indicates a shift from [seeking to help] the public and policymakers understand a complex issue, to demonizing disagreement,” as Braden Allenby has written. “The data-driven and exploratory processes of science are choked off by inculcation of belief systems that rely on archetypal and emotive strength.... The authority of science is relied on not for factual enlightenment but as ideological foundation for authoritarian policy.” ...

... So what happens if, say, we discover that it is not possible to return the environment to the conditions we desire, as James Lovelock expects? What happens if evidence accumulates that we should address climate change with methods that the carbon Calvinists don’t approve of? To what extent, if any, would devotees of the “natural” accept reengineering the planet? How long will it take, if ever, for nuclear power to be accepted as green?

In the years ahead, we will see whether the supposedly scientific debates over the environment can really be conducted by fact and reason alone, or whether necessary change, whatever that may turn out be, will require some new Reformation. For if environmental matters really have become matters of faith — if environmentalism has become a new front in the longstanding culture wars — then what place is left for the crucial function of pragmatic, democratic decision-making?

Reconciliation is not the core task of the people of God

I 've recently been reading After Sunday: A Theology of Work by Episcopal priest, Armand Larive. I'm presently in Chapter Three where he is identifying how theology has developed in a way that blocks us from seeing the importance of work. He is spelling out what needs to be altered in order to open space for a theology of work to emerge. I thought this excerpt was particularly insightful:

The term used most frequently to describe the task of the people of God is "reconciliation." It is biblical and seems to characterize God's purpose: God is reconciling or redeeming a rebellious humanity and humanity's systems. Reconciliation tends to be a broad description of what the church does, winning people to Christ, healing troubled souls, turning the spirit Godward, carrying forward a servant ministry, and the like. All of these activities - laudable as they may be - are people-oriented and point toward an enclave notion of the church. But what is the ministry of a pipe fitter, an auto mechanic, a supermarket checker, or a forest ranger? None of these occupations is primarily aimed at serving people in terms of redemption or reconciliation. Someone with a clerical prejudice might answer by suggesting opportunities for ministry to other people in the context of the job, but people don't choose their jobs primarily so they can have a platform for witnessing. When people value their jobs, they value them out of an excitement for the creativity a job offers, with a view to the job's intrinsic rewards, and because a job offers a platform of usefulness and self-worth. The concepts of redemption and reconciliation don't cover this excitement in any straightforward way. Once more they betray an implicit enclave view of the kingdom and an institutional church with a clericalized emphasis on membership. Redemption and reconciliation have their place, as do the church and its membership, but they belong under the umbrella of a broader, more inclusive term for human vocations. That term should be cocreativity, and its fuller description awaits the chapters on how human work is complemented by the work of the Trinity.

 Using reconciliation as the master term for what constitutes ministry also reflects a turning away from a cocreative role in the history of the church. Thomas Berry argues that, prior to the fourteenth century, the church's "story" was integrated with a stewardship of nature. But the black death's devastation shocked the church out of confidence in nature, reinforcing a focus on redemption, the need to be sure one left this uncertain world as a saved soul.

 Such excessive emphasis on redemption, to the neglect of the revelatory import of the natural world, had from the beginning been one of the possibilities in Christian development. The creed itself is overbalanced in favor of redemption. Thus the integrity of the Christian story is affected. Creation becomes increasingly less important. This response, with its emphasis on redemptive spirituality, continued through the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century and on through the Puritanism and Jansenism of the seventeenth century. This attitude was further strengthened by the shock of the Enlightenment and Revolution periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The American version of the ancient Christian story has functioned well in its institutional efficiency and its moral efficacy, but it is no longer the story of the earth. Nor is it the integral story of the human community. It is a sectarian story. At its center there is an intensive preoccupation with the personality of the Savior, with the interior spiritual life of the faithful, and with the salvific community. The difficulty is that we came to accept this situation as the normal, even desirable, thing.

 If these very strong statements are followed to a logical conclusion, a different doctrine of the laity will be required because it is principally the laity who work with the creation. They are not just a clutch of people whom the clergy try to get into heaven but a people at the core of life as it is to be lived now. Part of the reason theologies of work get so little attention is that the gatekeepers of theology are mostly clericalized professionals, few of whom have spent their lives - or else forgotten - working in factories, raising crops, or in other ways affording themselves a laboring layperson's point of view. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of church professionals perfunctorily screens out or only nods at the seemingly secular world and its occupations. The pull of attention toward the institutional church and its Sunday observance is too strong to make room for the other days and other institutions that make up the majority of people's time.  Nevertheless, the laity constitute that part of the church that serves the world, and that role demands recognition.

This gets at something I've been harping on for some time. Reconiliation and redemption are essential to our Christian vocation this side of the consummation of the Kingdom of God, but they are penultimate purposes. They expire at the consummation of the new creation.

We were created for relationship with God and to serve in cocreative domion with God over creation. That is our core purpose. That mission was marred with humanity's rebellion but it is also the mission that is being redeemed through reconciliation  with God. We aren't just saved from sin. We are saved to a mission. We are saved to a reconciling community that seeks the return of humanity to a relationship with God and to shalom-filled cocreative dominion. Cocreative dominion is our core purpose both now and in the consummated Kingdom.

Workplace Flexibility and the Bottom Line

New York Times - Economix: Workplace Flexibility and the Bottom Line

For several years now, many women’s advocates have been pushing hard for more workplace flexibility to help workers — not just women, but also men — have an easier time juggling work and family responsibilities. But to some people, the whole notion of workplace flexibility — paid maternity leaves, more flexible schedules, telecommuting — is nice-sounding mumbo-jumbo that might makes employees feel good, but doesn’t translate into dollars and cents on the bottom line.

On Saturday, I had an article reporting how the nation’s accounting firms have led the way in providing their employees with greater flexibility, largely as a way to reduce costly turnover. Several work force experts and many accounting executives I interviewed said flexibility did indeed help the bottom line.

My article quoted Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, saying, “The nation’s accounting firms excel at this for a boring, accounting reason — they’ve looked at the numbers, and they see it helps.” Jennifer Allyn, managing director in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ office of diversity, notes that stepped-up flexibility policies have helped cut turnover to 15 percent a year, from 24 percent.

The article adds, “Firms estimate that the cost of hiring and training a new employee can be 1.5 times a departing worker’s salary, so reducing turnover by 200 employees could mean $30 million in savings.” Sharon Allen, Deloitte’s chairwoman, said her firm’s flexibility policies saved more than $45 million a year by reducing turnover. ...

Increasing Violence?

We are now froty-eight hours into the news cycle for the tragedy in Arizona. I hear many commentors and religious leaders decrying the increasing violence in our culture, a common refrain each time an event like this occurs. Without diminishing the suffering and sorrow of those involved, it is important to keep in mind a larger context.

Here are two charts. The first one shows the rate of murders per 100,000 people. Note that the 2009 murder rate (5.0)  is less than half of its all time high in 1980 (10.2). It is the lowest since 1964.

The second chart shows violent crimes per 1,000 persons. These are not crimes reported to police. These are people reporting vicitimization through the National Crime Victimization Survey administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It is considered the most reliable indiactor of actual incidents. Note that the 2009 rate(17.1)  is less than one-third of the all-time high rate (51.7) in 1979. It is the lowest since the survey began in 1973.

We are not in an era of incresaing violence.

Furthermore, it seems to be taken for granted by many that this was a poltically motivated event. Some are wanting to see a cause and effect relationship between rancorous politics and this killing. So far, I haven't seen much that confirms this. The killer appears not to have been motivated by oppostion to health care legislation or rising taxes. He was irrated about illeteracy, grammar, and language. Every indication is that he is suffering from severe mental illness.

My point is that we should grieve this tragedy and comfort those who mourn. But if we are going to address societal problems well, we must resist the impulse to fly off into emotional and ideological frenzies, and actually address the problems that face us. So far, this incident says far more to me about for mental health care and access to firearms than it does about politics.

Grace and peace to those whose lives have been so painfully touched by this horrfic attack.

Chiefs: 40 Years in the Wilderness (or "O Come, O Come, Matt Cassel")

Forty-one years ago this month, Len Dawnson led the Chiefs to their first and only Super Bowl Championship in Super Bowl IV. For forty years the Chiefs have been wandering in the football wilderness. But to make matters worse, the chiefs have had chances to return to the big show six times over the last seventeen years. The last time the Chiefs won a playoff game was against the Oilers in a divisional playoff game on January 16, 1994, under the leadership of Joe Montana. They lost the next week to the Bills in the conference championship game.

Since then, the Chiefs have made it to the playoffs five times, only to lose the opening game: '95, '96, '97, '04, and '07. Probably the most painful loss was the '96 playoffs when the Chiefs had home field advantage throughout the playoffs. The divisional game was against the Colts on a bitterly cold day. They lost 10-7 in a game where Lin Elliot missed three field goals and three of Bono's fourteen complete passes were to the defense. (For a complete recounting of Chief's misery, see blogger Benjamin Herrold's post.) No team has lost seven consecutive playoff games.

So Chief's fans come to this weekend in hopes of deliverance from their wilderness wanderings and ending their string of playoff futility. In honor of the event, I thouht I would offer a Chief's playoff carol for the hometown faithful.

O come, O come, Matt Cassel

O come, O come, Matt Cassel
And put an end to our losing spell
We wait in chilly Arrowhead here
Until the Chiefs of old reappear
Go Chiefs! Go Chiefs! Matt Cassel
Shall come to us, and end our losing spell.

O come, Thou Coach Todd Haley, free
Chiefs fans from hapless tyranny
From football Hell Thy faithful save
Put opponents hopes in the grave
Go Chiefs! Go Chiefs! Matt Cassel
Shall come to us, and end our losing spell.

O come, Chiefs players, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And winless shadows put to flight.
Go Chiefs! Go Chiefs! Matt Cassel
Shall come to us, and end our losing spell.

That said, I confess I really feel a bit like Mircacle Max in The Princess Bride, sending off Wesley and friends to storm the Castle.

103K new jobs in Dec. point to slow, steady growth

Yahoo! News: 103K new jobs in Dec. point to slow, steady growth

WASHINGTON – The nation's added 103,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4 percent last month, its lowest level in 19 months.

But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was mainly because people stopped looking for work.

Private employers added a net total of 113,000 jobs last month and the government shed 10,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Friday.

"It's a bit of a mixed bag," said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody's Analytics. Many analysts hoped to see larger job gains, and the drop in the unemployment rate is unlikely to be sustained, he said. ...

The lion kings?

Economist: The lion kings?

Africa is now one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.

MUCH has been written about the rise of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the shift in economic power eastward as Asia outruns the rest of the world. But the surprising success story of the past decade lies elsewhere. An analysis by The Economist finds that over the ten years to 2010, no fewer than six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa (see table).

The only BRIC country to make the top ten was China, in second place behind Angola. The other five African sprinters were Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique and Rwanda, all with annual growth rates of around 8% or more. During the two decades to 2000 only one African economy (Uganda) made the top ten, against nine from Asia. On IMF forecasts Africa will grab seven of the top ten places over the next five years (our ranking excludes countries with a population of less than 10m as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, which could both rebound strongly in the years ahead). ...

Americans See Religion Losing Influence

Gallup: Americans See Religion Losing Influence

Visualizing One Trillion Dollars

Check it out at PageTutor.com.

In 27 states, don’t call your old computer ‘trash’

Kansas City Star: In 27 states, don’t call your old computer ‘trash’

MONTPELIER, Vt. | Get a new flat-screen TV for Christmas and wondering what to do with the old console? Finally replacing that turntable with an MP3 player? Just upgrading your Mac?

Whatever it is, you’d better check your state’s law books before taking out the trash.

In Vermont, a ban on electronic waste in landfills took effect New Year’s Day. New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina are soon to follow suit with their own laws encouraging recycling of “e-waste” and banning landfill dumping.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2007 that the United States generated about 2 million tons a year of e-waste, which can contain lead, mercury, cadmium and other potentially harmful chemicals.

If those toxins leach from landfills into the environment, risks to human health can include cancer and nervous system damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The EPA estimates that 13.6 percent of e-waste generated was recovered in 2008. Scott Cassel, executive director of the Boston-based Product Stewardship Institute, which promotes such recycling, said it was thought that the percentage had grown significantly since then, with more states passing laws.  ...

Later the articles says ...

... Most states ask electronics makers to pay for recycling programs — both to make sure they are run properly and to remove the temptation for consumers to avoid added costs by dumping illegally.

For businesses, knowing they’ll be responsible for taking care of their products at the end of their useful lives means “now they have an incentive to have these products contain fewer hazardous materials and be recycled more easily,” said Clare Inness, marketing coordinator for Vermont’s Chittenden Solid Waste District. ...

And that strikes me as a sound used of government to address the problem externalities. Whenever significant costs are shifted to those who were not a party to an economic transaction, an externality is created ... someone external to the buyer and seller of a computer, for example, is bearing the cost of its disposal. This method shifts the cost back on to the buyer and seller and gives them a market incentive to be more creative and cost effective in their transacations.

Donuts, genocide, and the American dream

BoingBoing: Donuts, genocide, and the American dream  (HT: Cameron Horsburgh)

Most visitors to Los Angeles and the west coast are struck by the number of donut shops, but few know that the vast majority of local donut shops are owned by Cambodian refugees who fled the killing fields of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. This is also the case in many other parts of the west. Through an interesting set of circumstances, Cambodian families got a foothold in the market, then helped other families through traditional loan systems and sharing of knowledge so they could earn their own piece of the American dream. These are people who have experienced unspeakable atrocities in their immediate families, and bust their asses (often 364+ days a year) to make a better life for their children in North America. So go enjoy a decadent donut sometime soon, and be extra friendly to the remarkable people who make these deceptively quotidian treats. The best documentary on the subject is Cambodian Doughnut Dreams , although the hygiene-averse dude in The Darkside of Donuts teaser trailer best articulates my own relationship with that quintessential American delight. [Video link]

The video is an excellent look into the immigrant entrepreneur experience. Check it out below.

Exchange and Trade in the Pre-Capitalist World

One of Adam Smith's more famous observations is on the propensity for human beings to "truck, barter, and exchange." But have they always? Some scholars would argue that the claim is overstated. In response, some scholars, while affirming that economic activity in past societies was not identical to our modern commercial societies, say critics are drawing to narrow a definition on what constitues truck, barter, and trade ... often out of ideological motivation.

A couple of weeks ago, economic historian and Adam Smith scholar, Gavin Kennedy, had an interesting exchange with sociologist Dan Hirschman at the University of Michgan at Kennedy's blog. See A Debate About Polanyi and Exchange, Polanyi was Wrong on Exchange and Trade, and On Polanyi Again and a New Critic. Kennedy concludes his third post with:

... The ideas of “commodification” have Marxist roots, though that alone does no disqualify them, but they are part of an ideology – no counter-facts can disprove them – as is the myth that exchange behaviours are alien in tribal societies. They are even present in some animal societies (Chimpanzees, for instance) in reciprocation behaviours, and certainly in human societies from the earliest times and to the present. To deny them is ideological. That is why I say Polanyi invented a theory and then sought evidence. Smith observed; he had no plans to change the world. Neither have I. The most dangerous breed on Earth are philosophers who think they can change the world - they only make it worse.

Smith recognized the importance of the Age of Commerce, and noted how it had collapsed after the Fall of Rome, when warlords took over Western Europe, until it re-emerged, slowly and gradually, a thousand years later and it spread and deepened, not because of the State, but despite it. No state invented agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Laissez-faire played no part in Smith’s thinking (he never used such words) – that was a 19th-century invention by propagandists of Mill and Mine owners in Parliament and politics.

I assure David I am an economist who has looked closely at the works of modern anthropologists (and sociologists); I find in them confirmation of Smith’s conjectures, and repudiation of Polanyi’s narrow, political focus. He should have looked beyond Engels and Marx - as should David.

I recently aquired a new copy of Polanyi's "The Great Transformation," which I think I read more than 25 years ago. It makes me even more intrigued to read it again. The topic interests me partly just out of historical curiosity. But I also think such study has value for theology. The economy of First Century Rome has some parallels to modern econmies but their are radical deapartures as well ... particularly when we move into the conflicted culture of First Century Palestine. Uncritically lifting Jesus' teaching without regard for the economic context continues to subvert productive reflection on our own economic questions. Here works like Douglas Oakman's Jesus and the Peasants provide valuable insight.

Anyway, check out Kennedy's posts on the topic. I'm persuaded by his take.

Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet

New York Times: Economic Optimism? Yes, I’ll Take That Bet

Five years ago, Matthew R. Simmons and I bet $5,000. It was a wager about the future of energy supplies — a Malthusian pessimist versus a Cornucopian optimist — and now the day of reckoning is nigh: Jan. 1, 2011. ...

Simmons lost.

... It’s true that the real price of oil is slightly higher now than it was in 2005, and it’s always possible that oil prices will spike again in the future. But the overall energy situation today looks a lot like a Cornucopian feast, as my colleagues Matt Wald and Cliff Krauss have recently reported. Giant new oil fields have been discovered off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. The new oil sands projects in Canada now supply more oil to the United States than Saudi Arabia does. Oil production in the United States increased last year, and the Department of Energy projects further increases over the next two decades.

The really good news is the discovery of vast quantities of natural gas. It’s now selling for less than half of what it was five years ago. There’s so much available that the Energy Department is predicting low prices for gas and electricity for the next quarter-century. Lobbyists for wind farms, once again, have been telling Washington that the “sustainable energy” industry can’t sustain itself without further subsidies.

As gas replaces dirtier fossil fuels, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions will be tempered, according to the Department of Energy. It projects that no new coal power plants will be built, and that the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States will remain below the rate of 2005 for the next 15 years even if no new restrictions are imposed.

Maybe something unexpected will change these happy trends, but for now I’d say that Julian Simon’s advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can usually make money betting against them.

I love that last sentence.