Christians and Merit

"Serious Christians have to struggle continuously against the temptation to view 'merit' uncritically."

Read more, much more, at this wonderful essay by Walter Russell Meade.

Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

Elinor Ostrom

There was sad news this morning that Nobel laureate political scientist Elinor Ostrom has passed away (she won the prize in Economic Science in 2009). Prof. Ostrom pioneered a fusion of field-based, almost anthropological, research with the experimental methods of her colleagues at Indiana, notably Prof. James Walker, to teach us much about how real people solve real commons dilemmas problems. She wasn't a Polyanna; common dilemmas indeed are problems and sometimes failures occurs. But she also documented the ability of people with local knowledge and local institutions to do much more than those textbook models which read something along the lines of "this is market failure... the government must intervene to fix the problem." She called the focus of her model "polycentrism." You can find her biography and her Nobel Prize lecture here.

We Will See Clearly

Motivations matter. There was a story from an experimental economics lecture that illustrates this point well, 

Consider these three scenarios: 1) I trip and spill a hot cup of coffee on you, 2) I walk up to you and toss a hot cup of coffee on you, 3) Someone else hits me over the head with a 2x4 and I spill a hot cup of coffee on you. In all three situations a hot cup of coffee has been spilled on you ---but you feel differently and would judge me differently in each scenario. 

What really gets under our skin is the motivation. Yet, it is not easy to infer motivation from conduct and there are also biases we must fight against. For example, in psychology there is the well known Fundamental Attribution Error in which we blame the character (attribute) of someone rather than the circumstances (Here are some examples of attribution error). Most things are mixtures of circumstances and character. 


Today in church we read a passage that I have read many times before (1 Corinthians 13:12), but, never in this way, 

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

I always perceived what would be made complete was my lack of informational knowledge.  Like explaining the presence of suffering in a world with a loving God. Or, asking about dinosaurs. But, our pastor pointed out that the last part, ". . . just as God now knows me completely," suggests something else. We see each other imperfectly. We do not know the hard battles each other are fighting. And, on top of that, we fear that if we were to give the benefit of the doubt they would take advantage -or- things would never get better. When we see things clearly we will see each other as God sees us.


We should be people that refuse to live in fear, but, instead pick the path of love. And, we should know that whatever sufferings we endure from love are not in vain. I want to close with a beautiful and poignant part of Rick Joyner's book The Final Quest:

I looked at the old eagle, and for the first time I noticed the scars amid his torn and broken feathers. However, the scars were not ugly, but were lined with gold that was somehow not metal, but rather flesh and feathers. Then I could see that it was this gold that gave off the glory that emanated from the eagle, making his presence so awesome.  

“Why did I not see this before?” I enquired. 

 “Until you have beheld and appreciated the depths of the treasures of salvation, you cannot see the glory that comes from suffering for the sake of the gospel. Once you have seen it, you are ready for the tests that will release the highest levels of spiritual authority into your life. These scars are the glory that we will carry forever. This is why even the wounds our Lord suffered are with Him in heaven. You can still see His wounds, and the wounds that all have his chosen ones have taken for His sake. These are the medals of honor in heaven. All who carry them love God and His truth more than their own lives. These are the ones who followed the Lamb wherever He went, being willing to suffer for the sake of truth, righteousness, and the salvation of men. True leaders of His people, who carry genuine spiritual authority, must have first proven their devotion this way.”     

First Day at ASREC: First Session

I think I should start writing up some summaries of the papers we saw at ASREC. The papers were overall very interesting and the people were a delight to talk to. The presentations that Mark and I gave were well attended and it was surreal to present with a Nobel Prize winner in the front row. Chapman University has a gorgeous campus and I hope to be going back there for the ASREC graduate student workshop in June. Without further ado here are some very brief summaries of the papers on the first session I attended.

Entry into Local Religious Markets (did not see an online version): (using late 19th century data from Scotland): attempted to track the likelihood of an additional church entering a geographical region given N existing churches in that region. He calculates the likelihood of entry at various levels of N and has a rich set of controls, down to details such as "Does the congregant speak Gaelic?". One of the interesting things he found was that there was more entry by the Free Church of Scotland because of the cross-subsidization from rich churches in the city to the new rural church plants which lowered the cost of entry. There was an interesting discussion about how greater religious pluralism in an area should make people less religious but that it seems that pluralism actually increases attendance.

Clergy Regulation (did not see an online version): This was an interesting sociological paper where the author Paul Olson was doing semi-structured interviews with pastors from a variety of Christian churches in a small Mid-western town. The regulation referred to an informal regulation among the clergy in this town to not "steal sheep". That is, there was a kind of cartel agreement where pastors could not pursue another pastor's congregants. From an economic perspective we know that cartels are difficult to maintain because there is always an incentive to deviate. Unless, of course, there is some sort of punishment for deviation. The main form of punishment put forth by Olson was social ostracism. (There is a large sociological literature that suggests pastors are lonely people to begin with. In seminary they're often told not to get too attached to their congregations. And, in interviews pastors often claim their ordainment sets them apart, even if they don't necessarily want to feel set apart.). The social ostracism would take the form of excluding people from invitations to the pastor's Bible study. I talked with Olson afterwards and he echoed what I was thinking, this was the central punishment for breaking the cartel. The punishment that all the other pastors raid the deviating pastor's congregation was not the threat because on some level the pastors believed it would be wrong to do that even if that other person did deviate.  

The more subtle question is, "What do you do when a congregant from another church starts coming to your church?". Among the mainline churches there was a strong norm to call the pastor from the other church to inform them that the family had started coming more and more to their church. There was a partial norm among the evangelical churches.

Another interesting point also came out. Targeting a specific person was not kosher, but, doing a mass event where all were invited was fine. This meant that pastors could get people in the door from other congregations then as one of them said (paraphrasing): If the chickens come to the yard of course I'm going to feed them. 

Exporting Christianity (http://irps.ucsd.edu/assets/001/502436.pdf): This was an extremely polished presentation from Gordon Hanson that was looking at which denominations were successful at "exporting Christianity" to countries outside of the denomination's headquarters. The authors used economic modeling techniques from international trade and industrial organization. Think of the denomination headquarters as a franchise and the newly planted church as the franchisee. In these kinds of agreements there are incentive problems. The denomination has a certain way of doing things; however, the pastor of the newly planted church might want to make some tweaks. The authors find that giving the local pastors more authority is correlated (they make a causal argument) with attracting more adherents. The reasoning is that they have more incentive to improve their congregation. Also, the authors find that strict denominations like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, etc. are more likely to succeed when social service provision in a country is weak. That is, people are more willing to accept the restrictions when they are receiving benefits such as healthcare and disaster relief.   

Five Things I Don't Know About You.

Urban legends are hard to put to rest, especially when statistics are abused.

The U.S. has abysmal infant mortality statistics? Well, not exactly.

The U.S. health care system leads to life expectancies that trail the rest of the industrialized world? Well, kind of, but not exactly.

Here is a very nice myth-busting article by health care expert Christopher J. Conover of Duke University and AEI.

Chasing

This weekend Mark and I will be going out to Chapman University in California to take part in the Association for the Society of Religion, Economics, and Culture. The name is a mouthful so it will be ASREC from now on. The program looks really good. Check it out. If you see a project you're interested in I'll check it out and do a write up on the blog.

You might notice that Mark and I are both on the program. He is presenting our out-of-the press research regarding the Parable of the Yeast and I am presenting our research on the Parable of the Great Banquet (I'll let everyone know when they can get a copy off my website).

The crux of the Great Banquet research is that all of us are modern invitees to a banquet, what would cause us to accept or reject an invitation to the banquet? We believe it comes down to how a person values the banquet. In the lab we manipulate how uncertain they are about the value of the banquet. We also manipulate how much they desire other things besides the banquet. One of these "other things" we can desire is social status. We have a desire for recognition, to be the best, and known as the best. Excellence is a good thing, egoism is not.

I do not know if our readers like rap music but I have embedded a music video of my favorite rapper (and he's a committed follower of Christ) Lecrae's rap song called "Chase That" (lyrics here if you prefer not to listen)

Also, congratulations to my friend Brandon Vogt who will be appearing on NPR's interfaith voices segment. You can check his blog Thin Veil here.

The Answer is Blowin in the Wind Part?

A report in this morning's Wall Street Journal (unfortunately behind a subscription firewall) investigated federal stimulus funds given to alternative energy companies, and found that wind farms receiving a total of over 4.3 billion dollars in stimulus funds currently employ 300 people. Even if every one of those jobs is simply a creation of the stimulus package, that works out to over 14 million dollars per job.