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Is College Worth It? Colorado Website Measures ROIs

June 27, 2016

If you’re thinking of going to college, or sending someone to college, it’s typical to wonder, is college worth it?

Well, according to a new website, these hot jobs may be, or maybe not.

— Accountant/Auditor
— General and Operations Manager
— Market Research Analyst and Marketing Specialist
— Registered Nurse
— Software Developer, Applications
— Computer Systems Analyst
— Construction Manager
— Cost Estimator
— Management Analyst
— Software Developer, Systems Software

What does it mean to be “hot”? Launch My Career Colorado doesn’t answer that question directly, but it does offer an interactive tool to determine the “Return on Investment” (ROI) for a college degree. The ROI isn’t measured as a percent return on the cost of college per se, but the difference between what an individual would make in his or her chosen industry over 20 years if armed with various degrees and certificates rather than merely a high school diploma.

A traditional four-year college education isn’t for everyone, and the state of Colorado makes clear that it has its own interests at heart as well as students’, boasting that the site “helps you see just how much continuing your education after high school might pay off for you, your family, and Colorado!”

But the state website does offer some useful tools. It allows people to enter the major, job, industry, and school they are interested in, and fires back the best schools for the major, or conversely, the best majors for the school.

It also lists how much people make in hot jobs, and what are the top skills that employers in Colorado are seeking from employees.

Economist Mark Perry points out some other interesting findings, including that jobs like petroleum engineering have a large ROI while careers in women’s studies do not. He notes that some of the best ROIs aren’t earned in degrees received at four-year institutions.

Interestingly, Perry also notes that the average graduating student in the Class of 2016 walks away from college with a $37,172 debt. This is even more relevant considering that Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James last year pledged $41 million to send 1,100 kids to his alma mater, the University of Akron in Ohio. He’s giving each student nearly $9,500 per year. That’s $37,273 per student to finish a four-year education at Akron.

So clearly, Akron is par for the course. But as Perry points out, students at UC-Boulder, Colorado’s flagship public university, pay nearly $100,000 for tuition, fees, textbooks, and room and board over the four and a half to five years it takes them to earn their degrees.

That makes looking at the website all that more critical.

The site is only exclusive to Colorado schools right now, but being partly funded by the US Chamber of Commerce, it will be expanded to 12 other states. At the very least, the chamber recognizes that the value of an education lies not in whether a student attends a four-year school, but whether education gets students to where they need to be in their lives, whether via a four-year accounting degree or a two-year emergency medical technician training program, or something else that will pay off in the long-run.

Most importantly, the site points out that better education not only helps a person land more income, but “people who continue their education after high school report better health and more involvement in their community than those who don’t.”

And that’s probably the most valuable takeaway of continuing education.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness

Lost Equality of Opportunity Is Biggest Threat to Education

June 25, 2016

Diamonds are forever. Desegregation orders will be, too, if our end goal for Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is merely to color-code American classrooms rather than to create equality of opportunity.

The latest case comes from the state of Mississippi. On May 13, to meet a desegregation order that began in the 1960s, a U.S. district judge ordered the state’s Cleveland School District to consolidate its two middle and high schoolsbeginning in the 2016-’17 school year. According to Judge Debra M. Brown, Cleveland’s failure to consolidate its largely racially separate schools in the past had “deprived generations of students of the constitutionally guaranteed right to an integrated education.” This is just one of hundreds of cases like it; the Justice Department currently has 177 open desegregation cases.

Enforcing desegregation orders is important because desegregation’s effects on American schooling have been positive. For example, a 2015 report found that black children born between 1945 and 1968 who attended a desegregated school were more likely to complete college, more likely to earn a higher salary, less likely to be incarcerated and had better health than their peers.

Read more about the lost equality of opportunity due to an overdependence on desegregation policy.

Filed Under: Education, Happiness, News

A New Social Science Scandal

June 24, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Professors are mere human beings. Naturally, then, each has his or her guilty pleasure. In my case, it was candy corn and circus peanuts.

Other academics’ guilty pleasures seem to be less benign. For example, some scholars cannot resist the allure of research findings that can be weaponized into ad hominem political attacks — and then cash in on a little media buzz as a result. Every couple of months, it seems, we see headlines trumpeting the latest juicy, data-driven potshot aimed squarely at conservative Americans. “New study shows conservatives can’t count. And they hate puppies!”

This kind of motivated reasoning is hardly universal. I can report firsthand that most academics, whatever their personal predilections, are above this kind of bad behavior. But they still happen pretty regularly.

For a prime example, consider a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Political Science. It was entitled “Correlation Not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies.” The paper’s main aim was to debunk the idea that a person’s personality type leads directly to their political ideology. But buried deep in the study’s empirical findings was a pretty provocative data point: Compared to liberals, the authors wrote, conservatives scored significantly higher on measures of psychoticism.

Sounds pretty bad for conservative citizens, right? You don’t need a PhD to understand this is basically saying “conservatives are dangerous.” To add insult to injury, the study also seemed to lavish praise on the personalities of conservatives’ political opponents. Left-leaning individuals reportedly scored higher on scales of “social desirability,” meaning they possessed a greater predisposition to try to please others.

But this time, it was actually conservatives who got the last laugh. It turns out the scholars made a pretty big mistake. At some point, someone misread the way the political ideology data were coded in the research. They mistook the data on liberals for the data on conservatives, and vice versa. What does this mean? These controversial results were actually the exact opposite of what the authors reported.

Conservatives are justifiably enraged. But so are some liberals. I originally heard about this egregious case of academic maleficence in a tweet from an accomplished left-leaning economist.

Of course, this story raises pressing questions about the impact that ideological prejudice may be having within academia. As a former professor, this is a topic I care deeply about, and I’ve written about it at some length in the New York Times.

But this little episode has me thinking about another bigger-picture issue. The cognitive problem of confirmation bias — people letting their mental guard down when a claim gels with their preconceived notions — does not impact only social science research. It plays out in our everyday lives, shaping everything from our political debates to our professional lives to our interpersonal relationships.

So I’m mulling a longer piece that would look at the broad impact of confirmation bias across American life. Keep your eyes out for my take as I dig into this more in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop this fun story at your next cocktail party. If you’re a conservative, maybe it will reassure your family and friends that you are not, in fact, crazy.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight

Mississippi Barriers to Opportunity Broken By Entrepreneurial Hair Braider

June 20, 2016

Melony Armstrong did not grow up financially disadvantaged, She didn’t suffer an accident that left her disabled. She didn’t make any poor decisions that ended her up in the criminal justice system.

An African-American girl growing up in Mississippi in the 1970s, Armstrong went to college and had a successful career in the field of psychology. She was a model for living the American dream.

But when she decided to strike out on her own, Armstrong confronted enormous, institutional barriers to opportunity that she never expected — state and municipal bureaucracy so entrenched that it became nearly impossible for her to open and own a small business.

The barrier was “a direct result of how our state and local governments regulate what people do for work and how those barriers slam the door to opportunity for many people in a very real way,” she told an audience in Washington, D.C., attending an AEI Vision Talk.

Armstrong, who grew up having her mother and grandmother braid her hair every weekend, part of a rich cultural heritage that dates back 3,000 years, wanted to become a professional hair braider and took the logical course of action in that direction — training under a master braider and practicing for six months on a mannequin.

“I dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur and opening and running my own hair braiding business. The dream got my adrenaline pumping,” she said.

But when she finally felt ready to employ her new talents, the nightmare began. Armstrong found that the state Board of Cosmetology required that anyone who wanted to become a natural hair braider had to take 1,500 hours of cosmetology school and had to pay the state more than $10,000 for the license.

The requirements were “going to all be in an area that literally had nothing to do with hair braiding.”

To obtain a license to teach hair braiding, part of Armstrong’s long-term business plan, would require an additional 3,200 hours of classes.

“I could have become licensed in all of the following occupations in Mississippi. Here we go: emergency medical technician-basic, emergency medical technician-paramedic, ambulance driver, police officer, firefighter, real estate appraiser, and hunting education instructor,” she said. “Not just one of those occupations, but all of those occupations, I could have (done) them all and still had 600 hours left over.”

Working her way through the labyrinth of state government, Armstrong learned that the state Board of Cosmetology, which made up the licensing requirements and granted the licenses, was comprised of practicing cosmetologists.

“What this meant for cosmetology schools is that cosmetology schools would be guaranteed students, right? Once they were guaranteed students, then basically these students became captive customers, and so anyone wanting to do this, there was no way that you could get around it. You had to go to a cosmetology school, you had to take the training, and you had to pay for the training in order to become licensed.”

Armstong said she had to make a decision: either give up on her dreams or fight the status quo. “I decided to fight back.”

Getting wind of Armstrong’s predicament, the Institute for Justice took up her cause and filed a lawsuit on her behalf. This meant weekly, and sometimes thrice-weekly trips to Jackson, the state capital, which is seven hours round-trip from her hometown of Tupelo.

Years later and facing down some incredible odds, including trying to explain hair-braiding techniques to male lawmakers and being challenged at one point about whether hair braiding could raise the risk of HIV, which it cannot, the state legislature overturned the elaborate requirements, and the governor signed the new law. Now, the only requirements for hair braiders in Mississippi is to pay a fee, register with the state board of health, and abide by basic health and sanitation guidelines.

That was in 2005. Today, over 3,000 people are registered hair braiders in Mississippi, and Armstrong has taught hundreds of individuals how to braid hair through her school, Armstrong Academy. She has also opened up Melony Armstrong Coaching and Consulting.

“There only needed to be one tweak in the law, and that one tweak in the law has affected thousands of women in Mississippi,” she said, adding that regulatory hurdles have also been eased in Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, and Utah as a result of the change in Mississippi.

So what is the lesson that Armstrong shares from her experience?

“I think we need to take a serious look at the regulatory walls that are barring entrepreneurs from making an honest living. … We owe it to our citizens to pay attention to these laws that do nothing but keep entrepreneurs out,” she said. “America was built on the backs of entrepreneurs. I think many people would agree that we need entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs made America great, and if we could do it in Mississippi, we can do it across the nation.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: entrepreneurship, Institute for Justice, melony armstrong, Mississippi, opportunity, regulatory barriers, Vision Talks, work

Take Mothers’ Labor Force Participation Seriously

June 18, 2016 by Aparna Mathur

There are two narratives about the labor force participation rates of mothers. The first argues that participation rates are low because women voluntarily choose to cut down on hours worked or quit their jobs after the birth of a child—the so called “opt-out” moms. The second narrative contends that the decline in participation after the birth of a child is involuntary and driven by factors such as high childcare costs and a lack of policies—such as paid family leave–that ease participation in the labor force. Clearly, the former is not a source of worry but the latter suggests that there is room for significant improvement. …

According to BLS data for 2015, of all working mothers, 76% work full-time and 24% work part-time. Working single mothers were marginally more likely to work full-time than married mothers. But what about preferences? A 2012 Pew survey found that 22% of non-working mothers would like to work full-time. Among working mothers, the demand for full-time work increased as well between 2007 and 2012. About 50% said part-time work would be ideal, down from 60% in 2007, suggesting that the recession and subsequent loss of incomes is driving some of these choices. …

It’s time to stop debating whether mothers want to work or even whether it’s ok for mothers to work. As we see in the data, that choice is obvious. The larger question is how we can make it happen in a manner that improves economic outcomes and well-being for mothers and their families. That is the discussion worth having.

Read more about mothers’ labor force participation rates and policies to get women who want to work into the workforce.

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Sasse Vision Talks: America’s Political Parties Suffer a ‘Crisis of Political Vision’

June 9, 2016

College students are talking about robots and the role they will play in America’s future. The political parties are fighting over whether to make America Europe again or make America 1950 again.

No wonder young people are largely disinterested in the debate in Washington, concluded Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.

“Neither of these (conversations) is very interesting,” Sasse said recently, telling an audience in Washington, D.C., that the major political parties in America would be considered failed enterprises if looked at from a business perspective.

“Both parties have a massive vision problem about what we need to accomplish in our time and place,” he said. This problem is “a crisis of political vision that flows partly from the fact that we have two exhausted political parties right now. We have a conversation in Washington that is really stultifying relative to the vibrancy and vitality of the American people and relative to the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, and what really needs to be accomplished in our time,” Sasse said.

Sasse was speaking during the latest Vision Talks, a series of conversations convened by the American Enterprise Institute that puts together Washington policy insiders with social entrepreneurs, non-profits, and other enterprising organizations outside the Beltway.

Sasse described the other contributors to the most recent series of Vision Talks, including two men whose organizations help ex-inmates and disabled people find work, and a small business owner who challenged her state government to change the licensing requirements for hair braiders, as “heroic” in their efforts to live freely and independently while contributing to their communities.

These types of people and organizations are looking outside of Washington to create solutions that honor the dignity of all the natural rights of everybody, American ideals that are close to being extinguished if the political parties can’t change their respective directions, he said.

Noting a Pew research study that found that 203 of the 230 largest metro areas in the nation — containing 75 percent of the U.S. population — have a shrinking middle class, Sasse said America’s political parties aren’t up to the task of laying down a vision for the future because they look at the new information economy using the lens of politics relevant to the industrial era.

Republicans “are suffering from a declining customer base, because root core Republican voters are dying. The Democrats don’t have the same customer base problem, but they have a massive product problem because the Democrats are still trying to pretend that if you just expand 1965 entitlement programs and the chassis of the federal government from 50 and 51 years ago, that somehow this is only three tinkers away from being a working system. It’s not true. The Democrats are trying to sell central planning in the age of Uber,” Sasse said.

The presidential candidates aren’t explaining to young people, the post-industrialist up and comers, solutions to address job market prospects in a rapidly changing economy.

“Jobs that are routinize-able, if that’s a word, and predictable, those jobs are going to become more and more rapidly disintermediated and disrupted. We’re going to need to create a completely different kind of conversation than we’ve ever had before, and our politics are not really up to that level of disruptive conversation.”

Fortunately, Sasse said, all is not lost. America still has a lot to offer, and it’s up to the people to take the opportunity during this upheaval to form the future.

“The distinction between politics and culture is really important. There’s a lot that’s broken in our politics, but there’s a lot about our culture that’s still hopeful. and there’s a lot to dream about and lot to try to recover, and culture is well upstream of politics. Politics is downstream from culture.”

Watch the entirety of Sasse’s remarks in AEI’s Vision Talks.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: 2016 presidential election, American exceptionalism, Ben Sasse, information economy, political parties, Vision Talks

Mississippi Hair Braider Challenges the Status Quo … And Wins

June 6, 2016

Melony Armstrong just wanted to set up a hair-braiding business in her hometown. Government got in the way.

Regulatory requirements demanded that the Mississippi hair braider take 1,500 hours of cosmetology classes and pay the state $10,000 for a license.

“My dream quickly began to turn into a nightmare,” Armstrong recently told an audience in Washington, D.C., about confronting the excessive requirements.

The rules didn’t sit right with Armstrong, but she didn’t walk away from her dream. She decided to challenge a status quo which had forced her to jump through hoops to comply with coursework that had nothing to do with her career choice as well as to pay for certification she wouldn’t need in order to teach her craft to others.

She told her story during a recent AEI Vision Talks, part of a series of lectures by top scholars, political leaders, and policy-makers inside the Beltway as well as business owners, practitioners, and influencers around the nation. The lectures offer fresh perspectives on key areas of public debate, and relate stories about overcoming barriers to success despite setbacks, often caused by overzealous policy.

Because of Armstrong’s persistence, the state changed its laws. Hair braiders now pay a $25 registration fee with the state’s Board of Health, are required to post basic health and sanitation guidelines at their business, and must take a self-test on those guidelines.

“I’m just one hair braider in Tupelo, Mississippi who just happened to make one simple change in the law. There only needed to be one tweak in the law, and that one tweak in the law has affected thousands of women in Mississippi,” she said.

Armstrong now employs 25 people and has trained more than 125 people how to braid hair.

Watch her tell her story.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness Tagged With: government regulation, hair-braiding, licensing, melony armstrong, work

Get Out of Dodge? American Migration Slows, Homebodies Abound

May 25, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Geographic mobility has always played a big part in the “American dream.” For my part, I have moved between states or countries 10 times. But you don’t have to share my apparent wanderlust to realize that picking up and moving can inflect a person’s life for the better. Especially in a hyper-competitive economy, we would intuitively expect people to be moving more and more to seize opportunities and find the best occupational fits.

I recently got curious about this topic and whether reality matched my expectations. I spent an afternoon digging into some migration data from the Census Bureau. And what I found surprised me: People today are actually moving less often than the historical norm.

Much less.

The data are astonishing. In the 1960s, roughly 20 percent of the US population moved in any given year. Since then, that fraction has been cut almost in half. Looking at the numbers another way: While the U.S. population has increased by more than 75 percent since 1960, the total number of people who move annually is roughly the same.

Curiously, those who would seem most compelled to move appear to be especially stuck. Look at Mississippi, which has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. One might expect to see outmigration to places such as North Dakota, where unemployment is about half as high. Yet Mississippians today are even less likely to move out of state than they were before the Great Recession.

Why the decline?

Reading through the possible explanations, one popular hypothesis was that our aging population explains a lot of this decline. Younger adults have always moved more relative to older people, and so a population in which they make up a declining share would be expected to be less mobile on average.

This is part of the story, but it doesn’t capture everything that’s going on. For example, it turns out mobility has dropped over time for all ages. In fact, since the onset of the Great Recession, the decline in mobility has actually been the most dramatic among millennials. Other factors must also be contributing. Chief suspects include a more broadly stagnant economy, a housing crisis that left many anchored to homes while they wait for values to rebound, and — especially interesting to me — a regrettable cultural shift that undersells the importance of entrepreneurial living.

Let’s talk solutions. First, we could reform our education system to better equip people with valuable skills that transcend particular organizations and localities. Reviving vocational and technical training programs via creative voucher schemes would be a good start.

Second, we can make moving easier. First and foremost, we should fine-tune welfare programs, many of which have policy quirks that can dissuade the vulnerable from relocating or from seeking employment at all. We could also experiment with small-scale programs in which the government offers relocation allowances or collects information about employment opportunities in other regions, and then rigorously assess their effectiveness.

But more than any policy tweak, we must set out to rebuild a culture that prizes dynamism and treating life as an entrepreneurial project. That starts with leaders who testify proudly to the true pillars of the American dream — courage, adventure, optimism, and a unique refusal to be tied down to our pasts.

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to our shores in the early 1800s, he didn’t find leaders who stoked — and sought to profit from — the masses’ fears of change. In fact, he found quite the opposite, noting that the American people embraced instability and churn as a source of wonder and self-improvement. Today, that sense of adventure is eroding and trepidation is taking its place.

Telling Americans they should be afraid or angry about our changing economy is exactly the wrong answer. The only acceptable response is to fight proudly and boldly for solutions. And I’m convinced that one of those solutions is to help people get out of Dodge.

This section is adapted from my latest New York Times piece.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight, Life Tagged With: American migration, community, family, US Census Bureau, workforce patterns

Happy Birthday, George Lucas! 7 Great Quotes From the Great Innovator

May 16, 2016 by James Pethokoukis

George Lucas, the film innovator, auteur, and genius behind “Star Wars,” turned 72 on Saturday, May 14. In honor of his birthday, here are seven inspiring quotes of his on innovation, technology, and America.

1) If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people. Because there’s nothing else that will make you happy. You can be as rich, and famous, and powerful as you want to be, and it will not bring you happiness. … This is a 5,000 year old idea, and every prophet, every intelligent, rational, successful person has said it. It’s a very, very simple idea and the most important part of it is, true. (Academy of Achievement interview.)

2) I had a problem: a story I wanted to tell… So I went and found the technology to do it. In the process of making “Star Wars” there weren’t any visual effects houses so I had to invent one. (Sundance Film Festival.)

Filed Under: Happiness, News Tagged With: george lucas, quotes by george lucas

Why Western Civilization Classes Are Not Passé

April 17, 2016 by Sharon Kehnemui

Can you answer the following questions?

Who fought in the Peloponnesian War?

Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?

Who was Saul of Tarsus?

Why does the Magna Carta matter?

What are one or two of the arguments made in Federalist 10?

Hard questions, right? Maybe not. Maybe you learned some or all of the answers in school, or you knew them at one time, but have now forgotten the details. Or perhaps you are devoted to a few events that you have internalized and helped form you into the person you are today.

But knowing the answers in great detail may be less important than recognizing the importance of the questions.

Unfortunately, Stanford University students may never realize how significant and meaningful these questions are because the student government earlier this week voted overwhelmingly against requiring students to complete a two-quarter course on Western civilization.

That’s right. Instead, the student leadership, validated by its Pravda-esque mouthpiece, The Stanford Daily, concluded that supporting Western civilization basically equated to “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

Filed Under: Happiness, Liberty, Life, News

The decreasingly United States?

April 4, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

There’s this old joke about two comedians who find themselves in a rowboat. One falls overboard. Not able to swim, he starts waving his arms and frantically screaming, “Hey! I’m dyin’ over here!” His friend calls back to him with some advice: “Go dirty!”

We might see this as a metaphor for this year’s presidential primary races. And if you think it’s bad now, just wait until the general election. The divided right is set for a crash course collision with the enraged left in a country that is more politically divided than it has been in decades.

What can we do?

It’s helpful to examine what is happening at a more granular level. Let me propose a quick analysis that looks at three different dimensions of polarization.

First, convincing research shows that polarization is happening on a citizen-by-citizen basis. For better or worse, the average American is becoming more and more internally consistent, more predictable in an ideological sense. A recent Pew study shows that the percentage of Americans who report holding “consistently conservative” or “consistently liberal” views has more than doubled since just the 1990s.

Comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hold a rally to mock the polarization of politics, Aug. 28, 2010.

Second, moving up a level of analysis. Both political parties are becoming purer ideological vessels rather than mixed coalitions. Rockefeller Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats are almost extinct. We know this intuitively, but the data also support it: In 1994, 4 in 10 Republicans were more liberal than the median Democrat. Almost a third of Democrats were more conservative than the median Republican. But today, those numbers have nosedived to just 8 percent and 6 percent respectively.

Finally, it’s not just that the intellectual gulf has widened, between both individuals and the parties. We also really don’t like the people on the opposite side of the gap. Polling shows that a little more than a third of Democrats have a “very unfavorable” view of Republicans; meanwhile more than 40 percent of Republicans hold that view of Democrats.

These phenomena cause problems more dire than just hurt feelings. For example, there is good reason to believe that hyperpolarization has led to a surge in political discrimination that spills over into areas outside politics.

Consider a recent study in the American Journal of Political Science. The researchers asked more than 1,000 adults to compare the resumes of two fictitious high school students and decide which should receive a scholarship. Here’s the twist: Some of the subjects were given resumes that were basically indistinguishable except for one key difference. One of the students headed up the Young Democrats, and the other led the Young Republicans.

What happened? Subjects who identified as Republican or Democrat gave the award to the high schooler who shared his or her own worldview almost 80 percent of the time.

Whether the discrimination was deliberate or unintentional, such dramatic political prejudice suggests real and damaging consequences for fairness and social cohesion. Obviously, we can actively choose our ideology, and so one’s political predilections do offer more substantive information about our character than, say, our appearance. But while dismissing somebody out of hand based on politics may seem less unjustifiable than doing so based on his or her race or religion, it is still not even close to a recipe for social harmony — nor for a policy climate that is conducive to the creativity that our present challenges require.

Who Pays for Polarization in Politics?

The downside to divisive politics goes beyond unpleasantness in our daily lives. The bigotry and contempt bred by excessive polarization make it much harder for America to aspire to the kinds of historic, path-breaking achievements that have defined our proud heritage. As a result, this social pathology imposes a direct and heavy cost on vulnerable people around the world who are not prepared to bear it.

Let me explain. The kinds of achievements in jeopardy aren’t just the ubiquitous DC examples of “pragmatic” policy compromises, such as infrastructure spending or entitlement reform. To be sure, both are important efforts, and they are made more difficult when reasonable disagreements morph into a culture of content. But I think we need to aim even higher.

If you read this newsletter, you’ve probably heard me explain how the spread of American-style free enterprise lifted two billion of our brothers and sisters out of poverty. (If you haven’t, I discussed the details in a recent TED talk.)

This humanitarian miracle is all the more remarkable because it unites seemingly disparate pillars from both sides of the political aisle. We normally associate special concern for the poor and vulnerable with the left, and free markets and global capitalism with the right. But what history teaches us is that only these supposedly “conservative” policies and institutions can fulfill these supposedly “liberal” moral goals. Each polarized camp holds one key to unlock the next antipoverty miracle. But we have to turn them together. We need fierce advocacy for free enterprise and deep moral concern for the vulnerable.

Sounds like a tall task? Well, it is. The stew of American polarization has been simmering for a long time. It’s going to take a minor cultural revolution to fix the damage that has been done. But we must, for our own sake — and the billions of souls whose chances at building financial security and earned success hang in the balance.

Here’s one way we all can beat back the forces of polarization: Challenge yourself to always remember the human faces who are victimized by every uncharitable political attack. As a convert to conservatism who was raised in Seattle, I have many liberal family and friends. Whenever I hear some ostensibly right-wing entertainers try to “fire up” the base by lambasting liberals as stupid and incompetent, I realize they’re attacking people I love. Instead of turning up the volume, I hit “mute.”

Never forget that each of us has agency. We can choose to fashion ourselves and our institutions into islands that rise above the sea of vitriol that has temporarily swamped our politics. The fact that reporters or commentators or some candidates have taken their eyes off the ball of building a better world through an earnest competition of ideas doesn’t mean we should do the same. Much the opposite.

It makes our shared mission all the more urgent.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight

Book Review: The Conservative Heart

March 25, 2016

By Robert M. Whaples, Wake Forest University

Although Arthur Brooks’ book is titled The Conservative Heart, it might just as aptly have been titled The Libertarian Heart, and perhaps even The Liberal/Progressive Heart. Its goal is to share a compassionate world view, findings from social science research and practical advice to build a broad coalition for achieving goals that are embraced by almost everyone – building a fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. Brooks (president of the American Enterprise Institute) argues that the central paradox of American politics is that conservatives’ ideas are better at achieving these goals but are sometimes dismissed because too many people think conservatives care only about themselves. Their inability to demonstrate their compassion in thepolitical arena has trapped us in a mire. The problem seems to be that many people think compassion is spending other people’s money in expensive but vain attempts to solve problems, rather than getting to the roots of the problems and empowering people to solve them by themselves.

The irony is that liberals often mistakenly view conservatives as greedy materialists. Of course many self-proclaimed conservatives are quite greedy, as are people of all political stripes. “Materialism is tyranny, and no ideology or economic system is immune to it” (p. 43). But true conservatives, Brooks argues, are actually less materialistic than average, as is demonstrated by giving larger fractions of their incomes to charities, having larger families and being more willing to donate blood (“if liberals and moderates gave blood like conservatives do, the blood supply in the U.S would instantly jump by about 45 percent” (p. 139)). Conservatives’ success in escaping the all-too-human cycle of “grasping and craving” (p. 41) often arises from the fact that they are more likely to focus on religious and spiritual matters, realizing the relative unimportance of material possessions. Perhaps excessive materialism is another example of lack of self-control. Interestingly, recent studies suggest that conservative also exhibit more self-control than others (see Science Daily, “Conservatives Demonstrate More Self Control than Liberals, Studies Suggest,” June 22, 2015).

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Why Ministers for Happiness, Tolerance, Youth and the Future?

March 4, 2016

Over the past two weeks, I have heard and read many questions, comments, and news stories regarding recent changes to the government of the United Arab Emirates. Why, everyone seems to want to know, did we establish a Ministry of Happiness, Tolerance, and the Future, and why did we appoint a 22-year-old Minister of Youth?

The changes reflect what we have learned from events in our region over the past five years. In particular, we have learned that failure to respond effectively to the aspirations of young people, who represent more than half of the population in Arab countries, is like swimming against the tide. Without the energy and optimism of youth, societies cannot develop and grow; indeed, such societies are doomed.

When governments spurn their youth and block their path to a better life, they slam the door in the face of the entire society. We do not forget that the genesis of the tension in our region, the events dubbed the “Arab Spring,” was squarely rooted in the lack of opportunities for young people to achieve their dreams and ambitions.

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Things Science Says Will Make You Much Happier

March 4, 2016

It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with happiness. After all, the “pursuit of happiness” is even enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. B What habits make us like a happy baby ut happiness is fleeting. How can we find it and keep it alive?

Psychologists at the University of California have discovered some fascinating things about happiness that could change your life.

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is a psychology professor at the Riverside campus who is known among her peers as “the queen of happiness.” She began studying happiness as a grad student and never stopped, devoting her career to the subject.

One of her main discoveries is that we all have a happiness “set point.” When extremely positive or negative events happen—such as buying a bigger house or losing a job—they temporarily increase or decrease our happiness, but we eventually drift back to our set point.

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition

February 21, 2016

If tuition and fees — net of aid — had risen only as fast as skyrocketing health care costs had from 1987 through 2010, they would have increased to $8,700 from $6,600. Instead, they hit $10,300, according to the new working paper “Accounting for the Rise in College Tuition” by Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund.

Here’s the abstract:

We develop a quantitative model of higher education to test explanations for the steep rise in college tuition between 1987 and 2010. The framework extends the quality-maximizing college paradigm of Epple, Romano, Sarpca, and Sieg (2013) and embeds it in an incomplete markets, life-cycle environment. We measure how much changes in underlying costs, reforms to the Federal Student Loan Program (FSLP), and changes in the college earnings premium have caused tuition to increase. All these changes combined generate a 106% rise in net tuition between 1987 and 2010, which more than accounts for the 78% increase seen in the data. Changes in the FSLP alone generate a 102% tuition increase, and changes in the college premium generate a 24% increase. Our findings cast doubt on Baumol’s cost disease as a driver of higher tuition.

Read the research study submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Filed Under: Happiness, Research

Narcissism is Increasing. So You’re Not So Special

February 21, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

My teenage son recently informed me that there is an Internet quiz to test oneself for narcissism. His friend had just taken it. “How did it turn out?” I asked. “He says he did great!” my son responded. “He got the maximum score!”

When I was a child, no one outside the mental health profession talked about narcissism; people were more concerned with inadequate self-esteem, which at the time was believed to lurk behind nearly every difficulty. Like so many excesses of the 1970s, the self-love cult spun out of control and is now rampaging through our culture like Godzilla through Tokyo. …

This is a costly problem. While full-blown narcissists often report high levels of personal satisfaction, they create havoc and misery around them. There is overwhelming evidence linking narcissism with lower honesty and raised aggression. It’s notable for Valentine’s Day that narcissists struggle to stay committed to romantic partners, in no small part because they consider themselves superior.

Read the rest of the article at The New York Times.

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Are the Danes Really the Happiest People on Earth? A Semantics Test

February 8, 2016

According to a new global narrative, the Danes are the happiest people in the world. This paper takes a critical look at the international media discourse of “happiness,” tracing its roots and underlying assumptions. Equipped with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic and cultural analysis, a new in-depth semantic analysis of the story of “Danish happiness” is developed. It turns out that the allegedly happiest people on earth do not (usually) talk and think about life in terms of “happiness,” but rather through a different set of cultural concepts and scripts, all guided by the Danish cultural keyword “lykke.” The semantics of lykke is explicated along with two related concepts
livsglæde, roughly, ‘life joy’ and livslyst, ‘life pleasure,’ and based on semantic and ethnopragmatic analysis, a set of lykke-related cultural scripts is provided. With new evidence from Danish, it is argued that global Anglo-International “happiness discourse” misrepresents local meanings and values, and that the one-sided focus on “happiness across nations” in the social sciences is in dire need of cross-linguistic confrontation. The paper calls for a post-happiness turn in the study of words and values across languages, and for a new critical awareness of linguistic and conceptual biases in Anglo-international discourse.

Click to read the research on the Story of Danish Happiness.

Filed Under: Happiness, Research

What People Around the World Mean When They Say They’re Happy

February 3, 2016 by The Washington Post

Even though she is still healthy and lively, Mrs. Xie has already prepared the clothes she will be buried in.

An 86-year-old Chinese woman who lives in Dongshan, a city on China’s southeastern coast, Xie has an active life, cooking for friends at the local Buddhist temple and joining in the chants there. Yet she has already bought the pants, shirt, shoes, earrings and purse she will wear after she dies, as well as an embroidered yellow pillow for her head. She had a portrait taken that will be displayed at her funeral. And she wrapped the items neatly in a cardboard box to await her death.

For many people in the West, picking out an outfit for your own funeral might seem sad or macabre. But Xie and her friends see it as a cause for reassurance, even celebration.

The video below, in which Xie shows off her burial clothes to her friends and a visiting researcher, Becky Hsu, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgetown, makes the scene feel almost like a party. Xie’s friends laugh as she shows off her outfit, congratulate her on getting a deal on her shoes, and scold her for paying too much for fancy earrings.

“It’s a happy thing,” another Chinese woman told Hsu about preparing burial clothes. “Everybody does it. I’ve had mine for more than 10 years!”

Read more about what it means to be happy from The Washington Post’s Ana Swanson.

Filed Under: Happiness, News

Science Behind the Factoid: Lottery Winners Are No Happier Than Quadriplegics

January 10, 2016

Here’s a frequently repeated, counterintuitive factoid: people who win large sums in the lottery are no happier, over time, than people who become paralyzed in traumatic accidents. This “fact” comes from Brickman et al’s 1978 paper called Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? The researchers interviewed 22 major lottery winners, 22 randomly selected controls from the same area, and 29 paraplegics and quadriplegics who had suffered the injury in the recent past. The lottery winners had won sums ranging from $300,000 (more than a million in 2013 dollars) to $1,000,000. Here are some of the results:

The respondents rated their happiness and their enjoyment of everyday pleasures such as hearing a good joke or receiving a compliment on a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 was the happiest. As you can see, lottery winners were not significantly happier than controls. They also derived significantly less pleasure from everyday events.

Read more about the breakthrough study on the relationship between happiness and winning the lottery.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life, News

Maryland to Mail Free Books Each Month to Baltimore’s Children

December 21, 2015

Not your typical government-sponsored program:

“The Youth League of Baltimore will help coordinate the effort — dubbed ‘Governor’s Young Readers’ — by identifying local partners to lead fundraising efforts, promote the program and help families sign up for it.

The program costs $25 per child, and according to the partnership, the Maryland Department of Human Resources will cover half that amount. The state said about 41,200 children are eligible in Baltimore.”

Filed Under: Happiness, News Tagged With: books, education, k-12