A good week for religious thought by philosophers

Platinga has some interesting things to say about religion in general. First, all of us must accept some things on faith -- logic cannot take us everywhere:

After all, one of the main lessons to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume is that there don’t seem to be good arguments for the existence of other minds or selves, or the past, or an external world and much else besides; nevertheless belief in other minds, the past, and an external world is presumably not irrational or in any other way below epistemic par.

Are things different with belief in God?
--Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, on the faith all of us have

The .Plan also cites the restored Wikipedia on Platinga's arguments regarding the problem of evil and their general acceptance in the philosophical community

Plantinga's argument (in a truncated form) is that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."
--Wikipedia on an example of progress in philosophy

Then Webb (who is not LDS) comes out with an impressive article on Mormonism. It is impressive partly because of some great one-liners, but more for giving me new and accurate insight into my own religion. First some one-liners:

Deriding Mormonism pulls off the neat trick of making the devout and the godless feel as if they are on the same side. ...
Mormons are more Christian than many mainstream Christians who do not take seriously the astounding claim that Jesus is the Son of God. Mormonism is obsessed with Christ ...
The Book of Mormon has to be one of the most lackluster of all the great works of literature that have inspired enduring religious movements. Yet it is dull precisely because it is all about Jesus. ...
Still, the Book of Mormon raises a question for Christians. Can you believe too much about Jesus? Can you go too far in conceiving his glory?
Mormon metaphysics is ... Christianity divorced from Plato.

The main point Webb draws out that I had not appreciated as much before now has to do with how we perceive matter:

Best of 2011

Time for some intense naval-gazing. I wasn't going to do one of these, but then I enjoyed others' so much for the posts I missed that it seemed much more interesting.

Top Ten Posts of 2011
1. Google's statement on AUN's amazing internet usage, got a lot of doubting comments and a few  defending and very plausible explanations.
2. Nutrition Labeling, describing the new requirement that meat include information on calories from fat.
3. Unemployment: Leads and Lags - Breaking unemployment into separate decisions to hire or fire will give us a better indicator of where the economy is going (has been) than total unemployment.
4. AEA session on agricultural export bans during the 07/08 food price crisis.
5. Microinsurance in Kenya via cellphone
6. My first visit to AUN. Classes will resume Thursday the 24th
7. Low saturated fat diet vs. low simple carbohydrate diet
8. QE2 and food prices - debunking the idea that the Fed is causing global food price inflation
9. Food safety, food movements, and paternalism
10. Lit in Review: Food Demand -- Ethiopia and Speculators
Honorable Mention (because I thought it was fun): The socially acceptable price of fried chicken, also known as the political economy of fast food markets in South Korea.

Top Ten Posts of 2010 (in 2011)

1. My pictures of the Thorvaldsen's Christus and apostles statues, mentioned in a Church lesson this year.
2. Lit in Review: Grossman and Helpman, there has been steady interest in summaries and other papers that make use of the "Pay to Play" model of lobbyists.
3. Food in Africa: Too much and too little discussing the problem of getting food from food-surplus states to food-deficit states. There was never a large spike, but a steady stream of interest throughout the year.
4. High Hopes for Rwandan Agricultural Development
5. Food Security in Nepal which has been of increasing interest lately
6. Cutting Costs Through ... Fonts?? Some fonts go easier on the printer's ink
7. Population Health vs. Individual Health - commentary on macro vs. micro in economics and health
8. Ethiopian Monetary Policy - combines monetary policy, food prices, Ethiopia's development goals (food self-sufficiency), and growth prospects
8. Five from vacation: education, hyperinflation, and Chinese food safety.
10. Fed governor: if we could guarantee 5% NGDP growth, it would be great - I'm glad this made the list because I think it was my most significant post, interviewing Governor Dudley about what they are targeting and Sumner's policy.

Where did my visitors come from in 2011?

Understanding Isaiah in South Sudan

* - This was originally posted January 9, 2011. That post had too many visits from spam engines, so I have reposted it hoping to clear my cache a little.



The referendum on Southern Sudanese independence is today. It is a good day to pray, for all sides.

For those who are unfamiliar with Biblical geography (as I was until I did some searching) when Isaiah was speaking about the land of Cush, he really was thinking about the same neighborhood - Eastern Africa, south of Egypt, Ethiopia in particular which is next door in our modern maps. Chapter 18, which the video cites, speaks mostly of the woe on the "land ... beyond the rivers of Ethiopia" until the last verse, which speaks of their suffering and finally being gathered "to mount Zion." Chapter 11, which references Cush more explicitly, speaks of a second, Millennial gathering of God's people out of Cush and assorted lands to Zion. Zephaniah 3 similarly speaks of people beyond the rivers of Ethiopia being gathered (vs. 10) and bringing offerings to God (vs. 12) in the last days. Any other reference to Ethiopia I find is about it being smitten by Assyria or getting ready to join Egypt in afflicting Israel. So I see a lot more about a gathering out of the area, rather than divinely ordained political independence, but it can't be denied that it's a regular theme of the Old Testament prophets for God's people. [Quick bias check: do you think of them as 'God's people' because the south is mostly Christian or because they could have intermingled with Ethiopian Jews, or can you see the Muslim north as also part of God's people who accept Isaiah as a prophet and are living in the same area?]

Hat tip: Poverty News Blog

AUN spearheads Adamawa Peace Council

I am copying an email sent me by the school about a Community Peace Council that brought together Islamic and Christian leaders with government, security, and academic representatives to condemn the recent violence. Among the initiatives they are putting forward is a "Yola Day" celebration, originally scheduled for tomorrow but now postponed for the governorship election. Alhaji Joda, quoted therein, is the Chairman of AUN Board of Directors, among many other notable positions and achievements. The email follows:

A peace-building council, a fresh initiative of the American University of Nigeria to restore communal harmony in Adamawa State, was unfolded in Yola on Tuesday, January 10. Tagged Community Peace Council, the government-backed body comprises the leadership of various interest groups.

The path-breaking meeting was convened at the instance of the AUN board chair Ahmed Joda and the University’s President Margee Ensign following last week’s unprecedented marring of the Adamawa State capital’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of peace in Nigeria’s northeast.

In attendance were religious leaders, business men and government representatives from across the state, including representatives of the Lamido Adamawa, Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) as well as those of the Christian Association of Nigeria.  Others are representatives of the Nigeria Police Force, State Security Service, Muslim-Christian Forum, the Muslim Council and the traders’ associations.

These groups jointly denounced the violent attacks in the Adamawa towns of Mubi and Jimeta, especially as the capital Yola has been reputed for peaceful coexistence from time immemorial. They also called for the culprits to be brought to book.

Development Clashes in India

The Guardian on Polio: "If in India as a whole there are no more confirmed cases before 13 January, the country will have completed its first year without a new victim." That would leave only three countries where polio is endemic: Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. IUPDATE: The Gates Foundation twitter feed informs me that it has taken two million volunteers' time each year to accomplish this. Misunderstandings and religious tension - including the War on Terror - have been heavily involved in why it has taken so long in India:

Equally important in overcoming the last bastions of the disease, as in many parts of the world, has been the consent of local religious figures.
Over the past decade one of the biggest obstacles to polio eradication in India, as in Pakistan and Nigeria, has been the resistance of poor, largely illiterate Muslim communities such as those in and around Moradabad.
Even as the first campaigns got underway in the area in the late 1990s, local clerics began telling congregations that the vaccinations were part of a government plan, backed by the west, to make Muslim women infertile. ...
Torabi said that he had attended immunisation clinics in clerical robes to show "that a common Muslim man is able to trust the programme".
He added: "I told them that in nowhere in the Qur'an is it written that we should be unhealthy, or not take care of our hygiene and that if tomorrow our children are suffering from polio then they will not be able to do the prayers properly. Slowly they understood my point."

NPR has details on a conflict between a South Korean steel company -- that has agreed to purchase a large amount of government land to build a steel mill, electric plant, and a port, all while providing training and jobs locally -- and a number of locals whose land is also being taken from them as part of the deal.

Meanwhile, the Economist reports on the private construction of roads and other infrastructure in India, which started out quite optimistic but is now showing signs of overly high debt and other financial distress:

Over the next five years it predicts that infrastructure investment will reach a new high relative to GDP, with some $1 trillion spent, half of it by the private sector. The trouble with this rosy prediction is that the balance-sheets of many Indian infrastructure firms are as potholed as the roads they resurface.

They argue first that firms need more equity, not more debt. Fair enough. The second argument, however, is that the government needs to untangle some of the business transactions. This is an incredibly dangerous suggestion overall. Government's job is to set the rules so that companies act in open, transparent ways, not to wade in and make business decisions. That is an open invitation to corruption and rent-seeking.

Lit in Review: Case Studies about LDS in Africa

Martinich, author of the LDS Church Growth blog, has published a series of case studies on the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints globally, including on opening new cities for missionary work in general and two case studies in Ghana and Ethiopia showing how that was done specifically. Of interest to me, he recommends leaders use cost-benefit analysis in determining where new cities should be opened as part of the "homework" required for the revelatory process.

In Sunyani, Ghana, there were previously no members of the church in late 2010 when 6 young missionaries and one senior couple were sent in to form three "groups" (very small congregations ... yes, very small) in a city of less than 100,000. In the course of one year they had not only turned two of them into "branches" (small, but self-sustaining congregations, in this case around 50 people attending each week) but a fourth congregation had also been formed. The branches are being led by local leadership instead of missionaries.

In Awasa, Ethiopia, one family had been meeting since 2003 but did not become a branch until 2008 (average attendance about 20). When full-time missionaries were assigned in mid-2010, attendance rocketed from 20 to 70 by the end of the year. There are now four congregations there, though attendance has been highly variable and most of the members appear to be under the age of 21. Some local religious leaders also joined the Church during this time period. The groups are still heavily dependent on the missionaries for leadership and training.

In other posts, Martinich reports on recent Church growth in Sierra Leone and the temporary removal of senior missionary couples from the Democratic Republic of Congo following the election violence last month.

Big Bag of Ethical Endorsements

Tabarrok endorses GiveWell's endorsement of the Against Malaria Foundation as a good charity to give money to. This sparked a debate in the comments about whether you should really give money to just one charity or to many and why we give in the first place. One argument (Landsburg's) says that if your contribution is small relative to the size of their total budget and if you are primarily seeking to do the most good with your money, you should only invest in one charity. Your small donation won't run into diminishing marginal returns, so there's no reason to diversify. On  the other hand, if you are concerned about other things, you may want to do something else:

• if I receive increasing marginal utility to the number of organizations I give to (up to a point), then I'd rather give a small amount to several organizations than a larger amount to only one; [translation: I feel like I'm a better human being because I give to 10 organizations than if I only donated to one]
• if I am uncertain which problem is the worst, it makes sense to donate to several organizations working on different problems (say, measles, climate change, and gender discrimination); [Note: if this is your difficulty, you might want to check out the Copenhagen Consensus, whose Nobel Laureate panel agreed child hunger was global problem #1)

Boudreaux meanwhile endorses Caplan on the perceived moral difference between nepotism and nationalism:

Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism.  Almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. ...
Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups.  Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians?  Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads.  Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants?  Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs” in a self-righteous tone, then bask in the admiration of your fellow citizens.

Yglesias endorses cash donations, even as a way to teach children about the value of giving well:

Food drives do teach a lot of valuable lessons to kids. Until, that is, you learn that giving $10 will buy twenty times as much food for poor people aswould donating $10 worth of canned goods. Once you actually know the facts, then all it seems like you're doing is teaching kids to be too lazy to scrutinize the world. ... We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's okay to be indifferent between helping one family and helping twenty families. It's a huge difference!

Cook endorses de Tocqueville:

The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire … principles. There is no religion which does not place the object of man’s desires above and beyond the treasure of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses.

Because in part that is my tradition as well, I wondered at Wronging Rights  perceiving religion solely as being in conflict with human rights. I pointed out in my comments that this in part stems from a confusion about what is meant by "religion". I wrote in part:

Scrooge and a Big Bag of Christmas

Marron's Twelve Days of Christmas list for the global (but mostly US) economy, including 10 new Steve Jobses to rise and replace the fallen, 7 fed governors (we've been making do with 5 for the longest time) pushing for a 5% nominal GDP growth target, $3 trillion in budget cuts, and 2 new currencies (letting the Euro drop a couple countries).


Scrooge's name came from misreading the tombstone of Adam Smith's grandnephew? Are you sure this isn't a Dan Brown plot reject? If not, how about considering below the moral hazard of Scrooge:



In which a friend of mine tries to show a Pakistani a Currier and Ives Christmas, and ends up finding its deeper meaning with an Alaskan crab fisherman.


The First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included this in their Christmas message:

This joyful season will bring to each of us a measure of happiness that corresponds to the degree in which we have turned our minds, feelings and actions to the spirit of Christmas.May this Christmas season be a time of prayers for peace, for the preservation of free principles, and for the protection of those who are far from us. Let it be a time of forgetting self and finding time for others. 

C. S. Lewis on two types of causality, that of work and that of prayer: "Prayers are not always -- in the crude, factual sense of the word -- "granted". This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind."


Delicious satire: a response to Band Aid's "Do they know it's Christmas?" is found in Plaster Cast's "Yes, We Do." (HT: Blattman)

LDS Diversity and religious differences

CNN visits an LDS congregation in Washington DC and finds a very mingled, multicultural group:

On this Sunday, the Sacrament - what Mormons call the remembrance of the Last Supper and what other Christians call Communion - is said in French, a nod to the area's burgeoning West African population.
It is not a special multicultural celebration Sunday. For this growing Mormon congregation in northeast Washington, it's just another weekend.
“It’s 30% Caucasian, 30% African-American, and the rest is a combination of first-generation immigrants from around the world,” says Bishop Robert Nelson, the lay leader of this congregation. ...
“We’re in most of the free world right now,” Allen says. "We have a presence in Russia and Ukraine and the Baltic countries. We have a growing presence in Africa ... Nigeria, Kenya … then we have, Japan, Korea, Taiwan. There are small congregations in India, and the church is growing in those places.”
The church's membership has doubled since 1988, to 14.1 million Mormons worldwide.  Six million Mormons live in the United States. ... But like many other churches, there has been explosive growth in the LDS Church in Latin America. There are more than a million Mormons in both Mexico and Brazil. There are nearly a million Mormons in Asia and 300,000 in Africa, according to church statistics.

This was a lovely article describing the Church's growth in India an the faith of the members there [some of them, pictured right.]

Yglesias reports on a paper analyzing differences between Protestant and Catholic Swiss cantons, though he is also somewhat skeptical. "“Our empirical results suggest that ceteris paribus in a Reformed Protestant electorate support for increasing leisure time will be about 13 percentage points lower than in a Catholic electorate, and that support for government intervention will be about 11 percentage points lower."

Another study finds that LDS and Protestant youth who are active in their religions are much more likely (over 90%) to marry someone from their faith than are active Catholic or Jewish youth (60-70%). There is also a sizeable difference between less-active LDS and Protestants (60%) and less-active Catholic and Jewish youth (45%). Active LDS youth tend to marry earlier and are much less likely both to have multiple sexual partners or to cohabit before marriage than other youth and less likely to divorce or separate.

"We have this really unusual thing that is happening in America now," Brother Busby said. "The majority of the people don't marry until they are in their later 20s. Many of these churches have strong values and opinions about abstinence, but then couples feel like they can't get married until they are almost 30, causing more and more to eventually cave in and become sexual. Eventually they are worn down, something happens, and they don't stay together and then an individual begins to have multiple sexual partners."

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:

Random Observations: AUN and Nigeria

The campus has closed access to most blogspot blogs, so I haven't been able to work on this one. I'm going to have to talk to IT about this. On the other hand, I've been so busy with 5 classes, you've only missed a few posts.

Working at AUN is a little like being newlywed Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. Every day I come "home" to work and AUN plays the part of Donna Reed, asking me if I can guess what surprise she prepared for me today. Here are just a few of things that have happened in only the last two weeks:

• Yes, I saw you working on the drainage system in the parking lot yesterday. Is that done already? Wow.
• Oh my, is that hallway open to the public again? How nice.
• That bathroom has someone regularly checking to make sure it has toilet paper. I really appreciate that.
• The new logo looks wonderful over our building. Now it has a name everyone can see. Thank you.
• I like the paint job.
• New flowers? How lovely.
• Oh dear, I can tell you got that coffee machine working. Now the whole floor smells of coffee. Ah well, the Dean will be happy.

Every day is a surprise. Yes, it's still the old Buster House, or whatever its name was, but it's less and less like it every day.

I fully expected that the music in Nigeria would be heavily influenced by hip hop and electronica/techno/dance/pop. It is. I had not expected quite so much reggae.

I can also add that Nigerian pop relies much more heavily on Autotune than US pop and has a few other distinctly Nigerian stylings I have not been able to pinpoint.

The four TV shows I see regularly on the cafeteria monitors when I bother to glance up from my food and the work I brought with me:

1. Football. (No, the other one. The one Nigerians call football. As long as I'm out here, it gets the title.) Gooooooooaaaaaaaal!
2. Music videos. They look just like ours, more's the pity.
3. Reality TV shows, particularly of the Nigeria's Next Supermodel variety.
4. Moralizing Drama? Imagine Saturday morning specials rated M -- blood, gore, violence, bad language, and the potential for nudity, then at the end of the program they have a notice on the screen that "Many people in the real world actually have to deal with HIV/AIDS" or "sexual violence" or whatever the topic is today. "If someone you know ... call this hotline ..." It is a very curious phenomenon that I am doing my best to not find out more about.

Anything I was warned about before I came here has come true. Anything I was told not to worry about hasn't. It's been nice to have expectations largely met.

Nigerian fashion is wonderful. The students wandering around campus are far more tastefully and fashionably dressed by large margins than students at Cornell. (That doesn't mean all are modestly dressed by my standards either, but there is no desire to look grungy.) Though most people around town clearly cannot afford the same scale of tailoring, a surprising percentage are very well dressed given what I know the poverty statistics to be.

I have had very little trouble identifying the Mosques, which you can find all over the town along the main roads scattered at semi-regular intervals. Churches seemed far fewer until this week when I found five congregated next to each other on one side road - Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, and a couple more. I would wager this has something to do with frequency of use and the availability of transportation, but I don't have enough data yet to speculate on the exact relationships.

Some opinions about Romney

Sumner is "increasingly impressed" by him:

1.  Romney doesn’t consider global warming to be a hoax.
2.  He refuses to join the other Republicans in criticizing fiat money and/or calling for tighter money.
3.  He understands that jobs are the big problem.
4.  He has Greg Mankiw advising him.
5.  He recently came out for UI personal accounts, a very Singaporean solution that even Singapore doesn’t have. ...
Josh Hendrickson does a good job explaining why Romney was right in saying that corporations are composed of people.  Romney’s critics would argue that they are rich people, but that’s not at all clear.  What is clear is that corporations should not pay taxes (on capital income), rich people should pay taxes (on consumption.)
The best argument for Romney?  Look at the other GOP figures considered to be “major candidates.”

Yglesias was not discussing Romney per se, but his discussion comparing candidates who all appear to be the same answers some Republican fears that Romney is too centrist, too much like Obama:

LDS service in Latin America

In Seamay, Guatemala:

A retired civil engineer, Elder Curtiss supervised the construction of a water tank that helped bring water into the homes of the 2,000 villagers, who had never had running water in their homes [right]. In the meantime, he and his wife taught sanitation classes at the Church and helped begin construction on a new school that will soon have a library and a computer lab. While the Church paid for the water tank and facilitated construction of the school, the villagers did the labor themselves, which Elder Curtiss says helped them feel ownership of the changes occurring in their village.

In Brazil during an LDS national day of service, July 31:

More than 6,000 volunteers were mobilized to fight against dengue fever, a virus-based disease spread by mosquitoes, through a door-to-door education campaign. In Santa Catarina, near the Brazilian coast, volunteers gathered nearly 17 tons of food to be used by institutions for needy families.
Mormon Helping Hands volunteers also facilitated the donation of blood to local blood banks. Other projects included cleaning beaches, marshes, parks and public squares and the distribution of newborn kits for hospitals.

The LDS Africa day of service will be August 31, as we learned while meeting with the saints in Abuja. In Abuja they will be repairing a local school. I'm not yet sure what we in Yola will be doing because we only just got here.


I was also touched by this story of an LDS reporter who went to Tonga and found everything chaotic and not according to plan. She was advised that while there, many things would not go "right," but that she would find unexpected treasures that delight, comfort, and enable her to do what needed to be done.

As was evident in the Tonga airport, things in that island nation did not go as she expected they should. She did not have a telephone or Internet connection in her room. The building had no food services. The refrigerator across the hall started beeping at 3 a.m. — every night — and never stopped. And there were few road signs and no fast food restaurants in the country.
But — thanks to sweet direction from a faithful temple president — she found things far greater. Church members hung bananas outside her room. They helped her use a computer at the Church's administrative offices on the campus of the LDS high school. And they invited her into their homes for dinner.

Such a story sounds much more familiar than it did a few weeks ago.

The qualtitatively evil goatee

Just how evil is the goatee? I was pleasantly surprised at this chart which shows that the goatee typically favored by my Lovely and Gracious is almost as trustworthy as the sage's disheveled mop. However, if someone somehow failed to see my faint mustache, they would mistake me for something between questionable and unsavory.

Among the cultural stereotypes I've had to dispel in Nigeria is the idea that there would be a lot more beards around town in this far more Islamic area. Apparently it's not Islamic Nigerian custom to sport beards.

Dictators, apparently, are a fairly good group for facial hair on the lip. However, in aid circles "it is fair assumption to make that there is a reverse proportionality between the presence of a goatee and decision-making authority..." Maybe they question our field cred...

Stewards of the Earth

On GMOs, Roman Catholic bishops in Kenya are credited with "taking a new stance," and though it's only a small switch it's surprising to me how many people are against it. What's the new stance? If you're going to starve to death because of famine, it's really much better to eat genetically modified food than to die. ... I know, what was the policy before? Death before GMO? And there are people against this!? I think we need to call in Jon Stewart for this one.


On "over"population, I wish there were far more people arguing that babies are not the problem. Here is one argument from Yglesias:

It’s especially mistaken, I think, to try to look at children as a negative environmental externality. The beginning of wisdom here is to note that pollution isn’t “bad for the planet.” The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings, and to the continued existence of ecological conditions that are conducive to human flourishing. Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end? The goal needs to be to reconfigure human activity in order to make it sustainable over a longer time horizon. But sustained human flourishing requires both acceptable levels of ecological impact and also the continued production of new human beings.

On the lowered and falling prospects for jatropha, a new report by Wu and Kant addresses the Indian and Chinese largely failed plans:

It appears to be an extreme case of a well intentioned top down climate mitigation approach, undertaken without adequate preparation and ignoring conflict of interest, and adopted in good faith by other countries, gone awry bringing misery to millions of poorest people across the world. And it happened because the principle of “due diligence” before taking up large ventures was ignored everywhere. As climate mitigation and adaptation activities intensify attracting large investments there is danger of such lapses becoming more frequent ...

On the land grab, there is a new film out attacking the primary banana corporation in Cameroon. Among the interesting political economy issues:

"If you look at the congressman of the region, he is also the director of public relations of the company, the minister of trade of Cameroon is also president of the board of directors of the company."

An interesting paper showcases informal seed exchange between farmers for preserving seed diversity in Mozambique following a disaster. They argue food aid should include local seed varieties as part of the package to speed diversity recovery following a disaster.

The research established that nearly 90% of the farmers in the affected areas received cowpea relief seed immediately after the back-to-back calamities. Two years after, only one-fifth of the recipient farmers were still growing the seeds, while more than half sourced their seeds from markets. However, this did little in restoring cowpea diversity in the affected communities as the seeds bought by farmers from the market were mostly uniform, coming from other districts that grew just one or a few select varieties. 
On the other hand, about one-third of the affected farmers obtained seeds from friends and relatives living within the same or neighbouring localities to restock their farms – the same people that they have been exchanging seeds with prior to the disasters. This practice was the main reason why cowpea diversity was restored in these areas, the study showed.

Big Bag of Interesting Sentences

Marron: Zanran is Google for data.
 

Economist: The alternative-medicine industry plainly excels as a placebo delivery service.
 

Blattman: Why use spray cans when you can simply strategically clean dirt?  [right]
 

McArdle via The .Plan: [Affluent white people in Manhattan] tend not to view themselves as affluent because they believe that living in Manhattan is a natural condition, like psoriasis, rather than a very expensive personal choice.

Yglesias on racism and egalitarianism in colonial America: there are multiple dimensions of inequality and social privilege, and tradeoffs between them do happen at the margin.

Fromson (via The .Plan) tells us that health food was created by cults (I’ve always felt there was something cultish about health food fads): The 1974 edition of the Spiritual Community Guide, "The Yellow Pages of the New Age Movement," listed 2,470 addresses throughout the country. ... 31.2 percent of the total, were health-food stores or restaurants. ... [U]nlike large religions, which can sustain themselves with tithes and donations, smaller groups usually have to generate revenue through actual businesses—and the restaurant industry has low barriers to entry.

Some of my soon-to-be colleagues at AUN evaluated Nigeria’s mobile phone network, finding that service has not improved in the last decade. Among the problems they want the government to address is corruption in activating SIM cards: "The registration and activation of SIM cards for MTN and Airtel took beyond seven days in Yola. This has led to some level of corruption on the part of their agents or employees, who expect some gratification before they would upload the registration request to head office," the report said.

The Economist on India’s new foreign policy efforts: Mr Singh promised $5 billion of loans on easy terms over the next three years for Africans willing to trade with India, plus another $1 billion to pay for education, railways and peacekeeping. It is a steep rise in aid and assistance—last year India gave a mere $25m to Africa

The Trouble with Hell

Yglesias on the problems with believing in just a heaven and hell and that’s it:

Folk hell has two relevant features. One is that it’s really awful. The other is that being sent there is the act of a just and moral God not an arbitrary and capricious one.
One important consequence of this that I think has tended to carry over into secular ethical thought via Immanuel Kant … is that the rules of morality ought to be realistic and achievable. It can’t be that a just and moral God is sending 99.9 percent of the population to a fate of endless suffering in Hell. God is good, so he wants to punish the wicked. But by the same token, God is good so his definition of “wicked” must be something that most of us are able to steer clear of. If we recognize that some people appear to go “above and beyond the call of (ethical) duty” we can recognize their supererogatory goodness by deeming them “saints.” But your average, everyday non-saint has to be a realistic candidate for avoiding the fiery pits of hell.
This tends to rule out the kind of ethical principles that say really middle class Americans ought to be giving 65 percent of their incomes over to charity. After all, nobody does that, it goes against human nature to do that, so it can’t be that we’re all sentenced to hell for being bad people. And I think that a lot of secular people who’ve dropped the entire God/Hell scheme from their worldview still hold on to a ghost version of that line of thinking. But without hell there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct.

This idea of a minimum standard of conduct is, as Kant put it, really necessary if you’re going to limit God to sending people to one of two places. The problem with it is what it implies about heaven and the sort of milquetoast, “haven’t killed anyone today” lifestyle most people act as if they believed will get them there. If the unrepentant but not vile can go to heaven, it must be a place of what the Book of Mormon calls “uncleanness” or “filthiness.” The Book of Revelation talks about God “spewing” the uncommitted away.

One of the things I appreciate in the LDS notion of multiple “kingdoms of glory” is that God can be a merciful God and a just God as well. People receive all the happiness they are willing to take on the basis of the laws they are willing to follow. Exceptionally few people endure everlasting burning and torture, and only when they specifically choose it; yet we can do so without making God’s home a place of filth and spew.

Our understanding of the purpose of life shifts from meeting a minimum standard and being “good enough” to really choosing those things that make us happiest. Repentance and the power of the Savior’s Atonement to change people from bad to good and from good to holy take center stage, rather than if our works muster a C grade. God has promised that the greatest happiness is for those people who learn to enjoy living as His Son, and striving to become one with God and like His Son is the heart of Christianity. We use the term latter-day “saint” not to signify that we think we’re better than everyone, but that “the saints are the sinners who keep on trying.”

LDS in Everywhere?

Is Mormon conversion a viable development policy? Cowen answers:

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. …
 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.

So if governments (today) aren't going to mandate lifestyle conversion, where does religion come from? Baumard conducted a test to try to see how universal the idea divine justice or retribution is (which would underpin the idea of religion existing in order to improve human collaboration).

Dr Baumard’s volunteers read about a beggar asking for alms, and a passer-by who did not give them. In some cases the pedestrian was not only stingy, but hurled abuse at the poor man. In others, he was skint and apologetic. Either way, he went on to experience some nasty event (anything from tripping over a shoelace, via being tripped up deliberately by the beggar, to being run over by a car).
The question asked of each volunteer was whether the second event was caused by the passer-by’s behaviour towards the beggar. Most answered “no”, the assumption being it was the shoelace, or the beggar’s foot, or the car. But Dr Baumard also measured how long each volunteer thought about the answer—and he found that when the passer-by had behaved badly to the beggar and then suffered an unrelated bad incident, volunteers spent significantly longer thinking about their answers than when the passer-by had behaved well, or the beggar had tripped him up deliberately.

He also tried putting a picture of a pair of eyes on a survey about religious attitudes, and those being “watched” rated the morality of the questions more highly.

Another attempt to understand how religion binds us in societies by Whitehouse and Atkinson graphed religious rituals according to how unpleasant they were to their frequency. Most are not unpleasant, and the vast majority occur daily or monthly, but there is also a significant group that are very unepleasant but performed only once a lifetime or less than annually. I pondered where they would put serving a Mormon mission… Or where I would put it, for that matter. As growing, formative, enlightening, character building, and joyful an experience at it was, I have a very hard time calling it “pleasant.”

Interesting Sentences

The Economist: The world could be on the verge of a great management revolution: making robots behave like humans rather than the 20th century’s preferred option, making humans behave like robots.

HT: Grandiloquent Bloviator: “If you’re not the consumer, you’re the product.” Also known as: there is no such thing as a free lunch on the internet. If you can’t tell what the website is trying to sell you, they are either selling your eyes to advertisers or your information. 

Beckworth: “money is special: it is the only asset on every other market (i.e. it is the medium of exchange) and thus is the only one that can affect every other market.  Money, therefore, is what makes it possible to have economy-wide recessions.”

Marron: Sometimes, it’s more than $100 lying on the sidewalk: “You can sell 9,999 shares of The Donald …  at $0.52 a piece [on Intrade]. In just that one trade, you can pocket almost $5,200 of free money.” The only question is whether the government decides this is an illegal activity for influencing voting and elections. “For the latest Trump action, click here.”

The Economist: “The [United Arab Emerites] government aims to reduce the rising number of single local women by offering prizes of up to $19,000 to men who marry them.”
 

The history of political cartooning in South Africa: “I tried to define when South African cartooning started … all the way back to a cartoon which was published in 1819 by George Cruikshank who was a leading London caricaturist of the day. I called it the Cruikshank’s cannibal cartoon. It shows the white settlers being devoured by these cannibal figures – these huge, hulking monstrous figures. … For me that became an iconic cartoon, a prototypical South African cartoon.”
 

Yglesias on Chomsky’s denunciation of Osama’s death as an illegal assassination: “International law is made by states, powerful states have a disproportionate role in shaping it, and powerful states have obvious reasons to not be super-interested in the due process of suspected international terrorists or the sensibilities of mid-sized countries. Many people are pacifists and/or strong critics of western military power, and that’s fine. But it’s simply not the case that international law is identical with these policy preferences. On the contrary, one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers."

Calzadilla, Rehdanz, and Tol: “Trade liberalization tends to reduce water use in water scarce regions, and increase water use in water abundant regions, even though water markets do not exist in most countries “

Easterly and Freschi: “Belief in Hell raised … economic growth potential. … A different twist than the Protestant Ethic: Scared Rich?

LDS in Japan and elsewhere

One LDS missionary’s experience in the Japan quake:

For his part, Hiltbrand is itching to get back to the disaster zone.
“I really want to be in Tagajo helping people,” he says. “I have many friends in Tagajo and I don’t know how they are. I don’t know how they will clean it all up and I want to help.” ...

For example, under the direction of Branch President Brad Brough, members in Misawa donated food and warm blankets to those in need in nearby Hachinohe. Elder Holland [right] said that kind of caring is happening in wards and branches across the country.

MSNBC also praised Church efforts in Japan to supply aid, locate all members and missionaries, and prepare its people for just such emergencies so they can take care of each other and their communities.

Archeologists uncover 70 lead plates that COULD be authentic and, IF SO, COULD be quite significant as 1st century commentary on the resurrection and other Christian topics. IF they are what they appear to be, it would be another instance of people recording religion on metal plates, a phenomenon discovered in a number of places after Joseph Smith discovered the Book of Mormon on golden plates. At the time, the claim was that since no one had ever found metal plates before, the entire thing must be a hoax. Now that we know it was common, the claim is that there is no archeological evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon.

This year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Welfare Program turns 75. They are encouraging members everywhere to engage in a day of service this year to celebrate.

The Vietnamese governments’ comments on the LDS Church

The Africa West area of the church will be introducing internet access to many of its offices, about 64 locations.