Noah Smith: You Are Already in the Afterlife

This is Noah Smith’s 2d guest religion post on supplysideliberal.com. I love this one almost as much as his 1st:

“God and SuperGod.”

 The Roman emperor and philosopher

Marcus Aurelius said something similar

to what you see below, but I like Noah’s version better:

If you ever want to freak yourself out, just sit there and think hard about what it’s like to be dead. Not “playing a harp in Heaven” dead, or even “roasting in a lake of fire in Hell” dead, but really dead. Just no more thoughts, forever and ever and ever and ever. 

Doesn’t that send a shiver down your spine? That’s called self-preservation instinct. No wonder people like to believe in an afterlife, right? Everyone wants to live forever. 

Now let’s think about something much less scary. Try to remember what it was like to be a 5-year-old (or if that challenge is too hard, try to remember–really remember–what it was like to be you 10-years ago). Of course you can remember snippets - the feel of a set of toy blocks, or the sound of your mom’s voice, or the shape of your kindergarten classroom. But I bet you can’t remember what it was really like to experience life, moment-to-moment, as a 5-year-old. How would the 5-year-old you react to this blog post? Would (s)he be comfortable in the chair you’re sitting in right now? What would (s)he be looking forward to right now? 

You may be able to guess at the answers to these questions, but the truth is, you don’t know. The experience and feeling and “qualia” of being a 5-year-old you is gone forever. You will never again perceive the Universe the way the 5-year-old you did. In other words, the 5-year-old you is dead. Really, truly gone from the Universe. The 5-year-old you will never think another thought. 

Even if you go to Heaven. 

So don’t be so afraid of Real Death. It’s something you’ve already experienced - not just once, but an indeterminate number of times. You, right now, are a living person, but because you’re living and growing and changing, you’re dying at the same time. Death is an old friend. 

Now think about what this means for the afterlife. Heaven is a comforting thought because it quiets our self-preservation instinct. But what would happen if we really went to Heaven? Either we’d have experiences similar to those we had when alive (flying around, playing a harp, eating infinite Doritos without getting fat, whatever), or we won’t. But if we experience things, those experiences will change us. Then eventually we won’t be the same person anymore. The soul may be eternal, but the part of you that’s really you just can’t stick around. 

So it doesn’t really matter if there’s an afterlife or not, does it? Life is change, and change is death. The process of living is the process of dying. 

So what does this mean for our lives? It means we shouldn’t spend much time worrying about death. And it also means we shouldn’t put our hopes in a better life in the next world. This is the world. This is life. You’re awake and alive and thinking things right now. Isn’t that amazing?

Interview by Joseph Sotinel for the French Website BFMBusiness about Electronic Money (with a Translation of My Bit)

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I was interviewed on Wednesday (December 11, 2013) by Joseph Sotinel of BFMBusiness for an article on electronic money: “Les banques traditionnelles vont-elles être tentées par le bitcoin?” (“Are traditional banks going to be tempted by bitcoin?”) The article, like the title, is in French. Here is what I am quoted as saying:

Une monnaie électronique permettrait des taux d'intérêts négatifs

Mais un acteur manque pour élaborer une monnaie électronique: les banques centrales. “On ne peut pas avoir de monnaie gérée par un algorithme ou un robot aujourd'hui sans avoir d'inflation”, explique Miles Kimball, avant d'ajouter: “Le bitcoin, en soi, n'est pas très utile, mais montre ce qui peut être fait.”

Selon lui, si les banques centrales se convertissaient aux monnaies électroniques, elles gagneraient de nouveaux outils monétaires, comme la possibilité de fixer des taux directeurs négatifs.

“Il faudrait alors des régulations financières très strictes”, reconnaît l'universitaire. En attendant, son idée gagne du terrain. En septembre, la Banque de France l'a accueilli pour un séminaire au sujet de la monnaie électronique.

But I didn’t say that, because my French isn’t that good! Here is my translation, done with the help of Google translate, having listened and talked back to the three levels of Pimsleur’s French CD’s–and knowing what I said in the first place. 

Electronic Money Permits Negative Interest Rates

But there is one category of actor that has failed to develop electronic money: central banks. Today, we cannot have money managed by an algorithm or a robot without inflation [or deflation], explains Miles Kimball, before adding: “Bitcoin would not work very well in that regard, but it shows what can be done.”

According to him, if central banks converted to electronic money, they gain new monetary tools, such as the possibility of setting negative rates.

“It would then be appropriate to have very strict financial regulation,” recognizes the university professor. Meanwhile, his idea is gaining ground. In September, the Bank of France hosted him for a seminar on electronic money. 

The Volcker Rule

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker suggested what has come to be called the Volcker Rule.

I am with Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig in strongly preferring tougher equity requirements on the liability side of the balance sheet that make sure banks and other financial firms are investing their own shareholder’s money to tight restrictions on the asset side like the Volcker rule. But given where the discussion is, I think the Volcker rule is a net plus. The Volcker rule can always be loosened later in exchange for higher equity requirements. The stronger the liability-side rules (high equity or “capital” requirements) the more financial firms can innovate on the asset side without putting the economy in danger, or putting taxpayers on the hook. The value of that innovation is one reason I think equity requirements are so much superior. Of course, there have to be *some* asset-side rules, but they only have to rule out quite extreme positions if the equity requirement is at 50%, as I recommended here:

Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig and John Cochrane on Bank Capital Requirements.

The reason common equity is such a good funding mechanism for financial stability is that stock prices go up and down all the time and no one is likely to be deceived by a claim that stocks are totally safe. By contrast, almost all forms of debt have built into them some relatively sudden transition from looking fairly safe to looking very scary when things go south. Stocks don’t have that sudden transition because they always look at least a little scary.

Miles Kimball and Scott Sumner: Monetary Policy, the Zero Lower Bound and Madison, Wisconsin

I had an interesting email exchange with Scott Sumner that he agreed I could share with you. In addition to talking about monetary policy and the zero lower bound, Scott and I figured out that we grew up less than a mile away from each other in Madison, Wisconsin. I am leaving out the actual addresses because security questions sometimes ask them, but I looked them up on Google Maps: the two houses Scott grew up in were 7/10 and 8/10 of a miles from mine. And Scott was in an elementary school class with my older brother Chris! (Chris has one guest blog post on supplysideliberal.com:

“Big Brother Speaks: Christian Kimball on Mitt Romney.”

Miles: 

I think you might be interested in my latest post:

“Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy: Expansionary Monetary Policy Does Not Raise the Budget Deficit.”

Scott: 

Thanks Miles, I’ll do a post in reply in the next few days.

Miles:

Wonderful! Thanks, Scott.

Scott: 

Sorry to get back to you so late, but I did this post in reply about a month ago:

“Miles Kimball on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

I saw you grew up in Madison.  The West side by any chance?  And did you have any older siblings?  The name is familiar.

Miles:

I am so far behind on my email I am only reading this now. Thanks for your post. My main reaction is that the mechanisms you mention might be enough at 2% inflation, but not at zero. To safely have 0 inflation, I think we need to eliminate the ZLB.

Yes. I went to Nakoma (later renamed Thoreau) for elementary school. My older brother was Christian Kimball. Paula and Mary are other siblings. I also had cousins David, Kent and Tim Kimball.

Scott:

It’s a small world, I recall that Chris was a classmate of mine in elementary school.  That’s 50 years ago!

I think we should keep the NGDP target path high enough to keep nominal rates above zero; not because I think zero rates prevent us from hitting our target, but rather because low rates might force the Fed to buy a lot of stuff, and I don’t think an enormous balance sheet is desirable.  So I agree about zero inflation being undesirable, but for different reasons.

Another reason to say away from the zero bound is to stop Williamson from writing more crazy posts.  :)

PS.  My first blog post after the intro (in early 2009) suggested that the Fed might want to look at negative IOR–but it fell short of your proposal.

Miles:

That is really cool to realize that you knew Chris! I’ll see him next week.  

Actually, I was going the other way, saying that absent the ZLB, zero inflation has definite benefits as compared to 2% inflation. So if eliminating the ZLB by the kind of thing I am proposing allows us to have 0 inflation instead of 2%, that alone would make it worth doing. You probably saw this, but I lay out the detailed argument here:

“The Costs and Benefits of Repealing the Zero Lower Bound … and Then Lowering the Long-Run Inflation Target.”

Scott: 

My memory is poor, but I vaguely recall he was a more serious and mature student than the other boys.  And I think he had glasses (as did I.)  That’s all I recall.  I suppose I should ask which street you lived on—we lived in Huron Hill then Seneca Place.  My brother was 3 years younger–closer to your age.

I do get your point about negative rates on money making it easier to have zero inflation.  In my view 90% of the cost of raising inflation from 0% to 2% or 3% comes from the taxation of capital, and I think right now it would be easier to switch to a progressive consumption tax than to deal with paper currency in your system.  But we are going to all electronic money in a few decades anyway so you’ll be right in the long run.  And then you’ll just have to convince the Krugman’s of the world that zero inflation is not bad for the labor market (money illusion and all.)

Miles:

I would like to make a blog post out of our exchange (leaving out our exact addresses of course!) I think the discussion about monetary policy in particular will be of interest to people, as well as the fact that we grew up only about a mile from each other.  Would that be OK?

Scott:

That’s fine.

BTW, I don’t really care, but people will get the impression that I grew up in an upper middle class family, when were were actually middle class.  My dad told me in the 1970s that he’d never made more than $10,000 in his life, which might be $50,000 or $60,000 today.  But he was clever with real estate and got us into a nice neighborhood, until they divorced when I was 11.  Don’t know if you are planning to discuss the affluence of Nakoma, if so you are free to use this info about me, or not, as you prefer.

Miles: 

Thanks, Scott.

Cathy O'Neil on Slow-Cooked Math

Math is sometimes better when it is marinated and cooked slowly; timeless truths take time. Cathy O'Neil, who blogs as Mathbabe, makes that point in her Q&A post  “How do I know if I’m good enough to go into math?” She kindly gave me permission to reblog it here. I talk about my own experiences after the text of her post. 

Q:

Hi Cathy,

I met you this past summer, you may not remember me. I have a question.

I know a lot of people who know much more math than I do and who figure out solutions to problems more quickly than me. Whenever I come up with a solution to a problem that I’m really proud of and that I worked really hard on, they talk about how they’ve seen that problem before and all the stuff they know about it. How do I know if I’m good enough to go into math?

Thanks, High School Kid

A: 

Dear High School Kid,

Great question, and I’m glad I can answer it, because I had almost the same experience when I was in high school and I didn’t have anyone to ask. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to answer it to anyone who reads my blog, just in case there are other young people wondering this, and especially girls, but of course not only girls.

Here’s the thing. There’s always someone faster than you. And it feels bad, especially when you feel slow, and especially when that person cares about being fast, because all of a sudden, in your confusion about all sort of things, speed seems important. But it’s not a race. Mathematics is patient and doesn’t mind. Think of it, your slowness, or lack of quickness, as a style thing but not as a shortcoming.

Why style? Over the years I’ve found that slow mathematicians have a different thing to offer than fast mathematicians, although there are exceptions (Bjorn Poonen comes to mind, who is fast but thinks things through like a slow mathematician. Love that guy). I totally didn’t define this but I think it’s true, and other mathematicians, weigh in please.

One thing that’s incredibly annoying about this concept of “fastness” when it comes to solving math problems is that, as a high school kid, you’re surrounded by math competitions, which all kind of suck. They make it seem like, to be “good” at math, you have to be fast. That’s really just not true once you grow up and start doing grownup math.

In reality, mostly of being good at math is really about how much you want to spend your time doing math. And I guess it’s true that if you’re slower you have to want to spend more time doing math, but if you love doing math then that’s totally fine. Plus, thinking about things overnight always helps me. So sleeping about math counts as time spent doing math. 

[As an aside, I have figured things out so often in my sleep that it’s become my preferred way of working on problems. I often wonder if there’s a “math part” of my brain which I don’t have normal access to but which furiously works on questions during the night. That is, if I’ve spent the requisite time during the day trying to figure it out. In any case, when it works, I wake up the next morning just simply knowing the proof and it actually seems obvious. It’s just like magic.]

So here’s my advice to you, high school kid. Ignore your surroundings, ignore the math competitions, and especially ignore the annoying kids who care about doing fast math. They will slowly recede as you go to college and as high school algebra gives way to college algebra and then Galois Theory. As the math gets awesomer, the speed gets slower.

And in terms of your identity, let yourself fancy yourself a mathematician, or an astronaut, or an engineer, or whatever, because you don’t have to know exactly what it’ll be yet. But promise me you’ll take some math major courses, some real ones like Galois Theory (take Galois Theory!) and for goodness sakes don’t close off any options because of some false definition of “good at math” or because some dude (or possibly dudette) needs to care about knowing everything quickly. Believe me, as you know more you will realize more and more how little you know.

One last thing. Math is not a competitive sport. It’s one of the only existing truly crowd-sourced projects of society, and that makes it highly collaborative and community-oriented, even if the awards and prizes and media narratives  about “precocious geniuses” would have you believing the opposite. And once again, it’s been around a long time and is patient to be added to by you when you have the love and time and will to do so.

Love,  Cathy

I especially like what Cathy says about fast and slow. I think of myself as a slow mathematician. It often takes me half an hour to wrap my head around a math problem or much more if it is a big one. I have gotten used to the confusion I regularly experience for that first chunk of time. If I keep wrestling with the problem, and come at it from different angles, usually the mental fog eventually clears.

Individuality: Noble and Beautiful; Crushing Individuality: Despotism.

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty chapter III, “Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” paragraph 9 reads:

It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fulness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them. As much compression as is necessary to prevent the stronger specimens of human nature from encroaching on the rights of others, cannot be dispensed with; but for this there is ample compensation even in the point of view of human development. The means of development which the individual loses by being prevented from gratifying his inclinations to the injury of others, are chiefly obtained at the expense of the development of other people. And even to himself there is a full equivalent in the better development of the social part of his nature, rendered possible by the restraint put upon the selfish part. To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others, develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint. If acquiesced in, it dulls and blunts the whole nature. To give any fair play to the nature of each, it is essential that different persons should be allowed to lead different lives. In proportion as this latitude has been exercised in any age, has that age been noteworthy to posterity. Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

(Above, I modernized the spelling of “developes” to “develops.”)

What Bitcoin Tells Us about Electronic Money

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Link to Jose Pagliery’s CNNMoney article “Ron Paul: ‘Bitcoin could destroy the dollar’”

Jose Pagliery interviewed me for a CNNMoney article on Bitcoin. Here are the 2 passages with quotes from me:

Even economists who embrace the power of central banks, like University of Michigan professor Miles Kimball, recognize the currency’s potential.

“Bitcoin really shows governments are behind the curve,” Kimball said. “It demonstrates there’s a demand for an electronic equivalent of cash.”

“Governments absolutely demand a monopoly on money and credit. They’re not going to give it up easily,” Paul warned. “They will come down hard.”

Kimball hopes politicians will take a less combative approach, choosing instead to compete.

“I suppose they could just try to crush Bitcoin, but that’s the wrong way to do it,” Kimball said. “Governments should be creating their own version of Bitcoin. They should be ashamed they haven’t.”

Our interview is also reflected in the mention of how Bitcoin dominance would take away central banks' “ability to help slow and speed up economic activity,” and in the discussion M-PESA. Jose did not fully reflect my claim that Bitcoin is an attempt at digital gold; even once things settled down, a dominant Bitcoin would give us monetary policy as bad as the gold standard did, which was pretty bad.

David Byrne: The Power of Democratizing Making Music and Art

There are pleasures in producing as well as in consuming. This is true for many things–indeed, this blog’s existence depends on it. David Byrne illustrates this fact beautifully for art and music in his book How Music Works (pages 267, 291 and 296):

The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming these things. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves–they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. 

In Salavador, Brazil, musician Carlinhos Brown established several music and culture centers in formerly dangerous neighborhoods. In Candeal, where Brown was born, local kids were encouraged to join drum groups, sing, and compose songs and stage performances in homemade costumes.

The kids, energized by these activities, began to turn away from dealing drugs. Being malandros was no longer their only life option–being musicians and playing together in a group looked like more fun and was more satisfying. Little by little, the crime rate dropped in those neighborhoods; the hope returned. And some great music was made, too. 

A similar thing took place in the Vigario Geral favela located near the airport in Rio. It had been the scene of a massacre in which a police helicopter opened fire and killed scores of kids during a drug raid. Life in that favela was about as dead end as you could get. A cultural center eventually opened under the direction of Jose Junior and, possibly inspired by Brown’s example, they began to encourage the local kids to stage musical events, some of which dramatized the tragedy that they were still recovering from. The group AfroReggae emerged out of this effort, and, as with the Brown projects in Salvador, life in the favela improved. The dealers left; their young recruits were all making music. That, to me, is the power of music–of making music. Music can permanently change people’s lives in ways that go far beyond being emotionally or intellectually moved by a specific composition…. Music is indeed a moral force, but mostly when it is a part of the warp and woof of an entire community. 

Roger Graef, who has written about the effectiveness of arts programs in UK prisons, believes that violence, like art, is actually a form of expression. Prisons, he says, are therefore ideal arenas for art creation and expression. Art can serve as an outlet for the violent feelings of inmates in a way that does not harm others, and that actually enhances their lives. Making art, Graef writes, “can break the cycle of violence and fear." 

He claims that the remedy for violence is an agency that will defeat feelings of impotence. Historically, religion has successfully done this, and the rise of fundamentalism might be viewed as a reaction to increasing feelings of alienation and inconsequentiality around the world. Making music might act as an antidote to those feelings too, as those cultural and music centers in the Brazilian favelas attest. In those Uk prisons, the quality of the work is beside the point, as it was in Brazil. And, unlike religions, no one has ever gone to war over music. 

However, grant-giving organizations often take the opposite view. Most arts grants focus on the work, rather than on the process that the work comes out of. The product seems to be more important than the effect its production process has. Sadly, Graef learned that it is hard for many of the inmates he worked with to continue making art outside of prison. They find the professional art world elitist and its "posh buildings” intimidating. Without a support system, and with their work being judged by criteria that are foreign to them, they lose the outlet for frustration that they had discovered.

Jing Liu: Show Kids that Solving Math Problems is Like Being a Detective

Jing Liu, Study Development Specialist at the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research at the University of Michigan

Noah and I have received a flood of overwhelmingly positive email about our Quartz column ”There’s One Key Difference between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don’t.” I am very gradually making my way through the electronic pile. I was delighted to read near the top of the pile this note from Jing Liu, which has an insight into math education that seems right on the mark to me. Jing kindly gave permission to reprint a slightly revised version of her note here.

I just read the article that you and Noah Smith wrote on Quartz,

“There’s One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don’t.”

 I’m writing to you because this is an issue that is close to my heart and I have been thinking about it for a long time.  I have two kids in K-12 schools, both love math, and I have been worried about what they are learning at school for years. I have talked with teachers and school principles and, of course, many parents.  A lot of the things that I’ve heard are concerning and reflect a general lack of  understanding from the educators on what math really is and what math can do for students who will not be mathematicians. I finally started a math enrichment program at our neighborhood elementary school and have taught advanced 4th and 5th graders through that program for four years now (this is my main community volunteer work).  So I’m sure you can tell why articles such as yours really strike a chord with me.

The issues that you raised in your article are all excellent and educators and parents should think hard about them. I’m also glad that you mentioned the starkly different attitudes toward sports and toward math.  It’s not that Americans don’t understand the value of hard work and that effort can definitely make up (to a certain extent) for lack of talent, it’s just that this somehow gets lost in math education. But I also think that there are another couple of very important issues that contribute no less to the current state of math education:

  1. There is a tendency to treat math as a set of discrete skills, procedures and facts for students to learn each year, not as a coherent and logical way of thinking that students will develop continuously through the years. The amount of rote memorization is, honestly, overwhelming. It is also quite clear that some teachers think that solving math problems is to follow a series of set steps. They miss the point that solving math problems is actually a quite creative process, in which one assesses the situation, assesses the tools in his/her toolboxes and zeros in gradually on how to connect what one knows and what one needs to know. It’s a detective’s work. So the question is: even if we make the kids not fear math, even if they are willing to work hard on math, are they truly learning the essence of math in the classrooms?                                                                                                             
  2. The strong tendency to protect kids from feeling deficient also affects those who are perceived to be capable math students. The math work tends to be very simple, kids are kept at a low level for a very long time until they are absolutely sure that they “have got it”. The slow pace and the lack of depth and challenge at each level can really turn kids off, even for those who are very capable. I’ve read that a whopping 60% of American students actually think that they are not challenged enough in math. In today’s high-stakes college entrance game, it is probably detrimental for a student to score a 70 on a math test. But in many other countries, East Asian or not, 70 is a perfectly OK score for good students. They know that they will apply a large set of math concepts and skills in various ways for a long time, and each time they apply these concepts and skills they have an opportunity to be better at it, and they know that it’s OK to make mistakes. After all, who is a good math student? Someone who only solves very simple problems and gets them all correct? Or someone who tackles very challenging problems but sometimes gets it wrong? In the US, the lack of challenge in the content, the lack of appreciation of math as a creative yet logical endeavor, and the high-stakes evaluation system together might just breed students who are risk-averse in their academic pursuit and who don’t get to see the true beauty of math. And this might be one reason why even the advanced students can be ill-prepared in math.

Making a Difference: Save-the-World Posts as of December 3, 2013

One of the reasons I blog is to do what I can to make the world a better place. In a useful hyperbole, I call this “saving the world.” This is my selection of posts that are in that vein. I have done posts with selections of “save-the-world” posts periodically since July 8, 2012, but it has been a long time since the last one on January 17, 2013.

I hope you will join me in trying to save the world–perhaps in a way very different from anything I have contemplated.

A word about the selection. My definition of “save-the-world posts” is the posts I most want you to read when I think of the objective of making the world a better place. Because of my view that the usual partisan debates are already well-discussed, for the most part, I am leaving aside posts that are about the current policy debates you would read about in regular news outlets. If you are interested in my contribution to those battles, take a look at my monetary policy sub-blog, the list of posts on taxation I give A Year in the Life of a Supply-Side Liberal, and the post I wrote immediately after watching Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for President: The Magic of Etch-a-Sketch: A Supply-Side Liberal Fantasy.

Let me try to categorize these save-the-world posts in a way that makes sense.

It is Possible to Make a Difference

and

for which the full text is 

May the best in the human spirit vanquish the worst in the human spirit.

Where Does the Motivation Come from to Want to Make a Difference?

Vision

Handbook for Making a Difference

Appreciating the Progress Has Been and Is Being Made

Ending Recessions and Inflation

Economic Stabilization in the Euro Zone

Financial Stability and Its Interaction with Monetary Policy

Long-Run Budget Balance

Geopolitical Stability

Economic Growth

Education

Saving Nature

Happiness

Making Religions that Work Even for Agnostics and Atheists

Freedom

Moral Dimensions of Public Policy

Hard Problems I Don’t Have a Good Solution For: Reforming Health Care and Women’s Second Shift

An Agnostic Prayer for Strength

Sometimes the task I face on a particular day scares me–whether because of its difficulty, or because of its importance. I felt that way as I walked from my hotel to the Fed to talk about electronic money a few weeks ago. I devised this prayer, which helped me feel more confident:

May I be strong and steadfast,

calm and collected,

as I set out to serve

the God or Gods who may be.  

The theology behind this prayer, and two other examples of agnostic prayers, can be found here:

In situations where strength is needed day after day for many days in a row, I would change one word:

May I be strong and steadfast,

calm and collected,

as I strive to serve

the God or Gods who may be.  

Better yet would be putting together your own agnostic prayer–something that works for you. 

I have called what I have above a prayer, but like a mantra, or “The Litany Against Fear,” it helped to say it to myself more than once.

Note: I saved this post for Thanksgiving weekend. I also had a Thanksgiving column on Quartz this year: “Gratitude is more than simple sentiment: it is the motivation that can save the world.”

Miles Kimball, Jason Becker and Jordan Weissmann Discuss Affirmative Action →

Kids who get passable grades in high school despite serious outward disadvantages are more likely to have the grit needed to succeed in college than kids who get somewhat better grades despite every advantage. And it is especially valuable to increase the odds that kids who have overcome obstacles many others also face will gain a broader influence in society by admitting them to elite colleges. But outward disadvantage is much more than a matter of race alone.

You might be interested in this Twitter discussion of affirmative action in that light.

But the big injustice in education is that we haven’t fixed our K-12 schools for those at the bottom of the heap. Here is a start:

http://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/27813547755/magic-ingredient-1-more-k-12-school

Enlightened Self-Interest vs. the Anti-Immigration Mob

Illustration of the Rock Springs Massacre from Harper’s Weekly

H. W. Brands, writing in The American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900 (p. 300):

The formal effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act was to bar most new immigration from China, but its informal effect was to declare open season on Chinese already in America. Within months of the act’s passage, what the Chinese called the “driving out” began. White hooligans waged racial war against Chinese across much of the West, killing twenty-eight in Rock Springs, Wyoming, thirty-one on the Snake River in eastern Washington, and smaller numbers elsewhere. Occasionally whites stuck up for their Chinese neighbors, if sometimes from selfish motives. A white gambler in Denver pulled six-guns on an anti-Chinese mob and told them to desist. “If you kill Wong, who in the hell will do my laundry?” he demanded. But in most places the mobs had their way. Rural communities of Chinese largely disappeared, their inhabitants driven off, their homes burned, their property seized by those doing the driving.