A Leftist Defense of Religious Institutions

Jonathan Sacks has a wonderful piece in the New York Times discussing in the fundamental role of religion in society. Most surprisingly, it comes from a place that seems to usually be the fertile ground of leftist movements: the need for communal bonds. As he writes,

A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.

The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.

If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions.

The argument against religion tends focus on its most prominent, conservative strains. Most of this comes from public misconceptions, and a general inability of the largely non-religious left to understand religious people. Religions and their membership are not monolithic entities, which is the same trap that we fall into when we talk about "Republicans" or "gun owners." This is a serious logical fallacy, and it lacks a honest estimate of empirical data. I'm not arguing that religion is a perfect thing, and there are flaws in our current religious institutions. Both of these things are normal for any liberal who believes in the importance of social institutions and the role they play in shaping and structuring political life.

But you can't look at the data on charity giving, volunteerism and general social work and then blithely conclude that religion is on the whole bad. Taking costs and benefits into account, the opposite seems to be true. In the way that it encourages strong in-group behavior, religion seems to do much more good than bad. Across a wide series of measures, it seems that highly religious people are simply better citizens. They volunteer more often, donate more to charity and tend to have a greater level of involvement in non-religious social institutions. Extremely religious people are also more committed to traditional left-wing values, like egalitarianism and social justice, than non-religious people. Most of the work against poverty around the world is led by Catholic organizations.

The argument about the crucial role of religion in American civil society was put forward by Putnam and Campbell (who are probably better known for the book Bowling Alone). The authors recognize that the current poor state of America's religious institutions can largely be attributed to the way that the conservative movement has become deeply intertwined with certain religions. The problem is not religion, but religion that has been radicalized by certain political actors who have encouraged groups to become more fervently ideological and less open to the wide variety of political ideas supported by religious doctrine.

The same communities that are inspired by faith play a strong role in moving forward progressive ideas as well. Look, for example at any Unitarian Universalist website, and how they both encourage strong in-group activism (with things like charity and volunteerism) while also striving to limit the negative sides of in-group behavior (intolerance in particular).

Religion is a fundamental part of human life, and there has yet to be a secular set of traditions and communal bonds that come close to replicating the effect of religion (you don't see atheists and agnostics getting together in a large group every Sunday). But, like any other human institution, religion is also subject to cycles of growth, decline and renewal. A recognition of these fundamentals will do the left good, as religion can be reformed over the next decades to be a tool to enrich our communities and strengthen civil society.

Sacks' argument also leads me to a more general thought. When our lefties here rant about religion, maybe it's not the content of belief that they find problematic but instead the consequences of group behavior. Leftists tend to sympathizes with those people victimized by society's power structures, so maybe it's not surprising that they would be unhappy with a type of organization that clearly delineates insiders from outsiders. Maybe instead of seeking the end of religion, which human history shows to be a completely vain endeavor, those on the left should try to make sure that religions are more inclusive. 

Surprisingly, inclusive religious systems do not emerge through the promotion of a single state religion (or atheism), but through a shared set of secular institutions that then allow individual religions to compete and flourish. Like previous arguments about elections, we know that higher levels of competition tend to also lead to higher levels of public involvement. In turn, this should bring us towards the positive social benefits discussed above. Religion may not solve every problem, but it can make some issues less severe. Religious competition within a secular framework can help get us there.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 3

The previous post mentioned that the gun law debate in the US, since it's such an emotional issue, tends to stir up plenty of misconceptions as well. I'll briefly address two of them here.

First, people often tend to think that guns are commonly held throughout the US. This is not as true as you might think. Ownership of firearms in the US seems to follow a power law distribution (although maybe not a very strong one). A very small minority owns a lot of guns and a lot of households maybe have a rifle or nothing at all. This is how you arrive at a situation where there as many guns as there are people in the US, but where just over a third of households actually report having one.

Chart via Ezra Klein's Wonkblog.

I also mentioned earlier that the rate of homicides in the US due to firearms is declining. While this remains true, my fault was in not looking at the causes for why it was falling. The Wall Street Journal reports that the number of people wounded by guns jumped up by nearly 50 percent from 2010 to 2011, but improving medical technology has made massive strides in keeping people alive.

This, again, follows common sense. As the number of guns in the US has increased, so has the number of people getting injured by guns. The same can be said for cars, tricycles or any other ridiculous instrument we use to harm ourselves all the time.

But the fact that gun violence is not declining makes me reconsider my original position. If the rates of people getting shot and surviving is climbing that quickly, maybe people really will want to actually change gun laws. There's a good question about how much change is needed to actually make a difference, but it seems like it might be enough to spur people out of apathy.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 2

My previous post on this topic discussed some of the incentives contributing to America's gridlock on gun control law and the way we react to tragic events like those in Connecticut. My conclusion is similar to that of Gregory Gibson, a longtime gun control advocate who became involved in the issue about the murder of his son. As he writes in The New York Times,

In the wake of Galen’s murder, I wrote a book about the shooting. In it I suggested that we view gun crime as a public health issue, much the same as smoking or pesticides. I spent a number of years attending rallies, signing petitions, writing letters and making speeches, but eventually I gave up. Gun control, such a live issue in the “early” days of school shootings, inexplicably became a third-rail issue for politicians.

I came to realize that, in essence, this is the way we in America want things to be. We want our freedom, and we want our firearms, and if we have to endure the occasional school shooting, so be it. A terrible shame, but hey — didn’t some guy in China just do the same thing with a knife?

While the incentives are obviously powerful, another key issue is how we as a public frame this debate. Needless to say, since it is such an emotional issue, there is a lot of fallacy, bluff and bullshit. It is much better to look at this issue through the framework of public cost and benefit.

Switzerland gets pointed out as some example where high gun ownership can exist with low crime rates. But this is a statistical error* Crime in Switzerland is already incredibly low, since it is not a social basket case like the US. But the presence of so many guns there makes the rate of fatal violent crimes higher than it would be otherwise. Research from criminologists at the university of Zurich confirms this.

To understand the effect of guns, you need to control for all other variables. Most people aren't willing to do that.

Statements about "gun laws not working" also often try to date the enactment of certain gun control laws and then assess levels of violence after. There are plenty of examples of this on other websites. This is also a mistake, because they do not take the effort of comparing how the gun laws actually affect ownership. Plenty of gun rights activists are correct to say that some gun laws haven't done anything to reduce gun ownership; this is an especially challenging issue when you only change the laws in a single jurisdiction. In broader studies, we have seen, over and over, that more gun ownership is correlated with higher rates of violence. So gun laws that do reduce ownership do work.

So, to understand the effect of gun control, look at how they influence ownership (the ultimate causal factor), not the actual timing.

Thee principals are a start of a process to trying to remove the emotional and ideological content of the debate. What's more, they really just confirms common sense. Guns are dangerous, and we should expect that the effects of the "evils of the world" would be magnified in their presence. In other words, we pay a "gun violence premium" above the already anticipated rates. This is obvious, and it's not worth trying to debate the issue on these grounds.

Via Ezra Klein's Wonk Blog.

That's not to say that the people owning guns might not benefit in other ways, but gun violence is the price we pay as a society for higher gun ownership rates; in a similar vein, motor vehicle accidents are part of the price we pay for everyone owning cars. If we think that the current levels of declining gun violence in the US are acceptable, based on improvements of some social factors (like access to abortion), then we should just learn to live with it. Otherwise, the answer is reducing the freedom of gun owners and engaging in gun buyback/ seizure programs.

If the political sacrifice is acceptable, implementing the actual program is pretty easy. Australia shows how. As the Nieman Center at Harvard explains, "In the 18 years prior to the Port Arthur massacre, Australia experienced 14 mass shootings; in the subsequent 16 years, there have been none." If you want it, there's a solution.

* It also ignores that fact that gun ownership rates have been plummeting there once they matched gun control laws to the Shengen system. For example lots of people have guns, but it's damn near impossible to get access to any ammo.

A Detour into Gun Law, pt. 1

Many social issues are kept at arm's length on this forum, and the role of guns in society is definitely one of them. I have a very strong personal belief on this issue, but I see no gain of trying to force it onto others. The contours of the debate over the last few years, each time whipped up by another more horrific event, show how little progress can actually be gained from this process. To put things very bluntly: there isn't anything that can be done right now, no matter how upset everyone is.

Nonetheless, the issue can be analyzed through the lens of political economy. The first obviously, is incentives. The strength of one side's adherence to ideology and the asymmetry of the benefits and burdens will pretty much guarantee that the status quo continues for a very long time. The long history of political economy has shown that a well-organized an aggressive minority can easily trump the will of the minority when sacrifices are not shared evenly on both sides. 

Think about the subsidies to individual companies/ industries. These could represent millions of dollars of revenues for these companies, at a cost of only pennies to individual tax payers. It's obvious to see how the side of subsidies wins these debates. They're just far too motivated.

There's also a very distinct political incentive problem too. (The threat of) gun control tends to be a very high priority issue among low-income whites, and Democrats are terrified of alienating this group any further. There's enough divide in the opinions on gun control that they wouldn't really benefit from pushing for more, since the only time we talk about it is after events like these and no one really cares during the rest of the year. The party that is supposed to address this issue has very little to gain, politically, by pursuing the law while it has lots to lose. This is another reason to believe that nothing will happen.

Public views on gun laws, via Mother Jones.

So the bad news is that nothing is really going to happen with US gun laws. On the other hand, the good news is that the public response to mass shootings follows the typical pattern of the availability heuristic. We are (rightly) outraged and upset over what happened in Connecticut, but mass shootings are a small problem in a world that is flawed in many profound ways. Our reaction tends to be disproportionately large.

We should be thankful of the fact that a mass shooting remains rare enough to make us this upset.110 people have died this year from these sorts of events, but they are an incredibly small portion of the 8,000 or so that will die to gun violence this year. To put things in perspective, 30,000 or so will have died from traffic accidents in 2012, and 2 million will die from things like inactivity. The odds of getting struck by lightning are still three times higher than the odds of dying in a mass shooting.

And while the US is has a high gun violence rate, it is not that violent of a country, in the grand scheme of things (although its much more violent than most of the OECD). We should be relieved to remember that. We are not northern Mexico or Brazil, and the murder rate is the US is still just a small portion of that in Kazakhstan and Russia.

Despite the advanced world's most lax guns laws and the highest concentration of guns, the US has become less violent in recent years. The murder rate is about half of what is was in the 80s. We can hope that the movement for limited drug legalization will cause that to continue to fall.

Most Americans think of freedom as some completely unalloyed good thing. Events like this show that it's not. We pay a price for our incredibly lax gun laws, just as we would pay a price for lax drug laws and open borders. As a whole, Americans seem to be willing to pay that price and unwilling to go through the intensely freedom-limiting process of a national gun buyback and strict carry laws. You may personally disagree with that, but that's life in a democracy.

Until we see a broader cultural change away from the social and economic liberalism of the last 30 years, we're not going to see any change on gun control laws. I don't see that happening anytime soon. My advice on days like today is the same as that of the Libertarian Party (even though I couldn't be any further away from them on this issue): don't overreact to terrible news like this, be thankful for the freedom that you have, recognize its costs and honor the dead in whatever way you find appropriate.  It's not as bad as it initially seems, and we shouldn't whip ourselves into a frenzy over something that won't happen

Worried about Education Attainment? Fix Healthcare Spending!

The BBC starts chiming in on American decline. This time, the focus is on education attainment.

An integral part of the American Dream is under threat - as "downward mobility" seems to be threatening the education system in the United States.

The idea of going to college - and the expectation that the next generation will be better educated and more prosperous than its predecessor - has been hardwired into the ambitions of the middle classes in the United States.

But there are deep-seated worries about whether this upward mobility is going into reverse.

Andreas Schleicher, special adviser on education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), says the US is now the only major economy in the world where the younger generation is not going to be better educated than the older.

The fears about declining education attainment are overblown, but their hearts are in the right place. Most of this stems from the fact that the US was once the most educated country on earth, which is no longer true. While it still remains highly educated and ahead of places like the UK at the secondary level, a slight decline is starting to emerge. Jared Bernstein was clearly pissed off by this chart, which the OECD released a couple years back and continues to update each year.

Original via the OECD. Linked from Jared Bernstein's blog.

The causes of this change are clear. Over the last twenty years, the US has been steadily eliminating its public support for higher education, and the increases in personal cost have gone up at a rate roughly proportional to the decreases in state funding. Despite what many would have you think about wildly out of control "costs," education is becoming more "expensive" mostly because we've decided to stop supporting it with public money.

Economic theory would say that this is a terrible mistake. Education provides substantial positive externalities; the benefit to society as a whole exceeds the personal benefit that a person receives from an education. This means that it will never be sufficiently supplied by private actors, since the price of education matches the private marginal benefit, not the public benefit. It's government's responsibility to intervene in these situations. Health care costs are the driver of these declines in education spending. State budgets have been particularly hard hit by increasing medical expenses (they provide most of medicaid, for example), and there is no indication that this trend will decrease. This is a nice example of the inter-connectedness of many policy issues. While someone might not think that universal healthcare is an economic issue (this tends to be the right's anti-Obamacare argument), state spending on health can crowd out state spending on other programs, having clear economic effects.

By foregoing education investments for immediate healthcare expenses, we are entering a spiral of forsaking the future for the present. As the linked OECD report points out, for men, each public dollar invested in higher education yields 5 dollars in public benefits (tax dollars, decreases in transfers). While the rate is quite a bit lower for women, the US has one of the highest benefit/ cost ratios for education in the world. Short-sighted thinking and our foolish attachment to private healthcare system is causing us to leave low-hanging fruit in the tree.

A comparison with Canada, one of the highest educated countries in the world, shows how drastically our broken health care system has distorted policy priorities. Even up to the middle of the 1970s, Canada and the US had relatively equal levels of health care spending per capita. As Aaron Carroll, points out, the US now spends almost twice as much as Canada; the US's outcomes aren't any better either.

From Adam Carroll at The Incidental Economist

That spending gap comes back to bite Americans in the form of lower education attainment. That gap comes back in the form decrepit infrastructure. That gap comes back in the form endless budget debates and government gridlock. America's broken healthcare system, and the weird incentives and ideology that perpetuate this mess, is the black hole at the heart of our public policy problems. Without further drastic change, every single policy decision will slowly get sucked into it, until we let it consume us all.