Category: Religion

“The People’s Budget”

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is endorsed by Paul Krugman and also Jeffrey Sachs, so I thought I would give it a look.  It is from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  One simple question is to ask how the rich are taxed:

1. There are separate rates in the mid- to high forties for millionaires, with strict limits on itemized deductions.

2. “Raise the taxable maximum on the employee side to 90% of earnings and eliminate the taxable maximum on the employer side.”  With volatile incomes, it’s tricky to translate that into an expected marginal rate or to figure out how much is infra-marginal.  See the technical appendix, p.8, for more details, though I find the entire proposal here poorly explicated.  In any case, it’s a big tax increase.

3. Tax capital gains and dividends at the normal income rates.  (I am not sure how loss offsets are to be treated, though it could make a big difference and significantly boost the demand for volatile stocks.)

4. I’m not sure what happens with state-level income tax rates but there’s certainly, in the proposal, no talk of them going down.  And since they’re probably not free market deregulators at the state and local level, I suppose I expect those taxes to go up, given Medicaid burdens, pension problems, ailing educational systems, and so on.

5. Estate taxes would be raised significantly (sock it to Boy Mankiw!), as would corporate income taxes, there would be new financial transactions taxes, there would be a new bank tax, and tax enforcement would be stiffer.

6. There are, by the way, no proposed cuts in benefits.

What is the final net income and also capital gains rate for wealthy taxpayers?  It’s hard to say exactly, but north of seventy percent for income rates (including state and local rates), and near fifty percent for capital gains rates, is not hard to believe.

Quick quiz #1: What are the capital gains tax rates in the European social democracies?

Quick quiz #2: From the climate change debates we learn the value of scientific consensus; what percentage of Democratic public finance economists would favor top income and capital gains rates in the neighborhood of seventy and fifty percent?  Some of them have read and digested, for instance, this paper by the impressive Raj Chetty.

Quick quiz #3: Does the technical report offer estimated labor supply and investment elasticities in response to these higher tax rates?  (p.s. the answer is “no.”)

I can tell you this: in the technical appendix; the assumption is that the net effect on growth, from investment changes, after all the new public sector investment is called into place, is a positive [sic] 0.3%.

There have been some good criticisms of the funny assumptions behind the Ryan plan, but actually this budget isn’t better, either in terms of its final conclusions, its adherence to best scientific practices, or its transparency in getting to its results.  Should we not apply equally high standards to both the Ryan budget and this?  There are plenty of good arguments that taxes have to go up, but this particular proposal isn’t one of them.  INSERT SNARKY CLOSING OF YOUR CHOICE I WON’T DO IT FOR YOU.

Why are so many Russian Jews Republicans?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I wouldn’t exactly describe my family this way, but here are some data (do read the whole article):

The most recent data, from the 2004 election, show that Russian Jews preferred Bush to Kerry by a margin of 3 to 1. Israel, national security, and the economy topped the list of concerns among Russian Jews, but there was also a cultural component to their preference; they were among the so-called Values Voters who voted Republican based on cultural wedge issues. A month before the election, 81 percent of Russian Jews supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages—nearly the inverse number of Jews nationally. They also expressed heavy opposition to affirmative action and showed less support for on-demand abortion, according to numbers compiled by the Research Institute for New Americans, which tracks the Russian-speaking community.

And here is more evidence.  Why might this be?  The stronger record of Republicans, in particular Reagan, as anti-communists is one obvious reason, but that doesn’t explain the broader conservative tendency.  The Russian Jews are not anti-gay marriage because the U.S. Republicans are.  The more hawkish stance of Republicans on Israel is another reason, but again that doesn’t seem to explain why the connection is such a fundamental one.  It doesn’t sound as if these Russian Jews are yearning to become Democrats, if only for the Israel issue.

I would suggest that many Russian Jews, compared to American Jews, are much less hesitant to affiliate with the American brand of Christianity found in the Republican Party.  Related strains of thought have been prevalent in Russia for a long time, yet for a long while their Christian nature was covered up by communist rule.  Furthermore attachment to Israel, rather than a lifelong felt contrast with American Christians, or strict Judaic observance, is the source of Jewish identity for many Russian Jews.  So affiliation with a fairly Christian party is not jarring for the Russian Jews and indeed it may be welcomed, especially if it dovetails with pro-Israel attitudes. 

The implied prediction is that Russian Jews who assimilate more in American life, and who marry Americans, are less likely to be Republicans.

I found this part of the article interesting:

Theirs is no country-club Republicanism. Russian Jews in New York, the nation’s largest Russian-Jewish community, numbering 350,000, are largely under-employed; a majority earns less than $30,000. (These numbers do not reflect under-education. The average Russian Jewish immigrant has more higher education that his average American Jewish counterpart.)

On related questions, here is Ilya Somin.  Here is another opinion:

“Russians respect power,” says Gary Shteyngart, a novelist who emigrated to New York from Leningrad at age 7. “Many immigrants give lip service to democracy but in the end they want some patriarchal white guy to run things with a strong hand. Feelings of oppression that began within the anti-Semitic confines of the Soviet Union are turned from a defensive to an offensive stance under the false perception that the Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Communist Party of the USSR.”

I thank Natasha, a loyal MR reader, for the pointer.

Religious conversion as an anti-poverty strategy

by  Tyler Cowen in

Adam writes to me:

Hypothetical for you: would a massive conversion of low-income people to Mormonism reduce poverty? Utah looks to have some good demographics, which must be somewhat due to to the fact that 60% belong to the LDS church: http://www.adherents.com/largecom/lds_dem.html

They have the lowest child poverty rate in the country, the highest birth rate but the lowest out-of-wedlock birthrate.

Is Mormon conversion a viable development policy?

A viable *policy*, no, but a viable solution *yes*.  Many of the costs of poverty are sociological rather than narrowly economic per se.  In other words, many of the poor do not have what could be called Mormon lifestyles.  This point holds all the more strongly in Latin America, where alcoholism is arguably a larger economic problem than in the United States.  It is not uncommon for a rural village to have a male alcoholism rate of up to fifty percent.

A political conservative is more likely to make this point than to simply focus on the lack of money earned by the poor.  A political liberal is more likely to assume that the rate of strict religiosity can rise only so high, and take that as a background constraint.  Furthermore, under the exogenous thought experiment of many more poor people converting to Mormonism, positive selection bias diminishes and perhaps the religion as a whole becomes less strict.

The truth of the Mormonism insight doesn’t necessarily have strong implications for cash-based social aid policies in the meantime.  Mormonism, as a variable, is difficult for political agents to manipulate, although they (possibly) can squash it.  Raising this point, however, makes the poor look less like victims and more like a group partially complicit in their own fate.  That framing does have “marketing” implications for the politics of how many resources the poor will receive.  For this reason, liberals sometimes underrate the conservative point, because they do not like its political implications, and this leads liberals to misunderstand poverty.  The conservatives end up misunderstanding poverty policy.  Almost everyone ends up a little screwy and off-base on this issue, victims of the fallacy of mood affiliation.

Here is an article about the poorest community in the United States, in terms of measured income, it is mostly Hasidic Jews (1/20).  It doesn’t have most of the problems which we usually associate with poor communities.

A new school of regulatory economics the culture that is Georgia

by  Tyler Cowen in

Members of a central Georgia church plan to gather at gas pumps to pray for lower prices.

WMAZ-TV reports the Beacon of Light Christian Center is planning the Saturday prayer gathering at gas pumps outside a Kroger grocery store in Dublin.

Pastor Marshall Mabry said he believes that if church members come together and pray as a community, they can make something happen.

Mabry said that with prices reaching almost $4, he says he plans to ask God for help.

He said it’s the third time members of his congregation have met at gas pumps to pray.

Mabry said he wants to start a movement which spreads from the small town of Dublin to the rest of the nation.

The article is here and I thank Peter Metrinko for the pointer.

China Grave Bubble

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I cannot afford to buy a house while I’m alive and now cannot afford to buy a grave for when I’m dead.

The soaring price of land in China is spreading to burial plots which now can cost more per square foot than luxury homes. And here:

Some Chinese call themselves fen nu (grave slaves), derived from fang nu (housing slaves) – those burdened with huge housing mortgages.

Hat tip: Helen Yang.

*Shi’ism*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Hamid Dabashi and the subtitle is A Religion of Protest.  This book is excellent in every chapter and on virtually on every page, including in its discussion of cinema and aesthetics.  Excerpt:

[In Shi’ism] what we see is the exact opposite of deferred obedience.  Instead we witness a permanent state of deferred defiance — a defiance in the making, a defiance to come.  What the Shi’is have deferred in the aftermath of the murder of their primordial son is not obedience — it is defiance.  Because the central trauma of Shi’ism is the killing of a primordial son and not a primordial father, Shi’ism has remained a quintessentially youthful religion, the religion the young revolutionaries defying the patriarchal order of things.

*Why Marx was Right*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That’s the new Terry Eagleton book, which apparently needs no subtitle.  Most of the claims in the book are correct, and they debunk superficial or incorrect readings of Marx.  In that regard it is useful and it is also clearly written.  Still, I have to judge it as a bad book, for instance:

But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too.  China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West.

Or:

Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task.  It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves.

Or:

…there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx’s work, bears witness to its validity.

Try this one:

Revolution is generally thought to be the opposite of democracy, as the work of sinister underground minorities out to subvert the will of the majority.  In fact, as a process by which men and women assume power over their own existence through popular councils and assemblies, it is a great deal more democratic than anything on offer at the moment.  The Bolsheviks had an impressive record of open controversy within their ranks, and the idea that they should rule the country as the only political party was no part of their original programme.

Ahem.  Terry Eagleton…telephone!

The historical roots of yoga

by  Tyler Cowen in

The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.

In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras–which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’–to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.

The full story is here, and hat tip goes to The Browser.

The Lucas critique and twin adoption studies

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is odd to cite a twin adoption study, and its results, as a response to a methodological critique of…a twin adoption study.  Nonetheless, the paper Alex cites, and the associated graph, show very readily the problems in interpreting such studies.

If you check out the graph, for a variable such as "religious importance" it shows family transmissibility of about thirty percent, with varying estimates of transmissibility for other religious variables.  That is the result from a data set involving a) parents who try hard to transmit religion with some idea of what to do, b) parents who don't try very hard, and c) parents who try hard and have no idea of what is an effective technique, as they might be advised by a well-informed social scientist. 

Here's the key point.  The original "control" question we were debating was about a) alone, yet in response Alex is putting forth a measure of the marginal efficacy for a-c, namely including the families who aren't trying to transmit.  Obviously the marginal product of the informed, trying families should be higher than the average marginal product for the group as a whole.  At the very least we can take thirty percent as the lower bound here, not the best estimate of the effect we are trying to measure.

The Korean-American Protestant study finds transmissibility of religious fervor, through family influence, of two-thirds.  That paper does not control for genetics, and of course because of genetic similarity family influence will run especially easily and this figure is an overestimate of the net family effect.  You can think of two-thirds as the upper bound here.  If we had commensurable studies (not the case), we would have lower and upper bounds for trying-to-transmit families.

One way to think about the Korean study is to recognize that out of 100 Protestant children, parental inculcation "worked" for 66 of them.  The correct marginal product question is: without that inculcation, how many of those 66 kids would have found their way to a comparably observant religion?  Of course we don't know, but that's the right question to focus upon.

Twin studies encourage you to think in terms of a different question about marginal products: if you had those Protestant families adopt 100 kids, and try to inculcate the same religion, would 66 of them have ended up observant?  Very likely not.  Of course the two thought experiments are quite different, and they give you different measures of marginal product, most of all because there are non-linear interactions between parenting, peers, and genes.  Since most children are not adopted, it is the first thought experiment which gives the more accurate measure of marginal product of parental inculcation of religion. 

What about the religious variables which don't seem very transmissible at all?  Alex cites "born agains," drawing on the same paper.  But this interpretation again mirrors a major drawback of many interpretations of twin adoption studies, namely that they don't reconcile the cross-sectional and the time series comparisons.  Alex is walking a simple pitfall here, as does the paper he cites.

What does this mean in practice?  Born agains (or arguably, their revival) are a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States, dating from the 1970s.  (There is a similar revival in biblical literalism, although perhaps less extreme.)  The study takes adults from the mid-1990s.  That means you will have lots of "born again" descendents who had strongly below average prospects of having had "born again" parents.  The correlation will appear very weak, but this doesn't show the variable is not transmissible going forward.  We simply don't know, at least not from this data set.  

To put this final point another way, the father of Abraham was not a Muslim, and so back then the correlation was zero, but this does not show the family cannot transmit Islam in later periods of time.

I'd like to stress again that when it comes to Bryan's book, I agree with most of his points.  But on religion in particular I don't think Alex is making sound claims.

Genetic Factors and the Religious Life

by  Alex Tabarrok in

It's getting late but for the record you can find a good study of genetics and religion in Do Genetic Factors Influence Religious Life? Findings from a Behavior Genetic Analysis of Twin Siblings. PSYDIR offers a good summary:

Bradshaw_2009_genetics_religion

It's a fairly standard twin study. They took a sample of around 600 identical and non-identical twins from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), and looked at a number of religious characteristics.

Basically, their analysis allows them to tease out the variations that are shared by identical twins but not by non-identical ones (genetic factors), by non-identical twins (family factors or shared environment), and that differed even among non-identical twins. This last factor was put down to the effects of external environment (i.e. things that happen in you life that aren't shared by your twin).

I've put the results in the graph. First off, look at childhood religiosity. The biggest factor is your family, and not your genetics. It's not until adulthood that the effects of genetics really start to shine through. No surprises there!

The 'salience', or importance of religion in your life is about one-quarter defined by genetics, as is your spirituality. The most important factor here, however, is the external environment. You get similar results for religious attendance.

When you get to more personal beliefs, the patterns start to shift. There are three factors that are about 40% driven by genetics, with your family upbringing having hardly any effect. These factors are: how often you turn to religion for guidance, whether or not you take the bible literally, and whether people should stick to one faith, or experiment with others (exclusivist beliefs).

It is true that there are tricky statistical issues with twin research and it is certainly possible that results like these will be overturned in the future. If that happens, however, it will be because of better twin/adoption and direct genetic studies. The type of evidence that Tyler cites is simply not capable of answering the fundamental questions that are being asked by this type of research. It is also true that these results are conditional on an environment, that is a time and place. (But that is the relevant measure for parenting today.)

I would also note that if you think the statistics get the numbers wrong you also have to deal with the fact that the patterns make sense. Parents have the biggest influence on childhood religiosity, non-shared environment has the biggest influence on attendance, genetics has the biggest influence on being "born-again." (Even the word suggests nature.) Bryan's book reviews a number of studies like this which are broadly similar.

What can parents influence?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I had been meaning to pen a longer response to Bryan Caplan (he is the one with "a theory of everything" in this area, not I, his theory just happens to have few variables), but I'll focus on two of his claims, as they are indicative of the larger disagreement:

Parents strongly affect what you say your religion is, but have little long-run effect on your intrinsic religiosity or observance.  I don't discuss language, but it's pretty clear how a twin or adoption study would play out: You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.

Both claims are false, at least at many commonly available margins.

Take Jews.  If a group of children are born to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or liberal parents, their later religious observance will be predicted by both peers and parental upbringing.  (Perhaps genes are a factor too.)  An Orthodox Jewish boy, with Orthodox parents, growing up in an otherwise non-Orthodox Jewish community of peers, is more likely to stay Orthodox than a Reform Jew from the same community is likely to become Orthodox.  And that of course correlates with levels of observance.  I have no formal study to cite, but can I just stamp my feet and scream this is true?  Because it is.  You can imagine numerous variants on this tale, even if it isn't true for all religious denominations.

Bryan has a tendency to concede environmental factors by noting something like "Of course parents can lock a kid in the closet and affect him that way."  He is less likely to admit that a lot of less extreme influences can matter too and that those influences are missed by twin adoption studies, for whatever reason.

Or take language.  Yana speaks Russian.  She learned Russian from Natasha (her mother, and it wasn't hard for her to speak Russian at home), and note that Yana left Moscow before she was two years old.  This is again a common pattern.  The parents matter, even though in most American families you won't see enough cross-sectional variation (most people speak English at home) to always pick this up.  Travel around India for more examples of this phenomenon.

Presumably the twin studies have in their data sets Jews and possibly some Russian immigrants as well.  And yet the twin studies, with their ultimately macro orientation, miss micro mechanisms such as these.  Parents can matter more than the studies suggest.

By treating those studies as an epistemic trump card, Bryan is led to make claims which are indefensible on the face of it.  I stick by my earlier points.  The evidence Bryan is citing for twin adoption studies is simply…the studies themselves.  Where is consilience when you need it?  

What do twin adoption studies show?

by  Tyler Cowen in

"A case in point is provided by the recent study of regular tobacco use among SATSA's twins (24). Heritability was estimated as 60% for men, only 20% for women. Separate analyses were then performed for three distinct age cohorts. For men, the heritability estimates were nearly identical for each cohort. But for women, heritability increased from zero for those born between 1910 and 1924, to 21% for those in the 1925-39 birth cohort, to 64% for the 1940-58 cohort. The authors suggested that the most plausible explanation for this finding was that "a reduction in the social restrictions on smoking in women in Sweden as the 20th century progressed permitted genetic factors increasing the risk for regular tobacco use to express themselves." If purportedly genetic factors can be so readily suppressed by social restrictions, one must ask the question, "For what conceivable purpose is the phenotypic variance being allocated?" This question is not addressed seriously by MISTRA or SATSA. The numbers, and the associated modeling, appear to be ends in themselves."