Does activism make you happy?

Flickr photo by Matthew Bradley

I’m quoted in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Section in “The Upside of ‘down with’” (Drake Bennett, 10/11/09).

The article reports on a forthcoming study “Some Benefits of Being an Activist” by Tim Kasser and Malte Klar that activism is associated with happiness (2009, Political Psychology 30(5) ).

The Globe article neglected to quote me that there are lots of reason to support activism — it may increase people’s confidence in making a difference, it may improve governmental quality and leaders’ accountability, it may spark extra-governmental change or reveal the immorality of laws (as seen in the Civil Rights Era).

That said, I am skeptical, as the Globe article noted that it is activism per se that is causing happiness, based on our forthcoming religious research.  Religious Americans are more happy, but it has nothing to do with their theology, or what they hear from the pulpit, or a sense of calling.  It is explained by being in a morally-infused social network.  Praying alone or attending a church where you hear the sermons (but don’t make friends) makes you no happier.  Similarly if one looks at research by Alan Krueger and others, it is social activities that bring happiness.

So while I’m not sure that bowlers are doing as much for government accountability as protesters, my guess would be that they are equally happy.

Trust declining in all institutions other than the military

(Source Oregonian)

Preliminary results are in from the 2008 General Social Survey (GSS), the gold standard for social science research, which asks about trust in the following institutions: the military, the scientific community, medicine, the Supreme Court, education, organized religion, banks/financial institutions,  major companies, organized labor, the Executive Branch,  Congress, television, and the press.

Since 1976, trust in all these institutions (other than the military) has declined, many of them markedly. And since 2000, trust is down for all except the military and education.  Note: the polling was done prior to the financial crisis, which presumably has lowered trust in banks/financial institutions further, but nonetheless, trust in banks and financial institutions was cut by more than half from 1976 to 2008.

Trust in government which was around 75% in 1960 has plummeted, with the Executive Branch and Congress only having the trust of roughly one in 8 or 10 Americans, and the Supreme Court a bit more trusted (with roughly 1 in 3 Americans trusting it).

Young Americans dropping out of religion, other American Grace findings by Putnam/Campbell

Saying Grace - Flickr photo by ImCait

Robert D. Putnam (Harvard) and David Campbell (Notre Dame) recently previewed selected themes from their forthcoming book American Grace at the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that draws a select group of the leading journalists on religion in America.

As Michael Gerson, ex-speechwriter to President George Bush and one of the Pew Forum attendees, noted in his opening paragraph in a recent nationally syndicated and well-nuanced op-ed in the Washington Post:

“There is a book that everyone will be talking about — when it appears over a year from now. American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives, being written by…Putnam and… Campbell, is already creating a buzz. Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is the pre-eminent academic expert on American civic life. Campbell is his rising heir. And the book they haven’t yet finished will make just about everyone constructively uncomfortable.”

Putnam and Campbell’s analysis draws on the Faith Matters data they collected — a national, authoritative large-scale, hour-long survey on religion (beliefs, belonging and behavior),  social and political engagement, and religious and political beliefs.  They followed up in a very rare panel survey, reinterviewing the same respondents 6-9 months later to understand the stability of our religion and religious beliefs and to get traction on the issue of causation.  Their research also entails a dozen to fifteen in-depth case studies of religious denominations and churches of many stripes across all parts of the nation.

American Grace finds evidence of unprecedented polarization along religious and political lines, with politics driving changes in religious attendance rather than the reverse!  But amidst the deepening divides, they find a startlingly high level of support on all sides for religious diversity. Most deeply religious Americans reject the idea of a theocratic society run by Christian ayatollahs, while most secular Americans are quite comfortable with the idea of a society infused with religious and moral values.  In short, they argue, America today represents a historical rarity—a society that is both deeply religious and deeply tolerant.  [For example, Americans believe that Americans of other religions can go to heaven, even Christians of non-Christians.  Moreover, 8 of 10 Americans think there are "basic truths in many religions" and 85% of Americans say that religious diversity is good for the country.]

Here are a few of their interesting findings:

• Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40% have no religion today versus 5-10% a generation ago).  But youth’s religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics.  Putnam and Campbell expect, given the remarkable history of American religious entrepreneurship (from Mormonism to revival meetings to megachurches), that this disaffection from religion is temporary: religious entrepreneurs will rise to offer these young Americans the less politicized religion that they crave.
• Americans today inherit both religion and congregation far less than their parents and grandparents did and there is remarkable religious fluidity, with between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Americans changing religion from the one they were born into.  [The lower bound does not count a denominational shift like that from Methodists to Calvinists as a switch and only counts a change in religion from Judaism to Buddhism or from Baptist to no-religion.]  And there has been remarkably more entrepreneurial sorting of congregations and congregation shopping with congregants finding a religious home within a denomination that maximally meets their wants and needs (sometimes through stricter “churches”, sometimes through looser ones).
• There is a remarkable degree of religious bridging in our social networks: approximately 70% of Americans have at least some extended family of a different religion than they are, and this rises to 75% for closest friends, and 85% of Americans who live among at least some neighbors of a different religion.  The interlinkage of these religious networks helps to constrain any message of intolerance that parishioners get from the pulpit.
• Religious Americans are better citizens than non-religious ones (they give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, and join more, to mention a few markers of good citizenship). However, it is not their particular theology that predicts good citizenship, but the extent to which they are embedded in a friendship network of religious others (regardless of their religion). [Putnam refers to these religious friends as "powerful, supercharged friends."]  So it is religious social networks, not teachings from the pulpit that are key to them being 3-4 times more generous than the most secular Americans.

The American Grace book is expected to come out in the Fall of 2010.

Michael Gerson’s syndicated Op-Ed “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” is here. (Wash. Post, 5/8/09)

See “Getting to Know You” (Wall Street Journal by Naomi Schaefer Riley, 5/15/09) [which discusses the extent of religious bridging social capital in America, and how having friends of different religions changes ones views toward that religion]

Also, see “Religious People Make Better Citizens” (BeliefNet.org)

Excerpt below from “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” By Michael Gerson:

“[R]eligious affiliation has declined in America since World War II, especially among the young. The change was not gradual or linear. It arrived, according to Putnam, in “one shock and two aftershocks.” The shock came in the 1960s. As conservatives have asserted, the philosophy of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is an alternative to religious affiliation (though some of the rocking religious would dispute the musical part). Baby boomers were far less religious than their parents at the same age — the probable result, says Putnam, of a “very rapid change in morals and customs.”

“This retreating tide of religion affected nearly every denomination equally — except that it was less severe among evangelicals. While not dramatically increasing their percentage of the American population, evangelicals did increase their percentage among the religious in America. According to Putnam, religious “entrepreneurs” such as Jerry Falwell organized and channeled the conservative religious reaction against the 1960s into the religious right — the first aftershock.

“But this reaction provoked a reaction — the second aftershock. The politicization of religion by the religious right, argues Putnam, caused many young people in the 1990s to turn against religion itself, adopting the attitude: “If this is religion, I’m not interested.” The social views of this younger cohort are not entirely predictable — both the pro-life and the homosexual-rights movement have made gains. But Americans now in their 20s are much more secular than the baby boomers were at the same stage of life. About 30 percent or 35 percent are religiously unaffiliated…. Putnam calls this “a stunning development.” As many liberals suspected, the religious right was not good for religion.

The result of the shock and aftershocks is polarization. The general level of religiosity in America hasn’t changed much over the years. But, as Putnam says, “more people are very religious and many are not at all.” And these beliefs have become “correlated with partisan politics….There are fewer liberals in the pews and fewer unchurched conservatives.”

We ‘want’ diversity, but live increasingly in segregated communities

The Pew Center has an interesting research report showing this contradiction both for political diversity and for socioeconomic and religious diversity.

Politics: Americans profess to want political diversity in their communities — true of all Americans, especially for Democrats, Liberals, Whites and Blacks and more wealthy Americans: Note: for conservative Republicans it is almost a tossup with 49% wanting to live in a diverse political environment and 43% wanting to live around others who share their views.  That said, more and more Americans are living in politically segregated communities.  Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, whose interesting book “The Big Sort” showed how Americans are self-segregating politically note that these trends continued apace in 2008.  Nearly half of all votes (48%) cast for President in 2008 were in counties that sided with Obama or McCain by a margin of at least 20 percentage points (i.e., at least 60-40).   Ironically, even a clear majority of Democrats living in these landslide counties want to live among a mix of political views (62%) and by a razor thin plurality Republicans in landslide counties prefer to live among political diversity (46% to 44%).  [Note: Bishop believes that people choose to live among people who share their backgrounds, tastes and lifestyles, and that these preferences are increasingly correlated with political views.]

The Pew authors note it is unclear what is causing what: people who have moved more recently into landslide counties do not have statistically significant different views about diversity.

Race, Religious and Socioeconomic Diversity:

Patterns here are similar as with regard to political diversity.  Most Americans want to be among a mix of races, religions, people of varied socioeconomic classes.

The big divergence comes with attitudes towards immigrants.  Most Americans (other than liberal Democrats and Hispanics) prefer to live in a community with few immigrants rather than many immigrants, despite the research of Rob Sampson that shows that immigrants are more law-abiding than Americans on average.  [The researchers note that the form of the question had to be different for immigrants since just one in eight Americans are immigrants, and thus they did not ask whether you want to live in a community with a mix of immigrants and non-immigrants or not.  It is possible that the wording form influenced the responses.

So what's going on?  The researchers note that it could be a "talk-is-cheap" phenomenon with people giving answers that they think interviewers want to hear or "saying the right thing".  Political correctness held that the increases in answers among Americans of their attitudes toward race were just cheap talk, and then we find with the election of Obama that a majority of Americans ARE willing to elect a president who is black, so we should be wary of asserting that people are always lying about their feelings.

With regard toward racial attitudes we find that comfort levels are very different with regard to diversity among blacks and whites.  Whites prefer to live in communities that are say 15-20% non-white whereas Hispanics or Blacks often have an ideal *diversity* rate of 50% white and 50% black.  Part of what is going on in white flight is non-whites moving into neighborhoods and the percentage of non-whites rising above most whites' comfort levels.  As the whites leave, the percentage non-white rises higher and higher, causing more whites to move out, and the community winds up becoming predominantly non-white.

The report notes that black/white segregation has declined significantly since 1960 (when 70% of blacks lived in predominantly black neighborhoods), "but immigrant segregation as well as Hispanic and Asian segregation has increased in recent decades.  [Some of these measures are sensitive to what measures one uses to measure segregation -- the so called dissimilarity index or the  isolation index: as the population of groups rises or falls in percentage terms, their isolation indices can change formulaicly without them actually moving across neighborhoods.]  “Even with this increasing spatial isolation of the well-to-do, however, blacks are still nearly three times as segregated from whites as are affluent Americans from those who are less well off.”

Read the Pew Report “Americans Claim to Like Diverse Communities but do They Really” here.

The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt has an interesting talk on TED on where differences from liberals and conservatives originate from.

He notes that “being open to new experiences” is a key predictor of these divisions.  Liberals crave novelty, new ideas, travel. Conservatives like dependability, routine, order and are low on openness to new experiences.  (This was captured by Robert McCrae in “The Social consequences of Experiential Openness”, 1996).

He notes that we are trapped in our own way of thinking, much like The Matrix, such that when liberals “lose” the 2000 election they think that all the Red States must form a country called *Dumb@$#$istan*.

In any effort to help liberals and conservatives see the world from the other’s perspective he notes that nature provides an initial draft for our mind which experience then revises (Gary Marcus, 2004).  He shows fascinating graphs from 23,000 people who indicated their ideology and answered some questions on THe Morality Foundations Questionnaire at www.yourmorals.org concerning their beliefs.  He categorizes individuals along 5 fundamental moral dimensions, the first three of which are heavily entwined with social capital.  He says the 5 core dimensions for the moral mind (abstracting from anthropology, neurology, psychology, etc.) are:

1. Harm/care - as a species care a lot about others

2. Fairness/reciprocity

3. In group/out group – only among humans are there large groups that are united together for common purposes, and as a species we self-consciously produce or reinforce tribes (for wars, sports team loyalty, etc.)

4. Authority/respect – often based out of love

5. Purity/sanctity (either with regard to things like sex, or the foods we put in our body)

What’s fascinating is that if you chart individuals across parts of the world you find that in all societies, conservatives treat all these five factors as moderately important; liberals however focus almost exclusively on the harm/caring or fairness/reciprocity principles. In most societies, the increase in attention given by Conservatives to factors like Respect, Authority, Order, Purity rises much more sharply than the attention to Caring and Reciprocity falls. Haidt describes conservatives as having a 5-channel moral equalizer.

Haidt notes that Liberals speak for weak and oppressed; they want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. Conservatives speak for institutions and traditions; they want order even at cost to those at the bottom. Haidt thinks Edmund Burke had it right when he said in the wake of the French Revolution: “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.”

He notes that liberals take for granted that order will always be there, but describes an interesting experiment by Fehr and Gachter written up in Nature in 2002. People in the experiment played a game in which they could cooperate or defect and like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the pot grew larger through collaboration. At the end of the game, the pot was split equally among the players. Although all shared in the gains of the group, an individual could often make out more on any given turn by not cooperating. When they played the game with no forms of punishment allowed (a liberal’s paradise), cooperation started at a moderate level and declined each round. Cooperators got angry at others’ defections and decided to reciprocate, creating a race to the bottom. Starting in the 7th round, the experimenters allowed the participants to punish through the remainder of the game. Cooperation rates immediately jumped to 70% and then increased in every following round.  The authors talk about how altruistic punishment is essential to cooperation.

Haidt says our most remarkable wonder of the world is not the Grand Canyon (erosion writ large) but our ability to cooperate and live together in hostile environments (the Alaska tundra or the Arizona desert) and in big cities. He notes that this takes full use of all of our moral toolkit and requires sub-groups, organizational tools, moral incentives to rise to our best and say no our worst voices (in which Haidt thinks religion plays a key role).

In our Saguaro Seminar, participant Liz Lerman asked “why aren’t our minds large enough to encompass “both-and” rather than “either-or.”  Haidt sings a similar tune when he notices how many Eastern Religions realize that both halves are essential: like Ying/Yang or Vishnu the preserve and Shiva the destroyer working together; or a quote from a Buddhist leader “The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.  Haidt notes that our Righteous Minds were ‘designed” by evolution to: 1) Unite us in teams; 2) Divide Us against other teams; and 3) Blind us to the truth.  He says we don’t have to adopt moral relativism, but we can’t charge in to a situation saying “I’m right”, “You’re wrong”.  We need to first understand who we are and who they are; what are the reasons why others are doing what they are doing.  This will help us develop moral humility and ultimately be more effective in changing the world into what we want it to be.

Watch Haidt’s TED talk here.

The Scramble for Evangelical Votes in 2008

Evangelicals, who have voted solidly Republican since Jimmy Carter ran for President and talked openly about his being “Born Again” and the “lust in his heart”, may be in play this November, and tip the election decisively.

Standard bearers Barack Obama and John McCain have been invited this Saturday by Rick Warren, the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, most successful megachurch pastor ever, to air their views before evangelicals. (Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, has sold more copies than any book in American history with the exception of the bible and Warren runs a network of several hundred thousand megachurch pastors who have been trained by Warren or Warren disciples in how to run a purpose-driven church). Warren was here at the Harvard Kennedy School several years and gave a speech in which he disassociated himself from the political Right and said “I’m not for the Right. I’m not for the Left. I’m for the whole bird.” Warren has also gotten his networks increasingly involved in issues that in the past would have been Democratic issues, like AIDS in Africa, through the PEACE plan, or environmental issues or world poverty. That Warren himself is increasingly open to courting ties with Democrats is symptomatic of the crumbling of the Republican-evangelical marriage that was solidified starting with Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition.

Almost 8 of 10 white evangelicals supported Bush in 2004 exit polls and they made up a third of Bush’s total votes. A Washington Post-ABC News poll of registered voters last month showed McCain with a lead among this segment, but the ratio was only 3:1: McCain with 67% vs. Obama with 25% among white evangelical Protestants. It’s especially true that the younger white evangelicals are far more likely to be Independent or Democrat than their parents were, but evangelicals are also coming to realize either that Bush didn’t deliver them the promises that he made or that the issues that Republicans have stood for (strong military, tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.) are less in tune with how Jesus would have lived his life (caring for the sick and poor).

In a historic reversal, Democrat Obama appears far more comfortable talking about his faith than Republican McCain, despite the flap over Barack’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, than past democratic nominees. And Obama on Saturday will unveil the Believers for Barack website.

For more on evangelicals in the 2008 election, see “GOP Loyalty Not a Given for Young Evangelicals” (Wash. Post, 8/15/08) or Pew Research report on McCain’s weaker connections to evangelicals in 2008 election. And this Pew Research Report shows drop in white evangelicals attached to Bush and Republicans from 2001-2007.

For a fascinating discussion of how Rick Warren builds community (social capital) through his church (Saddleback), read Better Together (by Putnam and Feldstein).

Memorials and the healing of the spirit

I was at New England Yearly Meeting over the weekend.

While there, I had my first chance to see the AFSC’s Eyes Wide Open exhibit, or a piece of it. They have a collection of military boots of the soldiers killed in Iraq, in addition to a memorial to the Iraqi civilian casualties. The number of boots has become large enough that the boots no longer travel as an exhibit together but now appear in regional form, and I saw the boots from the New England soldiers.

Each boot listed the soldier’s name, military rank, age, hometown and state. Some of the boots had notes written by the families, or an American flag stuck in a boot. One had a teddy bear. Another, a member of an Eastern religion, had a little shrine to the soldier’s god. Some boots were pristine. Others muddied and scarred. It was a somber reminder of the horrible costs of a war that we never had to wage that has disproportionately taken the lives of “volunteers” with fewer other economic options. I took in the boots in prayerful silence and the shame for national bellicosity that has condemned so many innocent Americans and Iraqis to die.

One of the NEYM participants spoke later in a meeting for worship of a recent visit to Virginia Tech (Viriginia Polytechnic Institute), site of the horrible massacre in April 2007 by a student, Seung-Hui Cho, who took 32 lives and wounded many others before taking his own. The campus in Blacksburg, VA, sits close to a quarry and many of the buildings are made with hokum stone from that quarry.

The speaker told how she learned that in the days following the Va. Tech tragedy, mysteriously overnight a makeshift memorial appeared with 32 hokum stones in a semi-circle, with a ribbon for the name of each person who died in the shooting spree. Then a few days later, a 33rd hokum stone appeared with a ribbon for the perpetrator, Cho Seung Hui. There ensued some debate among the Va. Tech community about whether the perpetrator should have a stone at the memorial or not. Some argued that the stones should be only for innocent victims and ultimately the 33rd stone was taken away. The speaker and others discussed the Quaker view that there is that of God in every person, Cho included, and how this could have been a time for still deeper healing. Another wondered where the mother or father of Cho can now go to mourn for the loss of her son and the tragedy.

Va Tech makeshift memorial (on right of photo)

I recalled Randy Pausch’s view that everyone has their good side, but it takes longer to emerge in some people than others. (Incidentally, Randy didn’t make much of his religion but was a Unitarian Universalist who came to this faith as a member of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh; I don’t know, for example, whether he believed in God.) In any event, the NEYM experience and the Va. Tech memorial debate evoked a narrative that played out among comments in this blog surrounding Randy Pausch. De Selby (whom I have never met) was very critical of Randy Pausch in blog comments, claiming that Randy was not sick and was using his claim of pancreatic cancer to sell millions of books. At some point I cut off debate between De Selby and supporters of Randy since it no longer seemed constructive. De Selby asked why I was no longer posting his rants; I said I disagreed with his views, knew Randy and that Randy was a decent person, but that he was entitled to his anger and his views. I urged De Selby to channel his energy into leading his life in way that he thought was inspirational if he felt Randy wasn’t. There were many nasty posts of blog readers against De Selby which I chose not to post since it seemed unconstructive. Then Randy died. Some readers posted nasty blog comments mocking De Selby for his earlier views that Randy’s cancer was a fraud. I didn’t post those but I did post the blog comments of a few who gently asked whether De Selby wished to comment now and another who said alas De Selby’s claims of a fraud apparently had not been true. De Selby took this opening to apologize for his comments and noted that they came from having had family members who died from cancer who appeared far sicker than Randy. He thought Randy (who looked in good health) was just using cancer to get publicity. A circle of support opened around De Selby after his admission of wrong to show how he was proving Randy’s point that people do show their good side if you wait long enough. I don’t know what De Selby will go on to do, but I hope it will be worthy of Randy. You can read the original post here and the comments here.

These incidents made me reflect on when death and memorials are healing and when they are embittering. I’m reminded of the wise words of a cousin who said that she wanted the death of a loved one to be a point of growth, not the beginning of a drawing in, a calcifying depression and a disengagement from others.

Faith is the bird that that feels the light and sings

When the dawn is still dark.

– Rabindranath Tagore

Gallup takes daily pulse of American happiness/Krueger’s interesting happiness research

Since January 2008, Gallup has surveyed 1000 people a day to gauge their levels of wellbeing. [Confession: We were asked to recommend social capital questions that should be included on this survey.] Gallup plans to continue the surveying indefinitely into the future.

Gallup’s first report is out and picked up by the press. TIME calls it the *Dow Jones Index of Happiness*. The data is probably going to be less useful on a daily basis: i.e., *happiness off today in late-day profit-taking …* and more useful after months or years of this data has been gathered together.

This aggregated dataset could be used to construct county-level happiness estimates for most counties in the U.S. And then these aggregate happiness measures could be attached to other datasets to see how much individuals’ happiness is affected by those around them. For example, are the same individuals (controlling for education, ethnicity, years lived in the community, income, marital status, etc.), happier or not if they are surrounded by others who are happy. One could imagine that subjective wellbeing is contagious or conversely that if one is a lone misanthrope in a sea of happy neighbors that it heightens one’s depression (in the same way as New Year’s Day is a grim holiday for those who are not happy).

One could also use this aggregated dataset to determine how individuals’ levels of happiness relate to various activities (social activity, political activity, religion, sports participation, etc.).

Along the latter topic, Alan Krueger (a terrific economist at Princeton) and others have some of the most interesting new recent work on happiness. He used the American Time Use Survey methodology and privately gathered through the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS). The individuals whose activities were being recorded through PATS had Palm-like devices and were randomly pinged on different days and at different times of the day and had to report their levels of happiness, what activity they were doing, and who they were doing it with. [I'm glad it wasn't a picture-phone!] What was unique about Krueger’s data and approach is that he could compare levels of happiness for the same individual across the week. So some people (the Zen Masters or Buddhists) might be pretty happy doing everything from dish-washing to summiting Everest, whereas others are relatively unhappy even if their dream spouse has just said yes to their marriage proposal. The Time Use data enabled Krueger to measure the happiness of individuals relative to each individual’s baseline level of happiness and thus see which activities brought more happiness or less. And the most pleasurable activities (that I can write about) were….

Religion

and Sports and Exercise.

[Note: they chart happiness by looking at the percent of the time that happiness feelings in the activity exceeded stress, pain and sadness). On this score religion was highest with 92% of the experiences being pleasurable; pleasure is the inverse of the U-index they report where religion is low with 8% of experiences.]

The full study is called “National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life” and is written with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman (also of Princeton), David Schkade (UCSD), Norbert Schwarz (U. Michigan), and Arthur Stone (Stony Brook U.). For the results on religion, see especially Tables 5.2.b and 8.3 at the end of the National Time Accounting piece.

Robert and Lara Putnam on America’s growing class gap

Robert D. Putnam and daughter Lara Putnam (historian at Pitt) comment on the kerfuffle regarding Barack Obama’s inartful description of poor whites being bitter and clinging to religion in response to their bleak economic circumstances.

They note that, while much of the debate has focused on small town vs. big city respondents, the issues really relate to class gaps within the white community not city v. rural.

They asserts that the “growing disparity in formative experiences portends a more caste-like America, in which children’s life chances are increasingly dictated by their parents’ social class. The playing field is tilted more and more against the have-nots.”

As the Putnams note: “The real question is not ginned-up outrage over Barack Obama’s choice of words to describe the very real hardships facing many Americans in towns and cities of all sizes. The real question is whether his optimistic insistence that “Yes We Can” will resonate in those still-struggling Pennsylvania cities and towns that suffered a body blow with the loss of steel mills and factories a generation ago. Mr. Obama’s work as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago was predicated on the belief that even in communities beset by disinvestment, job loss and chronic frustration, self-confidence can be restored, collective bonds can be rebuilt and political efficacy regained.” They indicate that we’ll know soon enough if this message of hope resonates among white working class residents in these devastated PA communities.

The Op-Ed, which appeared Sunday (4/20/08) in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, called “The Growing Class Gap” can be found here.

Super Crunchers: the social effect

Ian Ayres interesting new read Super Crunchers predicts a world in which humans’ intuition is increasingly replaced by machines mining enormous databases of information for connections that humans cannot perceive (who buys what products or what products to recommend based on past purchases, what illnesses could explain what symptoms, who would make good employees, etc.).

The book leaves me wondering what the human effects will be of this. Ayres predicts that humans will provide input to this machines (e.g., providing the three potential product names that will be tested by human behavior, or programming the machines or figuring out how to store these data).

I think there will be other social effects upstream and downstream:

1) many workers will feel that their work will be threatened and refuse to code information that is in their head or miscode information to make the computers’ performance look worse and try to preserve their jobs. [The WSJ had a story maybe 8 years ago set in the deep south about workers not trusting management and fighting their efforts to code their knowledge, for exactly these same reasons.]

2) will recommender systems erode one of the benefits of friendships and psychologically make us feel that friends are less valuable? (i.e., we’ll rely more on the wisdom of crowds rather than the idiosyncracies of specific friend that may have less predictive accuracy in telling us things we might like)

3) America is almost unique for most Americans’ belief in God and participation in religion. Part of what underlies this involvement is a search for meaning and a belief in what is unknowable, must be taken on faith or experienced. In the same way as science seems to conflict with faith, the cold calculations and regressions of *Super Crunching* are at odds with serendipity, epiphany, and a mysterious unfolding. How will the tensions of *Super Crunching* and faith play themselves out: with lesser degree of faith; with limits on our adoption of super crunching; or with us living what appear to be paradoxical lives that celebrate faith and super crunching.

4) how will supercrunching help when faced with problems for the first time or where you need new paradigms?

5) will supercrunching lead to a race to the bottom: will humans following computer scripts preempt important interactions or flexibility?

I’d welcome your comments about what you predict Super Crunchers’ social impact will be.