Population, Urban Thinking, and the Vote

Did I ever mention that I was once a cartographer? It’s what I did as a summer job, putting myself through college. This was back before AutoCAD, so we created overlays by hand. Fun times. It’s always been kind of a family joke, because I’m not good with directions (that’s an understatement). In a city the size of Houston, flat enough not to have directional clues on the horizon, it’s helpful that we now have GPS systems wherever we go.

Anyway, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by maps. I’ve come across some recently that are for different purposes, but imply some correlation. Those red spots are urban areas. I think that's cities with over 100,000. 

Most populated areas of the US (excluding Alaska and Hawaii)

This next one shows that information by counties. Essentially half of the US population lives in those densest counties, including Alaska and Hawaii. The blue "half" includes 146 counties out of a total of over 3141. That's about 4.6% of counties.

 

Half the US population in the blue counties

Here's a map of where the most murders take place. According to the commentary accompanying this map, "The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68%of murders. Over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties."

Murder rates in the US by county

This next one is the 2016 electoral map, showing vote winners by county, with more intense color indicating wider margins of the vote.

2016 Presidential Electoral Map

You’ll need to use your imagination to overlay all four maps. But what you see is likely this:

·         Urban areas cover a relatively small part of the land.

·         A relatively small part of the land contains half of the population.

·         The urban areas coincide with high murder rates, and possibly other cultural differences from the less populated areas.

·         The urban areas tend to vote Democrat, while the less densely populated areas tend to vote Republican.

The maps may not show this, but people who live outside the relatively few densely populated areas think differently, on the whole, than people who live in urban areas.

It may be that people self-select. Maybe cities make people think that government control is the answer to all their needs. Or maybe people who think that gravitate toward cities, and maybe more self-reliant types live in the suburbs and rural areas.

Maybe people who are born in cities inherit the ways of thinking that surround them. And people who live outside cities think in ways the people around them think.

Maybe people in these different settings have different needs based on their surroundings. For example, if you live in a small apartment with very little storage, you can’t keep a lot in your pantry and refrigerator—and you probably don’t have a deep freeze in your garage (which you probably don't have). So you would have to shop for just a few items at a time, frequently. Or eat out a lot.

But if you have to drive half an hour to the larger grocery stores, you probably stock up once a week, have supplies on hand to make various recipes. And you probably eat at home more often than city dwellers do.

If you live in a suburban setting, you might do more shopping around, and your stocking up or eating out may have more to do with your family’s schedule than location of stores or home storage limits.

If you live in a city, public transportation is widely available, and you may be used to it. You may not even own a car, which is expensive to garage, expensive to park, and inconvenient to get around town in.

If you live in a rural area, you’re used to driving long distances for everything: food, school, entertainment, work. Having your own transportation is essential.

If you live in a suburb, your access to public transportation may be spotty. And getting where you need to go, among many directions and choices, is a lot more convenient—even essential—in your own vehicle. Plus, you can carry a lot more in a car, or maybe an SUV, than you can on a bus.

Whether it's causal or not, people in urban centers tend to think differently from people outside urban centers. And, because they're surrounded by so many people who think like them, they may think that is the only right way to think. They may not even question what they think.

If we go back 230 years, when the Founders worked out the Constitution, a main concern was that argument about population or state power. Why would a small state like Rhode Island go along with a plan that would forever give all the voice to a large state like Virginia? People in powerful, populated areas thought differently from those in smaller and/or less populated areas.

The Founders came up with a great compromise: two houses of representative government—one determined by population, the other determined by state.

The United States is not a democracy. And that’s a good thing. In a democracy, all you need is half the people plus one to want something, and that’s what you get. If half plus one decide you don’t deserve the money you earn—because of your beliefs, or your looks, or because that many people just dislike you—then they “legally” take your money. If half the people plus one decide people like you shouldn’t own property, or shouldn’t get certain educational opportunities, or some other freedom we take for granted, the mob rules, and you lose that freedom.

That's tyranny of the majority. Back then, the Founders knew better than to want mob rule democracy. Do we still know better?

After the last election, especially, there’s been a push to do away with the Electoral College, which is the representative way we actually choose our president. The Electoral College is based specifically on that compromise between power by population and power by the various states.

Here's Robert Reich insisting that, since the election didn’t go the way of the population majority, the results were wrong, and this should never be allowed to happen again, so he’s offering a plan to thwart the Electoral College without all the bother of amending the Constitution. It’s called National Popular Vote, or NPV. And it’s getting enough traction that you’d better be aware of it.

Let’s be clear. Rule by popular vote intentionally and forever disenfranchises voters everywhere but in the urban centers.

Look at those maps again. What you see is that, if we elected a president by population, the efficient way to campaign would be to win voters only in those most densely populated areas. Win those, and ignore the rest of the country. Always. And forever. Go ahead and ignore the needs and wants of the whole rest of the country, because you don’t need their votes.

Getting rid of the Electoral College—or any other scheme that grants power based solely on population—and you get the mob rule the Founders worked hard to prevent.Tyranny of the urban centers, we could call it.

PragerU has a brief video explaining why the Electoral College is a much better idea than the popular vote, and why NPV is such a bad idea:

Here’s one more graphic* to illustrate the value of the Electoral College to everyone outside the East Coast, the West Coast, Chicago, plus a few other cities.

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* Found on Facebook. I don't know the original source.

Scouts and Honor

Last week the Boys Scouts of America changed their name to reflect a change of accepting girls. This week major Scouting sponsor, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, announced they will discontinue their association with Scouting at the end of 2019.

President Thomas S. Monson with Scouts
April 13, 2002
image from here

It looks like cause and effect. But I don’t believe that’s really accurate.

So, what I’m about to present are my personal views; I am in no way a spokesperson for either the Church or Scouting. But I have an insider’s view of both. So, maybe I can help offer some understanding.

Let’s start with what I see as the Church’s viewpoint.

For the past century the Church has adopted Boy Scouting as the activity program for their young men, starting with Cub Scouts at age 8 (so not including Tiger Cubs at age 7), and up through Boy Scouts, including Explorers, Venturers, and/or Varsity Scouts for ages 14-17. This has always been in addition to the larger youth program that teaches young men to grow into spiritual leaders in their homes and communities.

A year ago, the Church announced that it would discontinue the Boy Scout program for boys age 14+. For a very long time, the Boy Scout program for older boys has not been a good fit for the Church. With few exceptions, the Church has sponsored a troop for each congregation, called a ward, including the units from Cubs on up. But outside the Church, the older groups are designed to attract young men (and some young women) with similar individual interests, rather than the general interests of all the Boy Scouts in a unit’s neighborhood. So youth leaders have long struggled with various iterations, trying to make the program work for all the young men in a particular ward.

In other words, Boy Scouting has never been all there was for youth in the Church, because it has never been enough.

Add to that the fact that, for the past 22 years (since February 1996), there are more Church members outside the United States than inside. While Boy Scouts exist in some other countries, the reality is that the majority of boys in the Church have never had access to Boy Scouting.

That means the Church has long been developing a full, worldwide program for youth. That, program, along with changes for young women, was what was announced this week.

When the Church discontinued the Scouting program for older boys, the Church nevertheless paid sponsorship throughout the year as though they were still sponsoring those boys. In other words, the Church went out of its way to prevent its withdrawal from doing harm to the Boy Scout national organization.

Boy Scouts perform flag ceremony in the Mormon Tabernacle
in honor of Constitution Day celebration September 18, 2009
image from here

Now we come to the announcement this week. The Church is giving more than a year and a half for the BSA to prepare and rearrange their budget and planning. It will be a significant adjustment. As the news has been announcing, that’s a loss of about 425,000 boys nationwide. In the Sam Houston Area Council, where we live, about 3,400 LDS boys in 221 units make up about 10% of Boy Scout membership, and about 17% of the total units, along with their budgets, a portion of which goes to support the Council and the national BSA organization.

In Utah, I don’t have access to the numbers, but I’m guessing Boy Scout membership is probably north of 70%, and the budget might be more than that. That will include property, such as scout camps, which are outright gifted to the Boy Scouts.

Non-LDS boys have always been welcome in LDS troops. And after the pull-out, LDS boys will still be welcome in other community troops. But, in Utah especially, it will be a much smaller organization than it has been.

The Church could have simply made the announcement and gone ahead immediately. If they were reacting to last week’s name change or something else, that’s what you would expect. Instead, they’ve tried to make the transition as easy on BSA as possible. Why would they do that, unless they wanted the Boy Scouts to continue on without them?

In the joint statement made by the Church and BSA on May 8th, they say this: 

While the Church will no longer be a chartered partner of BSA or sponsor Scouting units after December 31, 2019, it continues to support the goals and values reflected in the Scout Oath and Scout Law and expresses its profound desire for Scouting’s continuing and growing success in the years ahead.

Scout Oath and Law

The Scout Oath and Law, as I’ve written before, are a very good guide for civilization. [In fact, I’ve written about Scouting here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

About the timing. For those paying any attention, the Church has been going through some major changes in the past few months. Our beloved Prophet Thomas S. Monson passed away in early January; he was a lifelong champion of the Boy Scouts, but it is obvious that any changes happening now were in the planning stages for a long time and had his full support. His successor, President Russell M. Nelson, is age 93 already—older than President Monson was. But he just finished a worldwide tour, and has been so full of energy it leaves many of us breathless. (He still skis with his grandchildren, by the way.) He is wasting no time putting changes into action.

None of these changes are doctrinal. All of them are designed to put more responsibility for our own spiritual growth on ourselves, from children on up, and for helping us put the gospel into action by ministering to one another. This has included changes in local priesthood quorums, retiring the visiting teaching and home teaching programs and changing them into more integrated ministering programs. There have been changes in what young people (ages 12+) are able to do in our temples—which follows lowering the ages for missionaries, a change that came about just a few years ago.

We’re getting so we’re expecting a new announcement every week. So the announcement this week—which was expected eventually, after last year’s ending of Scouting for 14+—is timed for the Church’s needs, and not in response to any BSA policy or name change.

Now for my view of the Boy Scouts.

Boy Scout badges, image from here

Here’s a brief timeline related to current issues:

·         1907 Boy Scouts are founded in Great Britain by Robert Baden Powell.

·         1910 Boy Scouts of America begins founded by W. D. Boyce.

·         1912 Girl Scouts are organized in America by Juliette Gordon Low, patterned after the Boy Scouts, but always a separate organization.

·         1913 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopts Scouting as its activity program for boys.

·         1969 BSA begins allowing young women to join Explorer posts wherever chartering organizations allow.

·         2000 After years of litigation, BSA prevails in the US Supreme Court’s ruling in “Boy Scouts of America v. Dale,” which means BSA and other private organizations have the right to set membership standards, including exclusions of homosexual Scouts and Scout leaders.

·         2000+ Despite the legal victory, BSA faces persecution and exclusion from organizations, institutions, and facilities over their exclusion of openly homosexual members (as Scouts or leaders).

·         Meanwhile, BSA tightens its training and rules to prevent molestation of youth, even as NAMBLA prints materials telling predators how to infiltrate youth organizations, particularly BSA[i].

·         2012 BSA’s 11-person national committee reaches “unanimous consensus” that continuing to exclude homosexuals from Scouting was in the best interest of Scouting.

·         2013 More than 1400 BSA volunteer leaders nationwide vote to accept all boys into Scout troops, regardless of sexual orientation; local entities retained the ability to abide by church beliefs. This became policy January 2014. Mr. Perry, the National President, said, “Everyone agrees on one thing, no matter how you feel about this issue, kids are better off in Scouting.”[ii]

·         2015 In July “open or avowed homosexual” adults were no longer banned from youth leadership.

·         2017 In January BSA began allowing transgendered boys (i.e., biological girls who see themselves as boys) to participate in BSA troops.

·         2017 In October BSA announces it will begin having Cub Scout dens for girls, and in 2019 will begin having regular BSA troops for girls (local units will have separate dens or troops for girls, and will not include girls within boy troops).

·         2018 On May 2^nd a name change was announced, from Boy Scouts of America to Scouting BSA, to accommodate the addition of girl troops into Scouting.

·         2018 On May 8^th The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announces plans to end its relationship as a sponsoring organization as of December 31, 2019.

The Boy Scouts have been pummeled for literally decades now, by people who, rather than start an organization catering to their own values, have insisted that the Boy Scouts become something different.

You’ve heard of the slippery slope. The Boy Scouts continue with the same Scout Oath and Law they have always had. But society around them, instead of recognizing those values, has derided and persecuted them.

In our Church, youth with same-sex attraction were never disallowed from any troop I’m aware of. However, there’s an assumption—because it’s in the Scout Oath as well as part of the religion—that the boys are not sexually active. A boy with same-sex attraction would receive the same level of care and attention as any other boy (maybe more, simply out of concern for him in his challenges). But the Church would never have supported a boy’s acting on those impulses, any more than it would have encouraged heterosexual boys to be sexually active.

Legally the Boy Scouts won their case in 2000. And they continued to stand strong for yet another dozen years. People who insisted that homosexual sex was not a sin told the Boy Scouts, who weren’t even accepting illicit heterosexual sex, that they needed to conform. The method of persuasion was persecution and pressure, to the point that Boy Scouts could no longer use public facilities, including many schools. Some schools even refused to allow them to recruit, or pass out informational flyers—while Girl Scouts and other organizations were allowed.

Every step of change has included considering, “How can we do what’s best for the boys?” Sometimes the decision went something like, “If we give in on this point, the pressure will go away, and it will have very minimal impact on the organization overall.” That was certainly true for allowing boys with same-sex attraction.

At this year's District Awards Dinner,
Mr. Spherical Model accepted
the Chartered Partner Award on behalf
of our local Church jurisdiction

Later, with the increased protection policies and training, there was less risk for allowing homosexual adult leaders, although there was the loss of leaders who would model only moral sexual behavior—i.e., marriage. I would have preferred they’d stayed strong on this. Unlike for boys, at this point it became about, not what a boy thinks, but what an adult does.

The transgender policy was another step with very little impact. The number of actual transgender teens is tiny, and the number of those individuals who would choose to join themselves to an organization with the Scout Oath and Law would be much tinier. And local organizations always retained their freedom.

Now, about girls joining.

The insider view looks more family friendly than feminist. What happens is that families who support their sons in Scouting also have girls. Those girls end up tagging along at those Scout activities. I did this myself, decades ago, as an unofficial Cub Scout. I did the field trips and the crafts. I just didn’t get any badges—and I didn’t get to make a pinewood derby car. But I was there, because, where else was I supposed to go?

So girls have been hanging around, unofficially for a long time. Or, sometimes the family gets split up trying to support a Girl Scout troop as well. During the few years when we had Boy Scouts and a Girl Scout at the same time, we divided duties that way, and kept ourselves very busy. But, as I’ve said before, the Girl Scout program wasn’t ever up to the level of the Boy Scout program.[iii]

What most families who will have girls join Scouting want is to have the whole family together. That does not mean the girls will be in the boys’ troops. It means that they’re hoping the sponsoring organization—their school, their church, their Kiwanis Club—will also sponsor a unit for girls. Then they can share some of the leadership, and can coordinate.

So you might have the boys’ troop meet on one side of the school cafeteria and the girls’ troop on the other. The family goes together to the same place at the same time. And the girls get a better program than they were offered before.

Girls have been part of older Boy Scout units—the Explorers, including the Sea Scouts—for decades, even in the same troops as boys. This is simply an expansion to younger ages, with more continued separation at the Cub and Scout levels.

Would I have liked this opportunity for my daughter? I might have. Much of it was about associations with friends, and meeting her needs. So I can’t be certain I’d have signed her up. But, because of my familiarity with Boy Scouts, I would have been willing to consider it.

It would be interesting to see the alternate universe in which the Scouts never gave in at all, regardless of the persecution. But, at the local level, among those who give all those thousands of volunteer hours for their kids, they’re still going by that Scout Oath and Law. And I hope they can hang on for the next generation.

---

[i] Jeffery Curley, age 10, was raped and murdered Oct. 1 1997. The perpetrators had in their possession NAMBLA materials, as well as a book, “Rape and Escape,” published by NAMBLA. They used an idea from the NAMBLA materials to lure the boy. The family sued NAMBLA for its contribution to the murder of their son; the ACLU defending NAMBLA pro bono, claiming NAMBLA has 1st amendment rights to free speech; ironically, the ACLU requested a gag order against the prosecution and asked for witnesses who testified in the Curley case concerning the NAMBLA information to be disallowed.

[ii] “Boy Scouts End Longtime Ban on Openly Gay Youths,” by Erik Eckholm, New York Times, May 23, 2013:    https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/us/boy-scouts-to-admit-openly-gay-youths-as-members.html

[iii] We participated in Girl Scouts up through her Silver Award. But changes like this show why we didn’t want to further the relationship: “Girl Scouts Now Allowing Adult Males to Share Female Restrooms and Changing Rooms With Children as Young as 5” It isn't feminists who want to join the Boy Scouts; it's people who don't want that agenda pushed on their daughters who are likely to join Boy Scouts.

Disparate Impacts

There’s a new Uncommon Knowledge interview with Thomas Sowell, with the release of a new book—his fifth since turning 80. The book is called Discrimination and Disparities. I’m glad he keeps writing, even though he’s no longer doing a weekly column; it’s never enough.

Thomas Sowell, Uncommon Knowledge, May 3, 2018

Much of the discussion is about the term disparate impact, which Wikipedia defines this way: 

Disparate impact in United States labor law refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral.

It’s a controversial idea, because it’s ostensibly about fairness while being literally unfair. And it introduces into law the idea that a person with no intention of discrimination is held accountable as if there were mens rea (intent to commit a crime) based on outcomes that simply appear discriminatory.

Interviewer Peter Robinson starts the discussion with a quote from the book:

The disparate impact standard represents a major departure from American legal principles where the burden of proof is usually on those making the accusation.

Disparate impact is a tool used in cases of employment, housing, and credit, among others. And, for the sake of setting up the discussion Robinson asks,

the latest book by
Thomas Sowell
cover image from Amazon

But, Tom, what about the notion that we need a disparate impact test because discrimination, particularly racial discrimination, particularly against African Americans, is so deeply embedded in the fabric of this country that people discriminate all the time without even being aware of it?

And Thomas Sowell answers:

If you're going with that assumption, then you don't need the disparate impact theory. You just simply say what you've just said. To dress it up as the disparate impact theory, the disparate impact theory depends upon the truth of the assumptions.

What assumptions?

This implicit assumption that all of the groups are very similar in their capabilities, what they want to do and so forth. When you look at facts, you find disparate impacts everywhere.

For example, he looks at three groups of immigrants: Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Disparities depend on what you’re looking at:

If you look at things like politics, the Irish were so far more advanced politically than either the Italians or the Jews that for generations you had Irish politicians representing neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Italian or Jewish.

Many disparities are natural. Like tornadoes.

You find 90% of all the tornadoes in the entire world occurring in one country, namely the United States. And only in a part of the United States. You don't hear about tornadoes in Maine or in the Pacific Northwest. So think how much land area there is in the world, and 90% of them right in this one little place.

If disparities are not an inherent evil, but simply part of nature, do we accomplish something good by adjusting to get rid of the disparities? Or do we accidentally cause some other problem?

Maybe we should start by questioning the assumptions. Are differences necessarily the result of bigotry? Or are some differences the result of personal choice and ability?

Sowell’s book refers to a 50-year study of 1500 people with IQs in the top 1%.

What I point out in the book is that the disparities within that narrow range, the top third, for example, had more than 10 times as many post-graduate degrees as the bottom third, among people who were all in the top 1%. So there were obviously many other things that had to come together. The other thing was that two people who failed to make the 140 IQ cutoff ended up getting Nobel Prizes in physics. There's nobody among these 1,500 that did, so obviously there have to be a lot of things coming together.

So intelligence is not the differentiating factor. What is? Family background.

It doesn't matter how much brain power you may have, if you're not raised in a home where people are thinking, where they're doing intellectual things, you're not in the same position as someone with the same IQ who's in a family that has that kind of background.

I talked about that in the last post. It’s not really about victimization, or a victimized underclass. It isn’t even much about innate ability. It’s about family.

Government interference—on the assumption that society is doing something evil, such as bigoted oppression—doesn’t get the positive results it claims to want, because it isn’t addressing the actual problem.

Dr. Sowell even gives examples of societies where there is actual racism, and government interferes by enforcing that racism, and yet people flout the law when it makes economic sense to do so. It happened in Apartheid South Africa. More black workers were hired than white, even in jobs where it was illegal to hire blacks. More blacks than whites lived in white-only neighborhoods.

Quoting the book, “Black incomes in 1900 were almost half again higher than they had been in 1867 to ’68.” So, in the American South, after the Civil War, where employers had agreed to suppress earnings for black workers and sharecroppers, black earnings had a higher rate of growth than the American economy overall.

The market is more powerful than racism, or any other bigotry.

Dr. Sowell explains this related to minimum wage laws:

If you have a minimum wage, and that's set above where it would be in a free market, then that means you're going to have more people applying because there's a higher wage, and there are going to be fewer people hired because of the higher wage. So you're going to have a chronic surplus of applicants.

Now, in a market where there's, say, a chronic surplus of qualified people of, say, 200, and there a hundred blacks, for example, who are qualified, then if the employer refused to hire all hundred black qualified people, he still has 200 others he can call on, and that's it. And it's cost him nothing. But if there's no minimum wage now, and there's no chronic surplus, every time he turns away a qualified black person, he has to have someone who's not black who's also qualified that he can hire….

[And he may not be able to find that person] at that price. Therefore, the price will have to go up, so it's costing him. And if he doesn't raise the price, he's going to have to keep his customers waiting because he doesn't have enough people to do the job.

In short, minimum wage laws are going to have an intensifying effect on existing racism, while free markets tend to lessen discriminatory hiring.

Another example of unintended consequences is housing in northern California, where home building is restricted in the name of saving the environment. The result, of course, is higher housing costs. And then officials ask, “What can we do to get more affordable housing?” The obvious answer is, build more houses. Instead, they appoint a committee to study the issue. Dr. Sowell quips,

It's like appointing a blue-ribbon committee to go out there and find out why the ground is wet after the rain. I think it's almost miraculous the way they can avoid the obvious.

So, what is the disparate impact of the higher housing costs resulting from government imposed home-building limitations? Blacks, among others who started out lower income, instead of moving up in the economy, get priced out—what Peter Robinson calls a sort of “soft version of Jim Crow.”

The progressive/liberal/tyrannists tend not to apply their disparate impact rules on their own “good intentions,” however. Because they want to keep feeling good about their intentions regardless of the harm they do.

Here’s another quote from the book:

The plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, prior to the expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration. There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the war on poverty began.

He lists several more disproportionately negative effects for blacks. Quoting the book again:

In the United States, murder rates, rates of infection with venereal diseases, and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies whose steep declines were suddenly reversed in the 1960s. Nowhere was rampant violence and other social pathology as common among low-income people in the first half of the 20th century, when they were more deprived, as in the second half, when the welfare state had made them better off in material terms.

Since we’ve been talking about sex education in schools recently, let’s look at that. Sex education was implemented in schools in response to disease and teenage pregnancy—both of which were going down on their own. By 1960 the rate of venereal disease was half what it was in 1950. Then they started teaching it in the schools, and rates rose dramatically, as did teenage pregnancy. And that hit blacks particularly hard.

In 1960 two-thirds of black children were being raised in families with both parents. By 1995, two-thirds were born out of wedlock. Today 85% of black children live in single-parent households. And that’s while, in some places, like New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born.

We know—the data is astoundingly clear on this—that children fare best in homes where they are raised by their two parents. The results of failure to these children is calamitous.

As Thomas Sowell puts it,

It’s not the legacy of slavery that destroys the African American family. It’s the legacy of the welfare state that destroys the African American family.

And, if you want to destroy or oppress a people, the simplest way is by destroying the family—the basic unit of civilization.

Did they do it on purpose? I’m not willing to go that far. But, if they had intended it, they couldn’t have done a more thorough job.

Dr. Sowell puts it this way:

For one thing, it [the welfare state] makes it unnecessary for fathers to support their offspring. And in fact, it makes it counterproductive in many cases. A very poor man who might be able to support his family realizes his family will be better off without him. But on the other hand, someone who's strictly irresponsible, either the man or the woman or both, now pays no price for being irresponsible. The taxpayers pay the price. And actually, the harm done to the taxpayers, which is serious, still is not comparable to the harm done to the families, especially the children.

Thomas Sowell is an economist; he’s about data. Let the data take you where it takes you, and then see what conclusions you need to draw. You don’t start with a premise and then dismiss data that doesn’t fit. Sometimes there’s an outlier, but sometimes it’s a clue that your original assumptions are wrong.

Disparate impacts—or simply differences—are not necessarily the result of a nefarious plot even so secretive that people don’t know they’re thinking it up. The simpler answer might be that there are a lot of factors—including personal choice—that go into various differences.

But allowing for freedom, and free markets, along with encouraging strong families—that gets us to better, more positive outcomes overall, than interference gets us, no matter how well intentioned.

Maybe we ought to switch it around: hold government accountable for negative impacts of their interference, and put a stop to it. And stop holding individuals and businesses accountable for discrimination that was never intended, thought, or practiced.

Disparate impacts, then, are really just a narrow, limited view, of one portion of a larger picture that, if you could see the whole picture, would become nothing worth acting on.

How do you know whether a particular policy is one of those, or something really worth acting on? Try applying this Spherical Model axiom about unintended consequences:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Class, Culture, and Moving Upward

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been reading J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It’s been on my reading list since late 2016, when it made a stir by explaining why so many people who used to vote reliably Democrat voted for Donald Trump.

I heard about the book when the author gave an Uncommon Knowledge interview. What interested me wasn’t so much the explanation for Trump voters, although that’s interesting. But it explains the value of social capital, and most particularly the value of strong families.

J. D. Vance (right), screen shot from Uncommon Knowledge

I appreciate Vance’s ability to identify the social and psychological issues, with a clear, insider’s view of what policies haven’t worked and why. By the end of his Marine Corps service, he was politically conservative. And life—if you can understand it from the inside—probably leads naturally to that viewpoint.

What surprised me much more than I expected about the book is how much his story resonates with me personally. So I’m working through that too.

But I’d like to share a few of Vance’s insights, because I think it’s another support of the Spherical Model, with the political, economic, and social spheres all interrelated.

In his late teen years, J. D. worked at a local grocery store. He handled plenty of people on welfare, and gained some insights:

I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Mamaw [his grandmother] listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole. Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mind-set when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be (pp. 418-420)[i].

He adds in some outside commentary at this point:

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re getting’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”[ii]

He goes on to share a bit more of Mamaw’s seemingly contradictory feelings—more like “those hateful Republicans” than the Democrat voter she was:

Hillbilly Elegy
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She’d rant against people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for doing too little the next….

Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat…. I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse (pp. 223-227).

Even though he wasn’t much of a student in his teen years, he was a curious reader. This section strikes a chord with me:

I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state (pp. 432-434).

Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart talks about some of the same issues, although more generically about the poor and their behavior that keeps them from social and economic mobility, rather than about blacks in particular. The wealthiest zip codes live a certain way, morally, but they don’t seem to dare share those secrets with the working poor.

Vance continues:

It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith (p. 435).

In Vance’s case, he manages to graduate from high school, spend four years in the Marines, graduate from Ohio State, and then Yale Law School.

It turns out that, for someone of his income level, Yale Law School is not only a better education, but a cheaper option than anything else he might have tried. They have needs-based financial aid available just for such cases. But students like him have no way to know that. As he says, “That first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world worked” (p. 626).

An earlier example is the picture of him and his grandmother, near the end of his high school years, trying to fill out financial aid forms, being asked about his father’s income. But his legal father had been totally absent from his life for over a decade. Obviously, the form wanted to know what other resources the student had, and clearly his father wasn’t a resource. But, to them, puzzling through something they have no experience with, they’re trying to figure out how to get this unknowable piece of information in order to comply to the powers that be.

This was so familiar to me. Back in junior high (7^th-9^th grades) I was earning straight As, but at that point in my life, I was completely unaware that there was any possibility I could ever go to college. The message I got was, people like us (i.e., lower-middle-class people like our family) don’t get those kinds of lives.

By 9^th grade my friends planted the idea that, of course I could go to college; I just needed to get a scholarship. I thought that meant I had to be the one, smartest, highest GPA student in the high school, and once we combined with another junior high for high school, I didn’t believe that could be possible. (Fortunately, even when I thought that, I didn’t give up. Eventually I got scholarships—after filling out all the forms myself—that covered more than half my tuition, and I graduated, paying my own way through, without debt.)

When I asked about college at home, I was told, “Why would you want to do that? You’re just going to be a housewife.” And, “You’ll have to pay for that yourself, because we’re not paying for it.” Also, I wasn’t allowed to work unless my mother decided to be willing to drive me to and from—walking alone as a girl was not allowed. There was also a slightly more subtle, class-based discouragement: “People that go to college think they’re so smart. They just want to look down on people.”

There’s a lot about my story that is simply about my mother’s psychological issues. But some of the discouragement stems from a lower-middle-class farm and labor environment. I’ve wondered about the Scots-Irish connection, which does appear in that family line. But I think it’s more a matter of living without the understanding of what’s possible.

Vance talks a little bit about solutions—and the difficulty of finding them:

People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re look for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”

There were many thumbs put on my scale. When I look back at my life, what jumps out is how many variables had to fall in pace in order to give me a chance (p. 711-712).

In his favor were his grandparents’ constancy. And, among the “revolving door of would-be father figures,” at least his mother never chose abusive men. There was his sister, his aunt and uncle, good teachers, and friends.

Remove any of these people from the equation, and I’m probably screwed. Other people who have overcome the odds cite the same sorts of interventions.

He lists several. Here’s what they had in common:

They had a family member they could count on. And they saw—from a family friend, an uncle, or a work mentor—what was available and what was possible (p. 721).

I’ve often discussed with my husband the people I was surrounded by that made a difference in my life. As I’ve written before, I grew up in Utah, at a time when the community was pretty safe, and families were large and strong. Despite the message I got from home that the happy successful world wasn’t available to someone like me, I had teachers and friends, and mentors from church, who told me otherwise.

I was also blessed that, because we were Mormon, there was no drinking in our house. The most negative person in my life was always sober. And I had examples all around me of people living the lives of civilization to good effect.

While there was a lot of discouragement and uncomfortable angst in my home (and probably less verbal expression of love than J. D. had), I wasn’t in a neighborhood that kept my possibilities limited. Until quite recently, I didn’t recognize how different my growing up experience was from so many friends around me; when you’re a fish swimming in the water, you don’t realize you’re wet. I see now that I was lucky to have gone on to thrive. That thumb was on the scale for me.

As Vance points out about the results of one study, “I wasn’t surprised that Mormon Utah—with its strong church, integrated communities, and intact families—wiped the floor with Rust Belt Ohio” (p. 724).

The problems Vance sees with his community, and maybe other similar poverty pockets, aren’t really about programs. As he says, “the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control. It’s what happens at home” (p. 731).

Here’s Vance’s conclusion:

As a cultural emigrant form one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn….But I have to give it to them. Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer” (p. 752).

That’s the message we need to find a way to share with anyone who’s willing to hear it.

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[i] I used an e-reader edition, which identified page numbers when I saved my notes. However, the print edition is listed as having 288 pages, so my page numbering seems to relate more to location within the book than to actual pages. It looks like there are around 770 digital pages.

[ii] Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008