Red Herrings

"Along with all of the other rising inequalities we’ve become so familiar with — in income, in wealth, in access to politicians — we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability. We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside."

"But the government does not have a life cycle; it plans to exist indefinitely. So it makes much more sense to compare the government to a corporation, which also plans for indefinite existence and therefore may have debt as a permanent part of its capital structure. There is not necessarily an expectation that a firm will decrease its debt load over time, and if a company keeps growing, its debt load may keep getting larger without being a sign of financial distress.
That’s not to say that a corporation (or a government) can never borrow the wrong amount. A company can expose itself to excessive bankruptcy risk by overleveraging. Or if it’s not leveraged enough, it may be paying too much for capital. Similarly, government deficits do matter — they just don’t always matter such that smaller is better."

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How can this be? If Christian numbers are exploding, how can they be left so far behind Muslims in the rate of expansion? The answer lies in differential demographics, namely that some parts of the world are growing much faster than others. Islam grew so mightily because Muslims were so heavily concentrated in those regions that maintained very high fertility rates throughout the twentieth century, chiefly in Africa and Asia. A rising tide lifts all faiths.

In contrast, overall Christian numbers lagged because that faith was traditionally concentrated in Europe, and Europe’s demographic growth has been very slow in comparison with other parts of the globe. Back in 1900, Europeans made up around a quarter of the world’s population, but by 2050, that number will probably be closer to eight percent. In 1900, there were three Europeans for every African. By 2050, there should be three Africans for every European. If we take Europe out of the picture, then, Islam and Christianity have been running a very close race worldwide, but Christians find it hard to overcome that demographic handicap.

When I am asked about the world’s fastest growing religion, then, I answer unequivocally: Islam. Or, Christianity outside Europe.

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Professor Autor’s own explanation builds on existing research showing that income inequality has soared, stretching the gap between rich and poor, and that a smaller share of Americans are making the climb. The children of lower-income parents are ever more likely to become, in turn, the parents of lower-income children.

Moreover, a growing share of lower-income children are raised by their mother but not their father, and research shows that those children are at a particular disadvantage.

Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college.

“It’s very clear that kids from single-parent households fare worse in terms of years of education,” he said. “The gender difference, the idea that boys do even worse again, is less clear cut. We’re pointing this out as an important hypothesis that needs further exploration. But there’s intriguing evidence in that direction.”

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"Chaos Monkey is a service which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) that seeks out Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) and terminates instances (virtual machines) per group. The software design is flexible enough to work with other cloud providers or instance groupings and can be enhanced to add that support. The service has a configurable schedule that, by default, runs on non-holiday weekdays between 9am and 3pm. In most cases, we have designed our applications to continue working when an instance goes offline, but in those special cases that they don’t, we want to make sure there are people around to resolve and learn from any problems. With this in mind, Chaos Monkey only runs within a limited set of hours with the intent that engineers will be alert and able to respond."

"As the cameras and cellphones rolled tape around them, Pavlich and Krohn continued to argue. The loud conversation soon turned to Krohn’s opinion of how Muslims were treated at the Breitbart panel. Krohn shouted that he was offended, because he felt that some at CPAC were unfairly portraying all Muslims as terrorists.
Darby swore at Krohn, accusing him of feigning outrage.
“Brother, listen to me,” Darby said. “Let me explain something: You’re 18. This type of loud angry display is why people gather around you.”
There was more shouting, including by Krohn.
“Don’t yell in my face,” Darby said. “Man, if we were outside and you were yelling at me like that, we would have an issue. Don’t talk to me like that. I’m trying to talk to you calmly.”
When Weinstein tried again to persuade them lay off of Krohn, Palvich turned to him and said, “I think it’s sad as a journalist that you think asking questions is confrontational. Maybe you should get another job.”
Leah Sargent, an editor for the website MisfitPolitics.com, chimed in from the side of the group. “Why are you being so defensive?” she asked Krohn, in the same way an older brother would ask why you keep hitting yourself. “You know what? I hope that in the next five years you keep reading and you actually get yourself an education. I would like to recommend ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to you.” She and some of the others began to walk away, but then she turned back around. “Also, if you want to be taken seriously, tuck in your shirt.”
(Later, when talking to a group of friends about the incident, Sargent said, “I just want everyone to applaud my self-control for not slapping that stupid brat.”)"

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Chivalry represented resistance to this clericalism: “the elaboration of the notion of chivalry was … an attempt to elaborate a lay theology… . This lay theology resisted an unintelligent clerical squeamishness about sex: as the Roman de la Rose asks, if clerical chastity is the ‘highest’ path and yet grace is offered to all, how is this consistent with God’s approval of nature and generation? Only the Olympian gods, the authors of this work argue, were jealous of the human physical bliss of the Golden Age: such an attitude is alien to the God of creation and grace, and therefore sexual puritanism is pagan and not Christian.”

Chivalry also resisted “clerical preciosity concerning conflict… . if clerical nonviolence is ‘the highest,’ then fighting a just war would imperil one’s salvation, at least to some degree. If some wars are just, they lie therefore within the scope of providence, and such impairment therefore seems inconsistent with divine justice and grace.”

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"Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper."

"In the main part of the country where people actually ride intercity trains and where intercity trains form an important part of the transportation infrastructure, we have operating profits. In a decent national rail policy, those operating profits could finance infrastructure improvements in the northeast corridor where rail is important and useful. Everyone knows that the Acela is a joke version of high-speed rail by European or Asian standards, and there’s a lot that could be done incrementally to improve that with upgraded rolling stock and targeted improvements to straighten tracks or improve tunnels and grade crossings. Instead we’re stuck in a dynamic where all these trains are running in places where nobody rides them and the local voters and elected officials aren’t supportive and Amtrak ends up sigmatized for its dependence on federal subsidies. But operating passenger rail where people want to ride intercity trains turns out to be perfectly viable without huge subsidies. And it could do a much better job of serving the needs of the communities where rail is useful and valued if those operating surpluses were used to cover infrastructure costs rather than soaked away covering operating losses elsewhere."