How Utah Keeps the American Dream Alive

Conservatives see poverty as being at least partly a social problem. They just don't see bureaucratization as a healthy solution to the problem.

It's common to refer to conservatives who have a more liberal view of poverty as "compassionate", but it's just a word, not a judgement.

> It's common to refer to conservatives who have a more liberal view of poverty as "compassionate", but it's just a word, not a judgement.

Let's flip this around and see how it sounds: "It's common to refer to liberals who have a more conservative view of poverty as 'intelligent liberals'". Point being, "compassionate conservative" comes across judgy, no matter how it was meant. George W. Bush coined that line during the 2000 presidential campaign and was criticized along these lines back then, too.

I mean: under the stated assumption that the data is given by a sum of independent Gaussian variables, would the Pearson correlation of the Gaussian data be equal to the Spearman rank correlation of the corresponding ranked data.

One can check from the definition that the answer is "yes".

> Hmmm. I think that it is the r-squared that is the proportion of variance in Y that is accounted for by X.

Yes, you're right, I needed to square this number. So, assuming Gaussian independent variables, 37% of the variance in mobility is explained by percentage foreign born. It would be pretty surprising if there were even an larger effect independent than this, so I'll self-grade my conjecture as "plausible".

This article is a nice addition to my own experiences. I admit I felt at first somewhat envious and impressed by the community sense, they have in Utah. Family and neighbors seem quite close. People are very smiling and positive. As a diehard atheist, meeting mormons made me really have to contemplate the role of religion. It seemed to make many mormons happy and create a tight knight society. And despite being anti-religion and atheist I actually wanted to live there for some years just for the experience. I loved my time there despite it being so much at odds with values in many respect.

Mormons deserve a lot of praise for what they have accomplished. Yet after staying longer I think it became clear to me that there was a dark side to what looked like paradise at first glance.

Too me it is a bit funny to see Americans praise the Utah model, when it is a far more extreme case of homogeneity than any Scandinavian country typically dismissed as a viable model for America for just that reason. To me people in Utah live a complete bubble world, with little idea of what the real world is like or what other people think about stuff. They seemed very confused when speaking to a non-mormon or non-religious person like myself about particular subjects. And if you didn't fit the narrow path designated by the mormon church, you were pretty much screwed.

I honestly think the Scandinavian model scales a lot better when it comes to tackling societies problems than the Utah model. It allows for a lot more individualism and ethnic mix. It doesn't rely on the majority being strongly religious and doing huge amounts of volunteer work. In a way Utah is really just doing the same as Scandinavian welfare states are doing. Citizens are contributing a lot of resources towards helping the less fortunate. The difference is that in Utah it happens through volunteering through the church, and a strong social pressure to do so. In Scandinavia it happens through high taxes. I realize that in the US the Utah approach is more palatable as it is strictly speaking not required to contribute, while you can't skip taxes in Scandinavia. However in practice there is a a strong social pressure that means it isn't really an option not to.

It is interesting though that creating social mobility and reducing poverty follows very similar receipts in Utah and Scandinavia. E.g. avoiding that welfare becomes a way of life has a pretty strong tradition in Scandinavia as well. The Norwegian labour party's old slogan was "Do your duty and demand your right!" The welfare system has always been generous but also quite a lot more pushy on getting people back into work than what has been the case in many other countries. But the ability for the system to work has also rested on a lot of trust between people as in Utah. I believe in Norway 68% say you can trust your fellow man, while in the US in general would around 30%, while in e.g. Brazil it would be 2%. That is one of my strongest believes about society. One of the most important things for society to succeed is trust.

I was more concerned about the more popular misconception about protestant Christianity: that it mostly involves claiming a label then going to heaven. This does a lot of harm because a lot of "Christians" are more or less untrained, unaccountable, and frankly bad people. And they are the examples often brought up when discussing hard feelings and distaste for Christianity.

I'd also wouldn't blame predestination for the lack of stress on membership and the consequential toothlessness of shunning. It more has to do with the removal of actual priests (i.e., with collars and robes) from any sort of essential role. You don't have to make any particular clergyman or bishop happy to have a birth blessed, a holy funeral, an honorable wedding, or salvation itself.