Category Archives: Random Blogging

Gravity is Serious….

Remember Gravity? The company that established a “minimum wage” of 70,000 a year, to the hoots and derision of more “serious” business experts?

According to Market Watch,

Gravity Payments, that Seattle credit-card-payments processing company that said all its employees would earn at least $70,000 in three years, is defying the doomsayers.

Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled. Customer retention is up, despite some who left because they disagreed with the decision or feared service would suffer. (Price said he’d make up the extra cost by cutting his own $1.1 million pay.)

The company is doing so well that it has hired an extra ten people to handle the additional business. The only person who isn’t doing so well, evidently, is Price himself–at least, not in the short term.

Price, meanwhile, has invested another $3 million in the company after selling all his stocks, emptying his retirement accounts and taking out mortgages on two homes, according to Inc. (He told the New York Times three months ago that he was “renting out my house right now to try to make ends meet.)

How this will all play out over the long term is anyone’s guess, of course. Which approach will prove to be better business practice over the long haul–Price’s insistence on paying all employees a wage that allows them to live well, or the Walmart /McDonald’s belief that paying below-subsistence wages (and letting taxpayers make up the difference via food stamps and other social welfare programs) will continue to be best for the bottom line?

I think we already know which approach is more likely to sustain consumer demand and generate economic growth.

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There Goes Another One….

I think I’m beginning to figure out why so many ostentatiously pious people reject science and empirical data. (And yes, Ben Carson, one of the examples I’m looking at is you…) It’s because those darn scientists keep telling us stuff we don’t want to hear.

And now, they’ve done it again.

It’s frequently argued that we need religion because–to use religious language– it leads people to “love their neighbors as themselves,” to be generous and giving. The accuracy of that assertion was recently tested by Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. The results of his study have just been published in Current Biology. As the Economist reports,

Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1,170 families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked “other”.

Decety and his collaborators used a variety of measurements to assess the religiosity of participating families, and arranged for the children to play a version of what is known to psychologists as the dictator game—an activity measuring altruism, that involves the willingness of the children to give up “stickers” that they have been awarded.

The upshot was that the children of non-believers were significantly more generous than those of believers. They gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. Children from a religious background gave away 3.3. And a further analysis of the two largest religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and Hindus were excluded because of their small numbers in the sample), showed no statistical difference between them. Muslim children gave away 3.2 stickers on average, while Christian children gave away 3.3. Moreover, a regression analysis on these groups of children showed that their generosity was inversely correlated with their households’ religiosity. This effect remained regardless of a family’s wealth and status (rich children were more generous than poor ones), a child’s age (older children were more generous than younger ones) or the nationality of the participant. These findings are, however, in marked contrast to parents’ assessments of their own children’s sensitivity to injustice. When asked, religious parents reported their children to be more sensitive than non-believing parents did.

This is only one result, of course. It would need to be replicated before strong conclusions could be drawn. But it is suggestive. And what it suggests is not only that what is preached by religion is not always what is practised, which would not be a surprise, but that in some unknown way the preaching makes things worse.

Happy Sunday morning….

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Fighting Fair

A number of years ago, my husband and I visited Florence, Italy. Not far from the famous “David” statue,  there is another well-known marble statue of two Greek wrestlers, nude, and magnificently muscular. The statues are, as we say, ‘anatomically correct,’ and one wrestler is holding the other by an organ that my male friends tell me is quite vulnerable.

I have long since forgotten the statue’s real name, but my husband always refers to it as the “fight fair, dammit” statue.

Too many Americans seem to have lost the ability to fight fair.

After one recent, unpleasant Congressional fight, a friend gloomily summed it up: “It used to be that conservatives and liberals would offer contending arguments and evidence for their perspectives; now, when someone offers a proposal, the opposition just screams something to the effect of ‘you’re a poopy head!'”

Insults aren’t arguments, and they’re anything but persuasive.

I thought about what constitutes a fair fight after reading some pretty nasty on-line criticisms of our local school board. Full disclosure: I have a stepdaughter, a former graduate student, and a good friend on that board. They are all passionate about what’s best for children and they are all committed to public education. The three of them don’t always agree about what needs to be done to improve performance in the district, but they tend to be able to negotiate their differences with each other, and with most of the other members of the board.

Negotiating differences requires “fighting fair.” When they aren’t getting everything they want, some folks can’t manage that. Rather than making their case, they resort to distortions, and (especially) to impugning the motives of those with whom they disagree.

That falls into the “poopy head” category.

It’s one thing to raise an issue, or disagree with a position being taken by someone. It’s another thing entirely to call the Superintendent “Clarence Thomas,” implying he’s a traitor to his race, to accuse Board members of being “like child molesters,” or to claim that they’ve been “bought” by campaign donors who want to “destroy public education.”

When opponents of a policy cannot explain why it is a poor choice, when they engage in name-calling rather than factual discourse, they aren’t entitled to be taken seriously.

Can’t we please acknowledge that reasonable, well-meaning people–nice people who are acting in good faith–might just have different ideas about how to do things? Does everyone with whom we disagree have to be a poopy-head?

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Return of the Social Gospel?

Sunday seems like an appropriate time to remind ourselves that there are a lot of religious people whose attitudes and beliefs are not reflected in headlines generated by people like Kim Davis, Micah Clark or Mike Pence.

When we read back through American history, we can see the ebb and flow of religious passions and the very different ways those passions were expressed. True, we’ve experienced frenzied Great Awakenings,  the “Christianity” of groups like the KKK, religious paranoia like the  Salem witch trials and a period of Social Darwinism that bears an eerie resemblance to the “makers and takers” dogma spouted by today’s corporatists– but religious beliefs also played a part in ending slavery and Jim Crow, and the Social Gospel motivated widespread efforts to ameliorate the miseries and injustices that came with industrialization and the Gilded Age.

A recent study reported at Think Progress suggests–fingers crossed!– that we may be on the cusp of a return to those kinder, gentler religious impulses.

Our new research shows a complex religious landscape, with religious conservatives holding an advantage over religious progressives in terms of size and homogeneity,” Dr. Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute, said in a press release. “However, the percentage of religious conservatives shrinks in each successive generation, with religious progressives outnumbering religious conservatives in the Millennial generation.”

According to the survey, 23 percent of people aged 18 to 33 are religious progressives, while 22 percent are nonreligious and 17 percent are religious conservatives. By contrast, only 12 percent of those aged 66 to 88 are religious progressives, whereas 47 percent are said to be religious conservatives.

On economic issues, the study found religious progressives more passionate about eradicating income inequality than secular progressives. Eighty-eight percent of religious progressives said that the government should do more to help the poor, more than any other group polled.

Religious progressives were also refreshingly different from religious conservatives in another way: they disclaimed interest in imposing their beliefs on others.

While it’s too soon to know whether the survey signals a groundswell of faith-based progressivism, the findings echo the recent rise of an increasingly vocal—and increasingly influential—”religious left.” For example, progressive religious leaders are heading up the ongoing “Moral Monday” protests in North Carolina, citing their faith as they decry the draconian policies of the state’s Republican-dominated legislature. In addition, religious progressives—as well as some religious conservatives—are spearheading efforts to produce an immigration reform bill that includes a pathway to citizenship, and prominent, left-leaning faith leaders were a driving force behind recent attempts to pass federal legislation to help prevent gun violence. Religious progressives are also playing a crucial role in campaigns to better the lives of fast food workers and Walmart staffers, with pastors and priests utilizing their congregational resources and organizational heft to push for better wages and improved working conditions for laborers.

Religious voices for social justice…now there’s a concept!

Have a nice Sunday.

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Selling Snake Oil

Following my recent post about Ben Carson, I got an email from my cousin, the cardiologist/medical researcher whose expertise I often cite here. He was livid about an aspect of Carson’s biography of which I’d previously been unaware: his willingness to use his prominence and medical credentials to hawk snake oil.

Carson first spoke out in favor of Mannatech products over a decade ago when he claimed that the Texas-based company’s “glyconutritional supplements,” which included larch-tree bark and aloe vera extract, helped him overcome prostate cancer….

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Carson’s relationship with the company deepened over time, including “four paid speeches at Mannatech gatherings, most recently one in 2013 for which he was paid $42,000, according to the company.” …

Mannatech supposedly made $415 million in the last 12 months selling pills and powders made from larch bark and aloe, known as glyconutrients, marketed under the trade name of Ambrotose, a so called “nutritional supplement that helps the cells in one’s body communicate with one another”…

My cousin’s blog has more detail.

During the last debate, Carson denied having a ten-year relationship with the company, which claims its nutritional supplement can cure autism, cancer and other serious illnesses. (Mannatech paid $7 million to settle a deceptive marketing lawsuit in Texas).

Politifact rated Carson’s response “false.” 

Paul Krugman also noted Carson’s relationship to Mannatech, but went on to comment on the GOP’s sale of “snake oil” more broadly, noting

As the historian Rick Perlstein documents, a “strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers” goes back half a century. Direct-mail marketing using addresses culled from political campaigns has given way to email, but the game remains the same.

Krugman listed several examples, from Glenn Beck’s Goldline, to Ron Paul’s book sales, to the recent New York Times series exposing a number of conservative PACs whose fundraising benefits the people who run the PACs, rather than the causes they ostensibly support.

You might think that such revelations would be politically devastating. But the targets of such schemes know, just know, that the liberal mainstream media can’t be trusted, that when it reports negative stories about conservative heroes it’s just out to suppress people who are telling the real truth. It’s a closed information loop, and can’t be broken.

A world of frightened, uninformed and disoriented people is tailor-made for guys selling snake oil.

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