LDS Aid

Two professors, one a Cornell-trained BYU professor of nutrition, have been working to improve the Atmit porridge that is often given out in LDS care packages. The hope is that it will be even better for small children with a better mix of micronutrients (particularly more iron) but without compromising on shelf-life. Another article describes its dissemination in poor areas of Peru.

A single serving provides 34 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein, 43 percent of calcium, 99 percent of iron, and high percentages for a dozen vitamins and minerals for children under 5 years old. ... 
In 2010, 645,000 pounds of Atmit were shipped by LDS Charities to four countries. Depending upon the age and size of the children, that's enough to feed 100,000 to 130,000 children for one month. The cost? Less than $6 (USD) per child.

LDS efforts to help those suffering from the famine in the Horn of Africa:

In Ethiopia, projects to aid more than 100,000 refugees are under way, including water tanks, trucking services, sanitation supplies and hygiene training for 15 villages; supplementary food for 8,700 malnourished children; nutrition centers and sanitation facilities for Somali refugees in Dollo Ado; and 5,000 hygiene kits.
The Church also plans to provide water catchment and storage structures, as well as soap and washbasins to serve tens of thousands of other residents in the communities surrounding the Dollo Ado camps.

Other projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia are also underway and briefly described at the link.



At the most recent General Conference, Church President Thomas S. Monson reminded members about the General Temple Patron Fund. Donations from members around the world are used to help members who live far from a temple travel there. A recent article highlighted some of the saints in southeastern Africa who have been blessed by the Fund:

Condie - Risk and Uncertainty

tBelow the fold is an interview with Dr. Scott Condie, who traveled with me through BYU and then Cornell's economics programs. He discusses his behavioral models of financial risk and uncertainty. The question is what people do when their information is highly ambiguous: we know there's more than a 25% chance of a strange coin toss coming up heads, but it might be 33% or it might be 50% or it might be 60%, and we just don't know. And if some investors are more than risk averse, but loss averse or maximin-ers or something else, that adds more complications. In that world then, how do markets respond, how informative are prices, and what opportunities are there for people with inside information to rig the system?

LDS in the Middle East

Growth in membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been high enough in the region that the Bahrain stake (large group of congregations) was split into two new stakes, one Bahrainian, one centered in Abu Dhabi. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland commented this growth was not from proselytizing Muslims as per the Church's agreement with the national governments, but from influx of members from elsewhere and conversions of other Christians living in the area. Pictured are members in Qatar listening to the apostle when he visited.

At the same time, the US State Department awarded Stephen Beecroft the Diplomacy for Human Rights Award for his work as US ambassador to Jordan in strengthening respect for human rights. Beecroft gives much of the credit to the Jordanians and staff with whom he works, and to his parents and their example of service. A fellow BYU graduate, he also worked as Executive Assistant to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice.

Michael Otterman discusses whether we are having another "Mormon Moment" with the probably presidential candidacy of not one, but two Mormons. In short, he says that yeah, we'll probably see a spike in interest, but the long course of growth and people getting to know more members in their daily lives are far more important. The Church is also making freely available an hour long film about the life of founder Joseph Smith, an adaptation from a similar film that relied on a little more background knowledge from the audience.

LDS in Asia and other news

The first Vietnamese families were recently sealed in the Philippines temple. One met the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Australia when they bought a used washing machine from a Mormon bishop there who struck up a conversation. They returned to Vietnam without knowing the church had a small congregation in Hanoi until missionaries in Cambodia told them about it (how's that for an international program?)

Another article introduces a few of the Laotian members of the church. There roughly 200 at the moment. Humanitarian service missionaries are working there to distribute custom-made wheelchairs and organize water improvement projects. A desalinization project in Micronesia is also briefly mentioned at the end of this one minute video.

In other LDS/aid related news, here is a success story told by a successful participant in the church's Perpetual Education Fund - a microfinance program for small education loans.

The BYU Law society awarded Senator Joseph Lieberman its first International Religious Liberty Award for his efforts to spread freedom of religion across the world. "Sen. Lieberman co-sponsored the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, which created a commission, an ambassador at large, and a reporting system to monitor and respond to religious persecution." In his remarks, he praised Ambassador J. Reuben Clark for his work declaring that "religion is a fundamental human right"

On a more personal note, he said being Jewish helped him identify with the “sting” of religious discrimination, bigotry, misunderstandings and falsehoods that have too often been directed at the LDS Church.
“I will stand with you,” he said, reiterating that when one group is attacked, all are.

Geocoding Aid

A collaborative effort between the World Bank, Development Gateway, and AidData are putting together a database showing exactly where WB aid projects are supposed to be happening (HT: Barder, link below). This is an effort to increase transparency and enable (web-connected) aid recipients to both know what is going on around them and monitor the efforts. There's a video* that interviews the (I'm guessing) undergrads from BYU, Georgetown, and few other prominent schools working on the project.

In the picture I snapped from the video, you see with green dots where aid projects actually are.
You can combine the data with tools like GoogleEarth to zoom in right to the village or the road or the building where services are supposed to be provided. One of the researchers commented how interesting it was to see the same village names over and over again while other villages are completely overlooked. Why is that, she wondered. So another great purpose is to identify where the aid has not yet gone and settle your next project there.

Barder recommends aidinfo’s paper Show Me The Money.



* - Warning: sound quality is terrible - terribly loud background piano, terribly variable, terrible staticky.

A "new" generation of Mormons

MR recommended an article from the Financial Times last week about "The rise of a new generation of Mormons." Honestly, I don't see much new other than someone finally recognizing what already existed. On the other hand, that's pretty new! It's mostly a story of latter-day saints (LDS, our preferred moniker) being recognized by Wall Street and politics, largely for clean living and a work ethic. "for the first time in its nearly two-century history ... Mormons are moving from the periphery of modern American life to the very centre." Wall Street and politics, the very center? I dunno. Anyway...

Names they name: Utah's Democratic Senator McAdams, Nevada's Democratic Senator Harry Reid, former Mass. Gov Mitt Romney, the Osmands of yesteryear, Stephanie Meyer of Twilight, Glenn Beck, Stephen R. Covey, Gordon Gee (OSU Pres.), David Neeleman (Jetblue founder), J.W. (“Bill”) Marriott of Marriott International, and US ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman Jr. Some of the more entertaining quotes:

an investment banker in New York said, “I was at my final day of interviews at JPMorgan during my senior year in college. They took students from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, U-Penn and Brigham Young University (a Mormon university in Utah [and my alma mater]). I was like, ‘what the hell? BYU?’ Then I slowly realised how many Mormons there are on Wall Street.” The CIA has its eye out for Mormons, who, people say jokingly, ace the mandatory drugs and lie-detector tests. Blue-chip corporations are recruiting, too. And at Harvard Business School, female students note ruefully that attractive male classmates are invariably associated with one of the “three Ms”: the military, the management consultancy McKinsey or Mormonism.

American Jews and Hindus stand out in socio-demographic surveys for their exceptional incomes and professional accomplishment, but this flows not from growing membership, rather from heavy investment in education and, in the case of Hindus, successive waves of immigration by highly trained elites such as doctors and engineers. Mormon success is different: unlike Hindu immigrants, the newest LDS members in America – converts – tend to be poorer and less educated than those with longer heritage in the church. ... Perhaps the most telling sign that Mormon success springs from different roots is this fact: the church’s most successful members, in terms of education and wealth, are also its most fervent. In most religions, piety and professional success mix badly. Devout Jews earn less, and tend to be less educated, than their less-orthodox brethren. American Christian evangelicals save and earn less than those from more moderate traditions. ...

Smith says Mormons were rare on Wall Street when he first got a job in the early 1980s. But, as he puts it, “banks like nothing more than finding an undervalued stock. And Mormon graduates were just that: a stock which was cheaper to buy, and which over-performed.” ...

a managing director at JPMorgan, confirmed that BYU is now seen as a top source of graduate talent: “These students are bright, mature, well-educated, share our emphasis on adhering to highest standards of integrity, have impressive work ethic and are very team-oriented,” he says. “They fit extremely well with our firm’s corporate culture.”

They blame/credit the effects of serving a mission - work ethic, rigor, language learning, skill developing, ability to face rejection, independence, commitment to the things we sacrifice for, dealing with severe emotional strain, discipline, leadership training ... - with the economic and social rise. They also discuss networking between members of diverse backgrounds and the ability to more-smoothly transition to living in a new area:

McAdams tells a similar story, of first arriving in New York for graduate school: “My wife and I packed up a van and drove our stuff across country. When we showed up at our place, there were 15 people there to help us unload. We’d never met any of them before, but they moved us in and invited us over for dinner. We had an instant social network.” He found that this same church network also provided helpful connections, both within his own law firm and to other people in the same industry.

An Old Post - Economics is Romantic

Originally posted Nov 2009 at another blog:

I had a professor and mentor at BYU (James McDonald*) who tried to convince us that

Economics is Fun.
Economics is Easy.
Economics is Your Friend.

One of his classes made a bronze plaque out of it for him. He also tried to convince us that Economics is Romantic because this one guy took a girl to his class on a date and she married him anyway. Because he was one of the economists I've tried to model my life after, I've always been on the lookout for ways to convince people that economics is, in fact, fun, friendly, easy, and romantic.

Here is Bill Easterly today blogging about how marriage search is like development, and in the process talking about how unromantic economists can be.

I recently helped one of my single male graduate students in his search for a spouse. First, I suggested he conduct a randomized controlled trial of potential mates to identify the one with the best benefit/cost ratio. Unfortunately, all the women randomly selected for the study refused assignment to either the treatment or control groups, using language that does not usually enter academic discourse.
With the “gold standard” methods unavailable, I next recommended an econometric regression approach. He looked for data on a large sample of married women on various inputs (intelligence, beauty, education, family background, did they take a bath every day), as well as on output: marital happiness. Then he ran an econometric regression of output on inputs. Finally, he gathered data on available single women on all the characteristics in the econometric study. He made an out-of-sample prediction of predicted marital happiness. He visited the lucky woman who had the best predicted value in the entire singles sample, explained to her how he calculated her nuptial fitness, and suggested they get married. She called the police.

He goes on from there to describe how he eventually did find a mate and makes the comparison with development. But this is where my comments pick up as I discussed the problem of ignoring the incentives women have and their corresponding actions:


1 – He ignored the self-selection bias. Regressions only tell us what the 'average' effects are, that is the effect for the 'average' person. It’s only about qualities that make the average guy happy if he is the average guy. Economists being the strange lot we are, it is likely that it takes a special kind of woman to marry one of us. He needed to find a bunch of guys very similar to himself and examine the qualities that made a difference from among (and this is key) the population of women willing to marry guys like him - the women who self-select themselves into our group. If he then approached a women who was not in that group, no wonder he was rejected. Speaking as a Mormon economist-in-embryo who read Shakespeare in the original Klingon as it were, who carried a briefcase in junior high, who preferred slacks to jeans, and who felt the downfall of music began with the electric guitar, I knew I had my work cut out for me when I was only 13. Small sample sizes indeed.

2 – He ignored endogeneity. Instead of trying to convince her that research showed she would make him happy, he needed to present research that demonstrated he would make her happy, and that’s the other half of the regression: male qualities on marital happiness. No wonder she rejected him: his regressions didn’t answer her question!

Personally, I took more of a Bayesian approach. Bayesians believe that a lot of things in life [like regression coefficients] are random and over time we get better and better signals about where the truth is, but we only ever approach it by degrees. First, by trying to become a friend, I identified if she was in the group of people who might marry someone like me. Each interaction gave me more information about the error term and the regression coefficients about fostering a happy, loving friendship that could endure. After any failed relationship, I had a new variable or two to add to my equations and I understood the ‘relationships’ between relationship variables better. That might be about finding out more or different things I needed [hunh, so her political affiliation isn't as important as I thought and her willingness to smile at me is vital] or about learning more and better policies over time that I could enact to make her happier [tips for being a better listener or learn to identify her love languages and feed them to her, instead of your own, regularly].

In the end, I’ve married someone who has all the good qualities in the best people I dated and avoids all of the relationship-ending problems, and I’ve learned how to promote her happiness so I can keep her. It's so wonderful. Thank you, my Lovely and Gracious, for saying yes.

* - Actually, the quote is about Econometrics, his specialty within economics, but I trust he wouldn't object to my making the model more general.

The Evil Goatee

 This is a post I wrote on my family blog a year ago, but with MR posting about BYU beard policy, it deserves mentioning again:

Can anyone think of an example of a goatee-wearing lead in a romantic comedy?

You see, the vast majority of movie and TV characters with goats are bad guys: Humperdink's evil sidekick (the guy with six fingers who killed your father); anyone on an Enterprise ship other than Riker with facial hair comes from an alternate, EVIL, dimension or is a Klingon (evil until the Berlin Wall fell); Han Solo and Knight Rider's evil twins have goats; even the villain in Lion King adds a goatee to his mane. A website full of examples of the Beard Of Evil exists if you doubt the phenomenon.

I grant that there are 'anti-hero' protagonists whose job is to maim and kill as many people as possible or whose allegiances are clearly questionable who sport goats (Jack Sparrow, post-Gorbachov Klingons). Athletes do not grow goatees in order to show their caring, compassionate nature.

These are not romantic leads or traditional good guys. I mean, can you think of anyone in a goatee playing opposite Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts?

This is a matter of mild concern to an avowed goody-two-shoes whose wife likes him to sport the occasional goatee. The first time she had me grow a beard and shave it down to a goat, I did a little editing of the picture to express my concerns about it (right).

On seeing this picture again, the Lovely and Gracious said, "I love that picture" (smiling prettily).





In today's comics we see the emergence of a "second, evil head." Can you guess what it has?