St. Maximos' Hut

So, one of the other disciplines seems to have a problem with its own version of religious hiring discrimination. Of course the religion being Statism, it's all perfectly ok and the religious zealots have control of the top institutions in the profession.

In this case, there's a market response. As it should be.

Very interesting post today, Andy. Though sometimes I'm afraid that some of our intermediaries are only too good at "stepping down the voltage". Interesting analogy... does the existence of many denominations and worship traditions (where religious markets are free) suggest, as Rodney Stark assumes, that there is a natural heterogeneity in preferences for " voltages"?

Laurence Iannaccone suggests that there are also more explicityly social explanations for the church - we go to church to consume positive externalities generated by other worshippers. On days when I'm "not quite up for" an intimate connection with God I can go and get a "contact high" by being in the presence of others. I can then decide if that's enough or whether I want to become directly engaged.

I would add that we derive important social benefits from "being a church" as oppossed to "going to church." For one thing, we can learn about God's nature from each other. Secondly, we can provide mutal aid for each other - in both material and immaterial forms. Clearly, church is just one way to provide these social functions... fora like this blog can provide the first of these functions and lots of other social organizations claim to do the later.

One interesting question is whether the church is better or worse at providing some of these functions than alternative social institutions. When barriers to exit are low, and there are many competing churches, for example, the church may allow people to engage in their ideal level of redistribution in an atmosphere relatively free of coercion (compared to the state). Can churches, therefore, (among other things) be Nozickian utopias?

(P.S. the aesthetic/analytic appeal of explaining social institutions as the unintended by-product of individualistic motives is not lost on me)

I assigned Ronald Coase's classic The Nature of the Firm to my introductory Business Associations class, which took place a couple of weeks ago. (We'll see if any enterprising BA students turn up in the comments here. I often wonder what all the furious keyboarding in class is - could be note taking, could be Google.) I also assigned Oliver Hart's excellent An Economist's Perspective on the Theory of the Firm, 89 Columbia Law Review 1757 (1989). [Both articles are available on line, but, as far as I know, only in places where you need an ID to get in.]

As I reread these articles for class, I started wondering if they could say anything useful about why churches exist. [There are sound theological reasons for churches too; I'll leave those to the priests around here.]

Coase says that "The main reason why it is profitable to establish a firm would seem to be that there is a cost of using the price mechanism." That is, people form firms to take some transactions out of the market place. They do this until the marginal cost of the non-market alternative equals the marginal cost of the market mechanism.

How might this apply to churches? I can worship at home or in church. At home, I'm by myself or with my family. At church I'm in a larger community. If I pray by myself, it seems that I'm incurring all the costs of interaction with the divine directly. Frankly, I'm just not up to it - getting in touch with the divine is not always a comfortable experience. Worship at church brings in an intermediary - in my case, the good Fr. M. He often analogizes his role to stepping down the voltage of the divine to a level that people can handle. I need that access, but the direct application would blow out my circuits.

On the other hand, if all worship occurs at church, there's not much time for that personal interaction that is sometimes so uncomfortable. In the midst of liturgy, with the choir singing gloriously, the incense wafting up, the sunlight shining on the icons [well, sometimes - I do live in Cleveland], it's easier to avoid thinking about uncomfortable things and focus on the music or the icons.

So it seems there is considerable room for a Coasian substituting across margins to have different forms of worship. All of one or all of the other would be insufficient; gains exist from having both forms. I need to think more about this - Coase seems to apply to virtually everything if one thinks about it long enough, and to yield insights that are worth the effort. I'm not there yet on this, but I'll have to keep at it.

Over at The Gates of Vienna, an intriguing blog, I found much to like and learn. But I also found a comment that exemplifies some of the problems with the post-Katrina commentary.

Dymphna argues for more planning as the solution to the problem of unpreparedness.
Specifically, she thinks the problem is that "We are not training enough people in maintaining anything. Maintenance jobs are considered “low status” and kids who shouldn’t be there are pushed into college."
Well, no. There may be problems with the set of incentives and institutions with which the states and federal government manage education but the problem is not a lack of planning. The problem is that the states and federal government are interfering in the marketplace. The problem is not that maintenance jobs are low status, whatever that means, but that maintenance jobs are actually getting harder because technology is getting tougher to maintain. Ask a car mechanic. I had to learn something about the development of engine controllers for heavy duty diesel engines for a paper I wrote (Regulation by Litigation: EPA’s Regulation of Heavy-Duty Diesel Engines, 56 Administrative Law Review 403-518 (2004) (with Bruce Yandle and Andrew Dorchak) for the curious - email me and I'll mail you a reprint). Between 1970 and 2000, engine controllers in all forms of internal combustion engines got very sophisticated, partly in response to clean air regulation but partly because technology got a lot cheaper. As a result, maintaining an engine got a lot more complicated along with the engines - but the jobs divided. Some "maintenance" on engines now is plugging them into a computer, which tells you how to fix them. Other maintenance is swapping out a chip or upgrading software.

The main point is that more central planning is not the solution to social programs. If anything, we've got too much planning of things like education.

On Tully's page.

The money quote:

I do not think that that State ought to have any role in defining the boundaries, purposes, or roles in marriage. Marriage is an Eccelesiastical sacrament, and should come under the purview of the Church and the Church alone - not the state, and not the Church-as-agent-of-the-State. When left to the Church, the sacrament maintains its integrity as a sacrament - not a tax status or organizational tool. If a Church wants to marry two gay men, so be it. If a Church wants to prohibit gay marriage and condemn homosexuality, so be it. Get the State out of the Churches entirely, and let them operate according to their own doctrine and consciences.

Tyler Cowen has some comments and a link on poverty statistics that are worth reading over at Marginal Revolution.

We know something important about the role of property rights and poverty. David Schmidtz, who I think is one of the best contemporary philosophers in part because he writes so clearly, has an essay The Institution of Property. There is a web version here.

Here's an important part of Schmidtz' argument:

Philosophers writing about original appropriation tend to speak as if people who arrive first are luckier than those who come later. The truth is, first appropriators begin the process of resource creation; latecomers get most of the benefits. Consider America’s first permanent English settlement, the Jamestown colony of 1607. (Or, if you prefer, imagine the lifestyles of people crossing the Bering Strait from Asia twelve thousand years ago.) Was their situation better than ours? How so? Was it that they never worried about being overcharged for car repairs? They never awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of noisy refrigerators, leaky faucets, or flushing toilets? They never had to change a light bulb? They never agonized over the choice of long-distance telephone companies?
Philosophers are taught to say, in effect, that original appropriators got the good stuff for free. We have to pay for ugly leftovers. But in truth, original appropriation benefits latecomers far more than it benefits original appropriators. Original appropriation is a cornucopia of wealth, but mainly for latecomers. The people who got here first never dreamt of things we latecomers take for granted. The poorest among us have life expectancies exceeding theirs by several decades. This is not political theory. It is not economic rhetoric. It is fact.

It is so. And when we read moral condemnations of property or capitalism, we should remember that both have done more to raise the standard of living among the poor than all the government programs since the dawn of time. Relative poverty is impossible to eradicate. Absolute poverty is being eradicated wherever the institutions that destroy it spread. Surely that is a moral message we could hear more about from those preaching a social gospel.

is the title of the conference I am attending this week, at the Elkhorn Ranch in Montana. I won't have much internet access while there (which I suppose is one of the advantages of having a conference at a ranch in rural Montana - the participants have to focus) but hope to find things worth sharing when I return. The schedule includes Prof. Daniel Chirot of U. Washington, C. Boyden Gray, Ed Meese, Thomas Schelling, and quite a few others of note.

Asymmetrical Information, which I found in the DFW airport via Instapundit, has some very interesting thoughts.

Sample:

I think that conservatives are right that many of the poor dig themselves in deeper. But conservatives tend to take a moralistic stance towards poverty that radically underestimates how much cultural context determines our ability to make good decisions.

Sure, I go to work every day, pay my bills on time, don't run a credit card balance and don't have kids out of wedlock because I am planning for my future. But I also do these things because my parents spent twenty or so years drumming a fear of debt, unemployment, and illegitimacy into my head. And if I announce to my friends that I've just decided not to go to work because it's a drag, they will look at me funny--and if I do it repeatedly, they may well shun me as a loser. If I can't get a house because I've screwed up my credit, middle class society will look upon me with pity, which is painful to endure. If I have a baby with no father in sight, my grandmother will cry, my mother will yell, and my colleagues will act a little odd at the sight of my swelling belly.

In other words, middle class culture is such that bad long-term decision making also has painful short-term consequences. This does not, obviously, stop many middle class people from becoming addicted to drugs, flagrantly screwing up at work, having children they can't take care of, and so forth. But on the margin, it prevents a lot of people from taking steps that might lead to bankruptcy and deprivation. We like to think that it's just us being the intrinsically worthy humans that we are, but honestly, how many of my nice middle class readers had the courage to drop out of high school and steal cars for a living?

I'm not really kidding. I mean, I don't know about the rest of you, but when I was eighteen, if my peer group had taken up swallowing razor blades I would have been happily killed myself trying to set a world record. And if they had thought school was for losers and the cool thing to do was to hang out all day listening to music and running dime bags for the local narcotics emporium, I would have been right there with them. Lucky for me, my peer group thought that the most important thing in the entire world was to get an ivy league diploma, so I went to Penn and ended up shilling for drug companies on my blog.

The always interesting Prof. Bainbridge comments on a little noticed news story about how environmental pressure groups blocked a project that might have protected New Orleans.

Update: An environmentalist response from Tom McGarity, one of the top environmentalist law professors (at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin).

Jacob Levy has a long response on the "religious faculty only hiring" issue over at The Volokh Conspiracy (it is in the comments to Juan Non-Volokh's post.)

The whole thing is worth reading. He raises two points I think are worth further discussion:

Point 1:

. . . a scholarly association can and should be true to its ethic of the academic vocation that holds that religious belief is not an appropriate hiring criterion for scientists (in Weber's sense of "science").

Now, the AEA doesn't tell us why it excludes job advertisements that discriminate on the basis of religion, it just says "Advertisements may not be discriminatory" and "Listings that indicate discrimination on the basis of religion are not permitted even if the employer is eligible to discriminate on the basis of religion under Sec. 703(e) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Somewhat oddly, it also says "Foreign universities are not subject to U.S. laws and regulations concerning equal opportunity employment. Some of their hiring procedures and employment practices may vary from those in the United States."

This last bit suggests that, perhaps, foreign universities do discriminate but somehow get their listings into the AEA list. It seems like it would be simple to ask them to certify that they don't discriminate if that's the AEA's concern.

I don't think the AEA gives us enough information to judge whether or not its basis is the one suggested by Jacob Levy. It just says you can't discriminate. The AEA also lumps religious institutions' preferences for believers together with racial, sex, disability, color, and national origin - which suggests that perhaps the AEA hasn't thought through the issue since there clearly is a difference. Maybe not enough of a difference to produce a different outcome, but a difference nonetheless.

In any event, if a professional organization is going to take a stand on such an issue, shouldn't (as a practical matter) the organization explain its views to help convert those who haven't thought about it to the organization's point of view?

If one pokes around on the AEA website, one can find minutes of the meetings. The most recent meeting to address this issue (according to the Job Openings for Economists web page, has this to say:

JOE continues to follow a policy prohibiting listings that express discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual preference, or physical handicap, as adopted by the Executive Committee in 1986. Siegfried noted that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 permits employment discrimination on the basis of religion at an educational institution when the institution is owned, supported, controlled, or managed by a particular religious corporation, association, or society, or if the curriculum of such educational institution is directed toward the propagation of a particular religion. Some educational institutions listing jobs in JOE qualify for the religion-based exemption, but currently JOE does not permit them to indicate that they discriminate. Because this may waste the time of some job applicants, the Executive Committee considered whether to relax this prohibition. Before deciding the matter, it asked for a legal opinion as to liability if the Association were to permit job listings to indicate that an institution discriminates on the basis of religion when, in fact, the institution did not qualify for the exemption. It was also noted that the Association’s statement does not specifically exclude discrimination on the basis of national origin. The Association’s Counsel was asked also to review the sufficiency of the Association’s policy pertaining to national origin.

This doesn't sound like high-minded policy - it sounds like bad lawyering and chicken-sh*t behavior. Being sued by somebody who reads an ad in which the advertiser claims a legal status that the advertiser in fact does not have, given that the advertiser is a member of the very small class of organizations allowed to post in the JOE, is so small a risk that doing more than posting a disclaimer or asking the advertiser for an agreement indemnifying the AEA is really going way overboard.

Maybe the AEA has a principled basis for its behavior, but this evidence doesn't support that. The policy was adopted at an earlier meeting, but I couldn't find those minutes on the web site.

Levy's second point:

The scholarly associations, like religious colleges, are built on a certain model of what scholarship and the scholarly life is like. Nothing wrong with that, even if the the two models are incompatible. And, frankly, as strongly as I believe in the associational freedom of religious colleges and in their right [against the state] to discriminate in hiring, it also seems to me a bad, non-scholarly thing to do, and the scholarly associations are under no obligation to pretend otherwise.

Why? What is wrong with discriminating on the basis of religious affiliation? It may not affect how well I do economics, but it might affect a lot about how I relate to students, my colleagues, etc. There's a lot to be said for a collegial department. Moreover, there is no particular reason to think that hiring with religious qualifications in mind will degrade the quality of the economics deparment that such hiring produces. Wheaton, for example, has a particularly fine economics department (featuring, of course, our own PJ - nice photo of him on the department home page). We tend to think that the verb "to discriminate" means something bad because it is so closely tied to illegitimate forms of discrimination (especially race) that we forget that choosing is discriminating.

I think a world with both Wheaton and Case Western Reserve University, my own, secular, university is a better world, and likely produces better economics, than a world with just one kind of economics department. For one thing, we can evaluate which approach is the superior one through observing data.

The American Psychological Association apparently decided not to drop its exemption for religious schools (giving it the reverse policy of the AEA) in 2002. This site argues that the repeal of the APA exemption was sought by gay groups which "feared that the exemption would result in anti-gay discrimination." I'm not sure about the sponsor of that site - I don't know enough about the politics of the psychology field - but the report of the APA action seems straightforward.