Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?

magiclight, In the spirit of your last comment, here is a link to one of the most interesting articles on upward mobility I have ever read. Upward mobility as appeared to stall in America today, but this gentleman may have found a possible solution. The article is rather long, perfect for a Sunday morning with coffee.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/...

Please let me know if anyone has trouble downloading the article.

I worry about finding community if we move to a smaller place. Seattle has become so expensive that we should move to conserve our savings. Our problem is where to move. Another large city would be expensive and a small place might be pretty closed to newcomers. Senior centers have lots of activities where you can meet people, but really small places might not have one. I think the woman saying God bless all the time would mark her as someone I wouldn't want to be close friends with. Ok to know casually, but nothing more.

Wren, We moved from Southern California to a small town in the Ozarks of Arkansas of 11,000 people.

The major drawback is we are two hours from the nearest airport. It is also a very religious area and very conservative but not a problem if one doesn't bring up politics or religion.

The plusses:

One out of three people are over 65 so all the doctors in town are experts in geriatric medicine.

We have an active senior center, a regional hospital, a community college that is tuition free

A Unitarian church that is welcoming to atheists if one is a joiner.

One of the best non-profit hospice programs in the state.

In California, for every $1.00 spent one gets $0.88 in goods and services. In Arkansas for every $1.00 spent one gets $1.22 in goods and services.

We have two huge lakes with clean water and lots of fish.

The medium home price is $160,000.

I don't think the author said anything about forcing people to move. He actually stated that one of the complexities of any program for moving people would be their reluctance to give up the connections they have with their existing community and that moving would not be a solution for everyone or would even work, long term. He wants more data. He is interested in data and what analysis of data shows. I agree that data is cool in the same way emotion is warm. Data can be misinterpreted and emotion can blur the facts. He is using his data as medicine would use a microscope; to study the problem. Here is a quote from the article.

"To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty's institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope."

Give him and others time to use this microscope to understand the pathologies of reduce opportunity.

Right now cannot get the 'link' to cite work but if interested an informative web cite is

CDC.gov/500cities

The data intersects with Ray Chetty research

Thanks for a great morning conversation.

magiclight, I know the section you are talking about. Here it is. Note that the people received vouchers and were not forced to move. If it were forced, they wouldn't have used vouchers.

'In the 1990s, the federal government launched Moving to Opportunity, a program designed to relocate families living in public housing to safer neighborhoods, where they had access to better jobs and schools. Thousands of families in five cities were randomly selected to receive housing vouchers and support services to help them move to lower-poverty areas. After a decade of study, researchers concluded that while these "mover" families experienced some physical and mental-health benefits, test scores among the kids didn't rise, and there were no signs of financial benefit for adults or older children.

In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz asked the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had overseen the program, for permission to take another look at what had happened to the children. When the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had moved before they were teenagers, had not yet reached their earning years, and this turned out to make all the difference. This young group of movers, the economists found, had gone on to earn 31 percent more than those who hadn't moved, and 4 percent more of them attended college. They calculated that for an 8-year-old child, the value of the extra future earnings over a lifetime was almost $100,000, a substantial sum for a poor family. For a family with two children, the taxes paid on the extra income more than covered the costs of the program. "The big insight," Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Princeton, told me, "is that it took a generation for the effects to manifest."'

This is just one small section of the article. It goes on to say that no one knows why one neighborhood has upward mobility and an adjoining neighborhood does not. Chetty is interested in putting his 'microscope' on this issue or issues.

Elizabeth Warren was asked a question in the first debate that she said she needed more data to answer. The moderator thought she was refusing to answer the question. She was not. She said she couldn't until the research was done to provide the data so any solution could be informed by what worked. (I can't remember the question.) At a time when the Trump administration is refusing to collect data, projects like Chetty's are key.

I think Chetty's work is fascinating and important. It's just that I've seen the human element left out of too many urban projects. And the vouchers may have been voluntary, but in too many instances, those types of enticements have been misrepresented to the recipients. A lot of low-income residents were lured into high-rise housing in the 50s and 60s, and those were almost universally disasters. And I just saw a news story about a town in Wisconsin that put all its financial eggs in one development basket a few years ago, and so far they haven't seen a single chick. So "voluntary" can mean a lot of things in urban planning and commercial development lingo.

Ananda , Good to hear about living in the Ozarks. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in Rogers for a while and have cousins in Tulsa.

I haven't read the article yet, but the discussion is interesting and I'll have to go back and do that.

Our paper had the most wonderful obit this week. The man had grown up poor, was a crack shot because it meant meat for dinner and he only had enough money to buy one bullet. He served in WWII, returned and married. Was a wonderful father and grandfather and basically lived an ordinary life doing good things for his neighbors. I was sorry I had never known him. I think he could be described as a good man. What a relief from the ones listing the honors and how successful the person was in business.

It's the same attitude in Oklahoma. It's OK to have money, but not to flaunt it. It also stems from the Depression, I think.

The fear of the other is an artifact of a scary childhood. The original "other" is the mother. If your mother is not safe that stays with you as a right brain certainty about "people" and if your Mom has your back that inculcates trust in people.

I think a lot of the religious craziness comes from draconian child rearing. If you ever look at Gary Ezzos evangelical child rearing books the stuff he recommends is horrifying. Hitting babies with an implement, etc.

Basically you can either believe people are basically good, but can get polluted by bad experiences..... or you believe people are basically bad but can be reformed by punitive bad experiences.

I believe people are basically good..... and if they are acting horrid, something damaged them at an early time.

Might be a signal that all the Ezzo's kids have repudiated them, and are estranged....

Alice, Would you be as put off by the god talk if the people were from Animists or Shinto, or other less well know to you religion? God talk by Christians bugs me because I know a certain group of them are attempting to control me politically. Once I put god talk into a category of exotic utterances, the amount of irritation I felt was greatly reduced.

How's this for in your face Christianity - South Dakota 'Public school students in South Dakota will notice something different on their first day back to school — the national motto, "In God We Trust," prominently inscribed on walls in stencil or paint.' US is founded on Christian principles - how has that played out in US history ? Oh yeah it began by decimating most Native populations?

Me.

I'm also an atheist - have been since around the age of 12. If someone needs the threat of going to hell in order to be a good person, they lack a moral compass (which I've noticed is quite prevalent in many theists I've known).