ips-dc | Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of
being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than
other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor
drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all
result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the
multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the “criminalization of poverty.”
In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public
assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to
systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance.
This form of criminalizing poverty — racial profiling or
the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access
public assistance — is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known
known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization
of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of
Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get
out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life
possible.
In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the
true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we
examine are:
the targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors,
and the resurgence of debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of people
unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees;
mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent
offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once
they have served their sentences;
excessive punishment of poor children that creates a “school-to-prison pipeline”;
increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the
homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping
in public when no shelter is available; and
confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through “civil asset forfeiture.”
WaPo | “If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental,
then you’ll work only on very incremental things. It’s self-fulfilling,”
Thiel, who is 47 and estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, said in an interview. “It’s those who have an optimism about what can be done that will shape the future.”
He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster
and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science
agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the
tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big
data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and
upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of
machinery in existence: the human body.
The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding,
regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA
will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding
includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long
lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the
inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with,
and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your
mind could live long after your body expires.
“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put
it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our
society.”
thescientist | On April 15, 2014, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded the first patent for use the CRISPR/Cas system to edit eukaryotic genomes to Feng Zhang
of the Broad Institute and MIT. Originally a bacterial or archaeal
defense system that uses viral DNA inserted into the genome (CRISPR) as a
guide to cut the genomic material of invading viruses with a
CRISPR-associated enzyme (Cas), researchers have found many ways to turn
the system into a potent and quick way to edit specific genetic
sequences. Although there are a handful of other CRISPR-related patents,
covering everything from the system’s use in yogurt production
to a potential treatment for Huntington’s disease, Zhang’s patent was
the first to be granted that covers the technology itself as a platform
for a wide array of applications.
However, a patent application filed by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier,
currently at the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Germany,
predates Zhang’s by seven months. Zhang’s was most likely granted first
because he applied for a fast-track patent, which awarded his
intellectual property (IP) six months after he applied. “I think without
Zhang fast-tracking his application, the PTO would have flagged it for
being in conflict with Doudna’s earlier application,” Jacob Sherkow of the New York Law School wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist.
Had his application not been expedited, “we may have been living in a
world where there were no issued CRISPR patents” until 2017, he added.
The Doudna/Charpentier patent application, assigned to the University of
California and the University of Vienna, claims much of the same
technology as the Zhang patent, and could be read to cover
genome-editing either solely in prokaryotes or in both prokaryotes and
eukaryotes. “It’s hard to reconcile 100 percent of both of them,” said
Sherkow.
14:49: Since the rise of western monotheism the human
experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were
unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that
we're getting from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a
major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of
the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the
planet... A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary
constants of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic
world,...a world based on ideas...downloaded out of the human
imagination and concretized in three dimensional space... 29:29:
Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination
of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and
builds a model of the future and then suspends the perceiving organism
in this magical moment called the now where the past is coordinated for
the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it "driving with
the rear-view mirror" and the only thing good about it is it's better
than driving with no mirror at all. 36:10: Reality is accelerating
towards an unimaginable Omega Point. We are the inheritors of immense
momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and scientific and
technological approaches to the world. Because we're driving the
historical vehicle with a rear-view mirror it appears to us that we're
headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. It
appears that we are destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere,
wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a
future, so forth and so on.
I believe what is in fact going on
is that we are burning our bridges. One by one we're burning our bridges
to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa
or the canopied rainforests of 5 million years ago. We can't even go
back to the era of...200 years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are
preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape. 39:35: Nobody's in
charge. 41:16: We are central to the human drama and to the drama of
nature and process on this planet. 41:34: Every model of the
universe has a hard swallow...a place where the argument cannot hide the
fact that there's something slightly fishy about it. The hard swallow
built into science is this business about the big bang. Now let's give
this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for
no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Before we dissect
this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you
believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of
something more unlikely, or less likely to be believed. I defy anyone.
It's just the limit case for unlikelihood: that the universe would
spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason....It makes no
sense. It is in fact no different than saying, "and then God said, 'Let
there be light!'".
What the philosophers of science are saying
is "give us one free miracle and we will roll from that point forward,
from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle and
then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre
equations which nobody can understand but which are so holy in this
enterprise." Well I say then if science gets one free miracle then
everybody gets one free miracle.
WaPo | If you want to be a true innovator, be prepared to leave everyone behind. (Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images) The
individuals who have founded some of the most success tech companies
are decidedly weird. Examine the founder of a truly innovative company
and you’ll find a rebel without the usual regard for social customs.
This
begs the question, why? Why aren’t more “normal” people with refined
social graces building tech companies that change the world? Why are
only those on the periphery reaching great heights?
If you ask
tech investor Peter Thiel, the problem is a social environment that’s
both powerful and destructive. Only individuals with traits reminiscent
of Asperger’s Syndrome, which frees them from an attachment to social
conventions, have the strength to create innovative businesses amid a
culture that discourages daring entrepreneurship.
“Many of the
more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of
Asperger’s where it’s like you’re missing the imitation, socialization
gene,” Thiel said Tuesday
at George Mason University. “We need to ask what is it about our
society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some
massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting,
original, creative ideas before they’re even fully formed. Oh that’s a
little bit too weird, that’s a little bit too strange and maybe I’ll
just go ahead and open the restaurant that I’ve been talking about that
everyone else can understand and agree with, or do something extremely
safe and conventional.”
An individual with Asperger’s Syndrome
— a form of autism — has limited social skills, a willingness to obsess
and an interest in systems. Those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome
tend to be unemployed or underemployed at rates that far exceed the
general population. Fitting into the world is difficult.
While
full-blown Asperger’s Syndrome or autism hold back careers, a smaller
dose of associated traits appears critical to hatching innovations that
change the world.
frontiersin | Ingroup favoritism—the
tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other
groups—is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are
not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup
favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup
over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and
outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup
favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and
providing suggestions on how future work can incorporate these insights
to shed further light on when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs.
In doing so, we demonstrate how social psychological theory and research
can be integrated with findings from behavioral economics, providing
new theoretical and methodological directions for future research.
Across many different contexts, people act more
prosocially towards members of their own group relative to those outside
their group. Consequently, a number of scientific disciplines concerned
with human cognition and behavior have sought to explain such ingroup favoritism (also known as parochial altruism). Here we explore to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the (future) behavior of ingroup and outgroup members.
In this theoretical review we combine insights from a
behavioral economic approach with knowledge from social psychological
research on social identity processes in intergroup behavior to explain
the proximate psychological causes of ingroup favoritism. We expand upon
previous discussions about ingroup favoritism by using a conceptual
framework of preferences and beliefs to review present findings
demonstrating ingroup favoritism in economic games. Although we focus on
economic games here, we also selectively draw upon other related
research to highlight how social-psychological theory and research can
be incorporated with findings from behavioral economics to provide
exciting new directions for research. We therefore provide an
integrative review of ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying
key gaps in the literature, as well as providing suggestions on how
future work can incorporate these insights to shed further light on
when, why, and how ingroup favoritism occurs.
Social Identity and Group Behavior
From the dawn of our species to the present day, humans
have lived, eaten, worked, and reproduced—that is, survived—in groups.
These groups have expanded from small, primarily kin-based ties to
groups based on language, nationality, religion, current geographical
location, and even seemingly arbitrary characteristics such as the
ownership of a particular brand of electronic device. As a species, we
appear to have a remarkable tendency to seek out and identify with
groups, and it has been suggested that cooperation with the ingroup and
competition with the outgroup may have co-evolved (c.f. Rusch, 2014).
Indeed, it is in our group-based character that the angels and demons
of human nature can be seen: on the one hand, the success of intragroup
cooperation that has given us democracy and civil rights; and on the
other hand, the darkness of intergroup conflict that has given us the
collective stains on human history of genocide and war.
The concept of social identity (Tajfel, 1970, 1974, 1982)
is key to this review—and more broadly most contemporary social
psychological work on intergroup processes. Social identity is “that
part of an individual’s self concept which derives from his knowledge of
his membership of a social group (or groups) together with the value
and emotional significance attached to that membership” (Tajfel, 1974,
p. 69). We use here the definition of a group from work on intergroup
relations in social psychology: a social group is a collection of
individuals who perceive themselves to be members of the same social
category, and therefore share a social identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987; Ellemers et al., 2002; Ellemers and Haslam, 2011; Turner and Reynolds, 2011).
Social groups can be based on a range of objective and subjective
criteria—from ethnic background to gender to nationality to occupation
to religion. An intergroup context emerges when social identities are
salient and individuals interact with one another in terms of these
social group identities (Turner et al., 1987).
Indeed, even assignment to random groups can be sufficient to engender a
relevant intergroup context in which intergroup behavior is observed (Tajfel, 1974). Once groups have been formed, how does this influence behavior?
frontiersin | We report the results of a new public
goods experiment with an intra-group cooperation dilemma and inter-group
competition. In our design subjects receive information about their
relative individual and group performance after each round with
non-incentivized and then incentivized group competition. We found that,
on average, individuals with low relative performance reduce their
contributions to the public good, but groups with low performance
increase theirs. With incentivized competition, where the relative
ranking of the group increases individual payoffs, the reaction to
relative performance is larger with individuals contributing more to the
group; further, we observe that the variance of strategies decreases as
individual and group rankings increase. These results offer new
insights on how social comparison shapes similar reactions in games with
different incentives for group performance and how competition and
cooperation can influence each other.
1. Introduction
Collective action most likely evolved as a survival
group strategy to overcome challenges and threats difficult to surpass
individually. Achieving collective action, however, requires solving the
problem of incentives within the group, namely, the conflict among
individuals who would be better materially if they reap the benefits of
cooperation by others but do not assume the cost. Groups with higher
levels of cooperation, on the other hand, could reproduce their
strategies more successfully making them more competitive against other
groups. This competition among groups over scarce resources decreases
the within-group conflict at the cost of raising the between-group
conflict1.
One particular condition shaping competition is the
availability of information on individual and group performance. When
these informational sets are independently provided, the feedback at the
group level decreases the salience of selfish incentives, increasing
within-group cooperation (Burton-Chellew and West, 2012)
at the cost of additional between-group conflict. However, subjects'
reaction to the simultaneous provision of individual and group ranking
has been rather unexplored. By receiving simultaneous feedback on
individual and group performance subjects may develop richer responses
to their relative success with respect to other group members but also
to their group's success with respect to other groups, especially in
presence of competition for additional resources. These different
incentives bring a complex interaction of cooperation and conflict. One
individual's higher relative performance could increase her individual
payoffs at the expense of reducing the relative performance of her
group, and thus harming the group's relative performance which in turn
would decrease her individual payoffs.
salon | In America, salvation is big business, and he who dies with the most
souls wins. Plenty of lives are wrecked along the way, but no matter.
When consumer capitalism meets religious yearning, the sky’s the limit
of what can you can get away with. That’s the subtext of Alex Gibney’s
latest film, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened on HBO on March 29.
L.
Ron Hubbard, or LRH, as he liked to style himself, was an American of
unprepossessing origins in search of meaning and money. Possibly he
found the first, and is just now cavorting with intergalactic spirits in
the sky. Most definitely he found the second, riding a rocket ship of
wacked-out ambition to create what is now essentially a tax-free shell
company with $3 billion in assets and real estate holdings on six
continents.
Gibney doesn’t give us LRH as a madman, or even a
simple huckster. The penny-a-word pulp fiction writer could have just
been another loser who couldn’t manage to finish college and whose
less-than-stellar naval service went awry when he inadvertently used a
Mexican island for target practice and was deemed unfit for command. Going Clear traces
the young man’s early perambulations through California occultism and
various hare-brained moneymaking schemes to the Jersey Shore, where he
washed up exhausted and plagued by anxiety. Another man might have just
given up. But not LRH.
Instead, he marshaled a smattering of
knowledge from various strains of psychological and philosophical
esoterica to gin up a mental health self-help system he named Dianetics,
which he introduced in a hugely successful book in 1950. For a while it
seemed like LRH had finally found his pot of gold, but alas, the
Dianetics fad faded like the hula-hoop craze, its foundations
disintegrating into debt and disorder.
Then came the epiphany,
shared with his second wife Sara Northrup, who appears in the film as
the shell-shocked survivor of LRH’s dreams. “The only way to make any
real money,” he told her, “was to have a religion.”
mail&guardian | For much of this week, our roads will overflow with cars, buses and
minibuses full of pilgrims en route to African Zions and Jerusalems.
Many local rivers will become Jordans in which the recently converted
will be born again.
Country valleys will echo with songs of gratitude from wretched souls
singing: “Jo, ke mohlolo ha ke ratwa le nna [what a miracle it is for someone like me to be loved].”
Innocent villagers will be battered with amplified sermons
on loudspeakers in all manner of fake American accents. With their
stomping feet, the dancing masses will convert ordinary mountains and
hills into sacred spaces. And the goats will catch hell on several
fronts – they will be slaughtered either in celebration or in libation.
For more than 170 years, Karl Marx’s brief reference to
religion as the opium of the people has proved hard to forget and harder
to forgive. He probably did not have Africa in mind when he made the
statement, but nowhere is this Marxist “dictum” in sharper focus. This
is the continent whose people respected scholar and academic John
Mbiti’s described as “notoriously religious”.
Nothing captures the tragedy and the wonder of the African
continent better than the coexistence of poverty and religiosity, both
in their most extreme forms imaginable. The question is whether the
coincidence is merely casual or causal – and in which direction. Are
Africans poor because they are religious, religious because they are
poor, or religious in spite of being poor?
peakoilbarrel | Every animal had adaptations that allowed it to survive in the wild.
But no animal had a “super adaptation”, that is no animal evolved an
adaptation that gave it ultimate control over other animals. There was
no colossus in the animal world. No matter what the adaption, no animal
could be that strong.
But the first hint of such an adaptation evolved about 5 million
years ago. Somewhere in Africa a species of great ape evolved that had
all the other survival adaptations of other great apes plus one more,
that ape was just a wee bit smarter than other apes. And among these
smarter apes, some were smarter than others. These smarter apes had a
slightly higher survival and reproductive rate than the ones in their
own group who were not so smart. But even these “smarter” apes were not
really all that smart.
Brain size, which is correlated with intelligence, increased very slowly
over two and one half million years. But the ultimate competitive
weapon, the weapon that would give this one great ape a huge survival
weapon over all other species had begun to evolve. From this point on
the fate of the earth, the fate of all other species, was set. The
ultimate weapon had begun to evolve. And about 100,000 years ago modern
humans appeared.
about 10,000 years ago, give or take, humans depended entirely on the
natural world for its substance. Killing animals that they could find
and gathering what fruits, roots and tubers than nature provided them.
Then slowly the Neolithic Revolution started to happen. People began to
plant seeds and domesticate animals. However Homo colossus had not yet
appeared.
Homo colossus appeared about 250 years ago. That was when man began
to spend nature’s non renewable carbon deposits as if they were income.
William Catton:When
the earth’s deposits of fossil fuels and mineral resources were being
laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet been prepared by evolution to take
advantage of them. As soon as technology made it possible for mankind to
do so, people eagerly (and without foreseeing the ultimate
consequences) shifted to a high-energy way of life. Man became, in
effect, a detritovore, Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we
must expect crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel.
However we need to get back to the subject of this post, the competitive exclusion principle.
Wiki:The competitive exclusion principle,
sometimes referred to as Gause’s Law, is a proposition that states that
two species competing for the same resource cannot coexist at constant
population values, if other ecological factors remain constant. When one
species has even the slightest advantage or edge over another then the
one with the advantage will dominate in the long term. One of the two
competitors will always overcome the other, leading to either the
extinction of this competitor or an evolutionary or behavioral shift
toward a different ecological niche. The principle has been paraphrased
into the maxim “complete competitors cannot coexist“.
npr | And nobody feels as much like a nobody as an immigrant does. And you
can engage with a great power like the United States simply by throwing a
bomb. You can declare war on the United States. And the amazing thing
about it is that the United States will accept the declaration of war.
We respond to terrorism by treating it not as a crime, but by treating
it as war. So someone like Tamerlan, who feels small and insignificant,
can suddenly claim a sense of belonging to a great, big effort - and a
place in history.
GREENE: This is obviously an event that many Americans followed
and have memories of. What do you hope people will learn from your book
that they haven't learned from other places?
GESSEN: A couple of things. One is that - and I understand that
this is a risky strategy, but I think it is really important to see
people as people, and to try to understand the story, and perhaps catch
yourself being sympathetic to these brothers, because I think that the
more we understand about something that we believe is a huge threat to
this country, the more effective we can be inviting it.
GREENE: And you said catch yourself being sympathetic there -just
want to make sure I understand that. You're suggesting that it can be
healthy to find some level of sympathy somehow.
GESSEN: Yes, I am suggesting it could be healthy to find some
level of sympathy because I think that the way that wars are fought is
that the enemy is always dehumanized. That's what we have done with
terrorism. It's a perfectly normal and logical thing to do. It also
makes wars continue and build. And until you start seeing your enemy as a
human being for at least a second, you're never going to advance in
your understanding of what's going on. That's one thing I want people to
take away from it. Another thing is I want people to question what they
think about terrorism and the war on terror, and how it's fought, and
the assumptions that have been made and that aren't usually questioned
by the media, like this whole radicalization narrative.
Popular Science | In case you were wondering whether Steve Wozniak is afraid of robots, get this: He probably is. "Computers are going to take over from humans, no question," the Apple co-founder told the Australian Financial Review earlier this week. He also said that, "If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.” Wozniak goes into so much detail, however, wondering aloud about whether the machine will squash us like ants, or pamper us like pets, that it's hard to tell whether this was a cathartic expression of his genuine fears, or just the more respectable version of the sort of freshman-year prognosticating happening in any given dorm room, on any given night. But while Wozniak doesn't have the same prophetic gravitas as an Elon Musk, a Stephen Hawking or a Bill Gates, the list of household names who want robots to plot a path off of humanity's lawn is growing.
It's a bad time, in other words, to be staging the most ambitious robotics competition in history. Worse still, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals, scheduled for June 5-6 in Pomona, California, will feature machines that walk on two legs—imagine the hubris—or skitter across rubble like giant insects. Robots will turn doorknobs, and saw through walls with power tools. The DRCis a robophobic's worst nightmare.
DARPA is fully aware of this climate of fear, and plans to tackle it head-on. “We actually take these questions about what the future is going to be like, and what the applications are, for the different technologies that DARPA helps to develop, in a very serious way.” said DRC program manager Gill Pratt in a telephone briefing earlier this month. “And we don't want to presume that we're the ones who have to come up with the answers, but we do want to be responsible for asking the questions.”
NYTimes | Even before Ronald Reagan
became the oldest elected president, his mental state was a political
issue. His adversaries often suggested his penchant for contradictory
statements, forgetting names and seeming absent-mindedness could be
linked to dementia.
Now
a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office,
subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of
dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.
The findings,
published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at
Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs
of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability
to make decisions in office.
But
the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be
used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological
conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.
NYTimes | “I
wanted the research I was doing to match the stuff I was thinking
about,” he says. “And I just felt more and more that the most relevant
level of analysis for generating social change was the psychological
level.”
He
started looking into conflict-intervention programs and discovered that
there were hundreds more like the one he volunteered for in Ireland,
and that hardly any of them had been scientifically validated. No one
was really checking to see if the programs accomplished their stated
goals, or even if their stated goals were the best ones for achieving
the desired outcomes. “They have all these very straightforward metrics
like building trust, and building empathy, that sound totally
reasonable,”
Bruneau says. “But it turns out that a lot of those
common-sense approaches can be way off-base.”
Increasing
empathy seemed to be a key goal of every conflict-resolution program he
looked at; he thought this reflected a misconception about the type of
people who engage in political violence. “If Hollywood is to be
believed, they’re all sociopaths,” he says. “But that’s not the reality.
Suicide bombers tend to be characterized by, if anything, very high
levels of empathy. Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide
bomber, was a volunteer paramedic during the second Intifada.”
Bruneau
developed a theory to explain this paradox: When considering an enemy,
the mind generates an “empathy gap.” It mutes the empathy signal, and
that muting prevents us from putting ourselves in the perceived enemy’s
shoes. He couldn’t yet guess at the mechanism behind the phenomenon, but
he hypothesized that it had nothing to do with how empathetic a person
was by nature. Even the most deeply empathetic people could mute their
empathy signals under the right circumstances. And it was difficult to
determine what role empathy played in group conflicts. Increasing
empathy might be great at improving pro-social behavior among
individuals, but if a program succeeded in boosting an individual’s
empathy for his or her own group, he reasoned, it might actually
increase hostility toward the enemy.
phys.org | Figure 2
now shows on the horizontal axis the share of total income inequality
due to differences between racial groups. Under this dimension, the two
cities turn out to be actually very different. The share of total
inequality due to differences between races is twice as large in Houston
as in San Francisco. This in turn is related to the level of trust in
the two cities. In San Francisco, where the probability of meeting an
individual of a different race but similar income level is relatively
high, the level of trust is higher than in Houston, where belonging to a
different race is also likely to be associated with a difference in
income.
This same pattern of apparent similarity, which is in reality masking
an additional dimension of heterogeneity, is repeated over different
pairs of cities in the US My empirical analysis documents the pattern in
a systematic way, exploiting answers from 20,000 respondents to the US
General Social Survey (GSS) between 1973 and 2010. The survey contains a
variety of indicators on the respondents' political views, social
behavior and socioeconomic characteristics. Crucially, it also asks
respondents whether they think that most people can be trusted. I match
their answers to this question to their socioeconomic and demographic
characteristics, and to the level of racial diversity, total income
inequality and racial income inequality in the MSA of residence.
I start out by
showing that racial diversity and total income inequality have a
statistically significant, negative effect on individual measures of
trust, a result that is consistent with previous studies. But I then
find that these effects become statistically insignificant once I
account for the income inequality between racial groups, which instead remains negatively and significantly associated to the level of trust of the respondent.
I then show that the negative impact of racial income inequality on
trust is larger in more racially fragmented communities, and that
members of minority groups reduce their trust towards others more, when
racial income inequality increases. These results are consistent with a
simple framework in which individuals can be similar in both race and
income, and trust towards others falls at increasing rates as
individuals become different in both dimensions.
Overall, my results suggests that racial diversity is more detrimental when associated with income disparities between races and that, similarly, income inequality
is more harmful when it has a marked racial connotation. This in turn
suggests that policies aimed at reducing income disparities along racial
lines might be particularly effective in increasing the level of social
participation and trust in US communities.
newyorker | The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search
for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base
around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not
everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to
make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage
to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of
Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some
business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the
law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made
strangely powerful, in ways that haven’t yet been fully tested, by the
Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA
to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her
dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions. As Jeffrey Toobin has noted, she was proved right even before the Indiana controversy.
Both
of those factors have combined to produce real confusion about the
Indiana law. Some people are not being straightforward about its
implications, whether because they are calculating, mortified, or—in the
case of opponents, some of whom have also been unclear about what the
law means—alarmed, but it also inhabits novel legal territory, so it is
genuinely hard to know what those implications would be. Governor Pence
has done much to muddle things even more. On Sunday, on “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos asked Pence
“a yes-or-no question” about whether “a florist in Indiana can now
refuse to serve a gay couple without fear of punishment.” He asked half a
dozen times, but never got an answer:
Pence: This is not about discrimination, this is about …
Stephanopoulos: But …
Pence: … empowering people …
Stephanopoulos: But let me try to pin you …
Pence: … government overreach here.
Stephanopoulos: … down here though. … It’s just a question, sir. Question, sir. Yes or no?
Pence:
Well—well, this—there’s been shameless rhetoric about my state and
about this law and about its intention all over the Internet. People are
trying to make it about one particular issue. And now you’re doing that
as well.
WaPo | The pizza shop in Walkerton, Ind. — a small town of about 2,200
people about 20 miles south of South Bend — doesn’t look like the
epicenter of a national controversy. The black-and-white linoleum and
red booths are unassuming — the decor of any take-out joint anywhere in
America. A Triple XXX Root Beer will set you back $2. It even has a
piano — and a prayer suggestion box.
“Every day before we open
the store, we gather and pray together,” reads a sign posted in the
store, which also boasts numerous crosses, including one that says
“Glorify the Lord.” “If there is something you would like us to pray
for, just write it down and drop it in the box.”
But Memories
Pizza — “a Walkerton mainstay,” according to local media, for more than a
decade — is feeling the heat of a great debate about religious freedom
and gay rights. Memories has been billed by a local ABC affiliate as the
“first business to publicly deny same-sex service” after Gov. Mike
Pence (R) signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)
into law. Many feel the law, which advocates say is intended to protect
religious freedom, will result in discrimination against homosexuals.
The affiliate was looking for reactions to RFRA — and it made some memories at Memories.
NYTimes | The
1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was supported by Senator
Ted Kennedy and a wide posse of progressives, sidestepped the abstract
and polarizing theological argument. It focused on the concrete facts of
specific cases. The act basically holds that government sometimes has
to infringe on religious freedom in order to pursue equality and other
goods, but, when it does, it should have a compelling reason and should
infringe in the least intrusive way possible.
This
moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results.
Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation,
marginalization and prejudice.
Yet
I wonder if this phenomenal achievement is going off the rails. Indiana
has passed a state law like the 1993 federal act, and sparked an
incredible firestorm.
If
the opponents of that law were arguing that the Indiana statute
tightens the federal standards a notch too far, that would be
compelling. But that’s not the argument the opponents are making.
Instead,
the argument seems to be that the federal act’s concrete case-by-case
approach is wrong. The opponents seem to be saying there is no valid
tension between religious pluralism and equality. Claims of religious
liberty are covers for anti-gay bigotry.
This
deviation seems unwise both as a matter of pragmatics and as a matter
of principle. In the first place, if there is no attempt to balance
religious liberty and civil rights, the cause of gay rights will be
associated with coercion, not liberation. Some people have lost their
jobs for expressing opposition to gay marriage. There are too many
stories like the Oregon bakery that may have to pay a $150,000 fine
because it preferred not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex ceremony.
A movement that stands for tolerance does not want to be on the side of
a government that compels a photographer who is an evangelical
Christian to shoot a same-sex wedding that he would rather avoid.
Furthermore,
the evangelical movement is evolving. Many young evangelicals
understand that their faith should not be defined by this issue. If
orthodox Christians are suddenly written out of polite society as
modern-day Bull Connors, this would only halt progress, polarize the
debate and lead to a bloody war of all against all.
As
a matter of principle, it is simply the case that religious liberty is a
value deserving our deepest respect, even in cases where it leads to
disagreements as fundamental as the definition of marriage.
Morality is a politeness of the soul. Deep politeness means we make accommodations.
rawstory | In a classic case of “unintended consequences,” the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana may have opened the door for the establishment of the First Church of Cannabis in the Hoosier State.
While Governor Mike Pence (R) was holding a signing ceremony for the
bill allowing businesses and individuals to deny services to gays on
religious grounds or values, paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis
Inc. was being filed with the Secretary of State’s office, reports RTV6.
Church founder Bill Levin announced on his Facebook page that the church’s registration has been approved,
writing, “Status: Approved by Secretary of State of Indiana –
“Congratulations your registration has been approved!” Now we begin to
accomplish our goals of Love, Understanding, and Good Health.”
Levin is currently seeking $4.20 donations towards his non-profit church.
According to Indiana attorney and political commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz,
Indiana legislators, in their haste to protect the religious values and
practices of their constituents, may have unwittingly put the state in
an awkward position with those who profess to smoke pot as a religious
sacrament.
Shabazz pointed out that it is still illegal to smoke pot in Indiana,
but wrote, “I would argue that under RFRA, as long as you can show that
reefer is part of your religious practices, you got a pretty good shot
of getting off scot-free.”
theatlantic | There’s a factual dispute about the new Indiana law. It is
called a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” like the federal Religious
Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1993.* Thus a number of its defenders have claimed it is really the same law. Here, for example, is the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack:
“Is there any difference between Indiana's law and the federal law?
Nothing significant.” I am not sure what McCormack was thinking; but
even my old employer, The Washington Post, seems to believe that if a law has a similar title as another law, they must be identical. “Indiana is actually soon to be just one of 20 states with a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA,” the Post’s Hunter Schwarzwrote, linking to this map created by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The problem with this statement is that, well, it’s false. That
becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.
If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features
the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law
explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free
exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language,
and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in
fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A
person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is
likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may
assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a
judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding.” (My italics.) Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this; only the Texas RFRA, passed in 1999, contains similar language.
What these words mean is, first, that the Indiana statute
explicitly recognizes that a for-profit corporation has “free exercise”
rights matching those of individuals or churches. A lot of legal
thinkers thought that idea was outlandish until last year’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in
which the Court’s five conservatives interpreted the federal RFRA to
give some corporate employers a religious veto over their employees’
statutory right to contraceptive coverage.
Second, the Indiana statute explicitly makes a business’s “free
exercise” right a defense against a private lawsuit by another person,
rather than simply against actions brought by government. Why does this
matter? Well, there’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious
freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a
New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In
that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio
that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars
discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual
orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred
the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply
“because the government is not a party.”
Remarkably enough, soon after, language found its way into the
Indiana statute to make sure that no Indiana court could ever make a
similar decision.
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