America's Best (and Worst) Airlines

For the second year in a row, the Airline Quality Rating (AQR) report has ranked Virgin America as the highest-quality major airline in the United States. The AQR has been conducted annually since 1991 and is considered the premier statistical study of US major airline performance. It focuses on four criteria: On-time arrivals, denied boardings, mishandled bags, and customer complaints. The final ranking is a weighted average of the four scores. Here they are:

I haven't risen all of the carriers, but I see that my least favorite (American Eagle) landed at the bottom of the list. No surprise there, at least not for me. An airline that's missing from the list is Spirit Airlines, which a recent Planet Money episode labeled the "The Fastest Growing, Least Popular Airline In America." If that report is correct, it would've almost certainly landed below American Eagle, which in my opinion is very hard to do.

What's a Bitcoin?

Bitcoins are a digital currency (aka, as virtual currency, electronic money, or cryptocurrency) that was introduced in 2009. They are created by a process called mining, and users can send and receive them with a personal computer or mobile device. The Bitcoin system is not controlled by a single entity (e.g., a central bank), which is why they are considered a decentralized currency. The commercial use of bitcoins as a form of payment is small compared to how they have been bought and sold by speculators, which has led to considerable volatility in the price of bitcoins. That said, there has been some growth in their use as a currency because bitcoin transaction fees are typically lower than credit card fees. So far, the largest purchase using bitcoins was the purchase of a villa in Bali for over $500,000.

Bitcoins have been the subject of two recent podcasts: one on NPR's Planet Money and one on Freakonomics. The one on Planet Money ("Bitcoin Goes To The Moon") discusses the recent volatility in the price of bitcoins. There's also a link to an earlier 2011 Planet Money podcast ("Bitcoin"), which talks about the nuts and bolts of the Bitcoin system. The Freakonomics podcast ("Why Everybody Who Doesn’t Hate Bitcoin Loves It") examines what bitcoins are and why bitcoins (or something like them) could prove to be revolutionary. As the folks at Freakonomics put it: "thinking of Bitcoin as just a digital currency is like thinking about the Internet as just e-mail. Its potential is much more exciting than that." Both the Planet Money and Freakonomics podcasts can be downloaded from iTunes or you can listen to them at their respective websites. Just follow the links above.

Hobby Lobby, Ideology, and Constitutional Philosophy

As many readers know, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for an exemption to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (i.e., Obamacare) requirement that certain for-profit corporations have to provide contraception coverage to their workers. They are seeking an exclusion on religious grounds from the health care law's requirements, maintaining that some contraceptive products, like the morning-after pill, are equivalent to abortion. The case's outcome appears to hinge on whether freedom of religious conscience can be extended to corporations (rather than just for individuals). Oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court last week.

I've read several op-eds on the case, and I've come away with the sense that in most cases ideology trumps philosophy, that the side people take is largely determined by their ideological leanings rather than their constitutional philosophy. In other words, most of those who are pro-life find the argument that religious freedom can be extended to corporations compelling, while most of those who are pro-choice do not. No doubt there are exceptions (e.g., people who actually study constitutional law), but I'm willing to bet that the best predictor of someone's opinion on the case is not their constitutional philosophy concerning religious freedom but whether they are pro-life or pro-choice.

Ball Four: Or is It?

I can't recall how many times I've watched a pitcher get a little wild, walk a couple of guys, and then can't catch a break from the umpire. Almost every pitch that borders between a strike and a ball is called a ball. This inevitably forces the pitcher to start aiming his pitches, which usually translates into him either getting even more wild and walking even more batters or grooving one right down the middle of the plate, which the batter then launches into one of the gaps and drives home numerous runs. It's as if once a pitcher becomes a little wild, the umpire assumes that the next pitch will be a ball. And unless the next pitch is clearly a strike, the umpire calls it a ball. Of course, I have had no data by which to test this hypothesis. Data on how Little League, high school, and college umpires call pitches do not exist.

But, they do exist for professional baseball. Pitch location data have been collected by Major League Baseball for several years now, and a recent study Brayden King, associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Jerry Kim, assistant professor at Columbia Business School, indirectly appears to confirm my suspicions ("What Umpires Get Wrong"). They not only found that umpires call about 14 percent of non-swinging pitches incorrectly (i.e., calling a strike a ball and a ball a strike), but they are heavily influenced by unconscious preconceptions of what the next pitch will be. For instance, umpires were 16 percent more likely to call a ball a strike if the pitcher had appeared in an All-Star game than if he hadn't, and they were 9 percent less likely to mistakenly call a strike a ball if the pitcher had appeared in an All-Star game than if he hadn't. Similarly, a pitcher who has a reputation for not walking a lot of batters is much more likely to have a ball called a strike than a pitcher who is known for being wild.

Thus, it isn't too much of a leap to suppose that after a pitcher has walked a couple of batters, umpires are much more likely to call the next pitch a ball than if he hasn't. What's interesting is that I can actually test this hypothesis. I think I'll wait until I get tenure before I do, however.

Not Everyone Can Throw Like Mariano Rivera

It used to be that when a starting pitcher threw a clean eighth inning, he would start the ninth. More and more, however, that doesn't happen. If starters pitch through the eighth, they are often relived by the team's closer regardless of how they pitched the ninth. Personally, I think this is inane, but it reflects current conventional wisdom in major league baseball: to win, you gotta have a closer, and so teams will spend ungodly amounts of $s to get one.

The problem is that closers as good as Mariano Rivera are rare, and most teams would probably do just as well, or better, if they closed by committee and spent big-dollars for other positions. As an article in today's New York Times notes ("A Season Opens. But Who Closes?"), dropping huge $s on big name closers is a hit-or-miss proposition (e.g., Miami Marlins and Heath Bell); in fact, the last three World Series winners (St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, Boston Red Sox) all finished the season with different closers than they started with. But, professional baseball is no less immune to current fads than are other professions, so I doubt that too much will change in the short term.

Why Christianity is Fashionable Among China's Intellectuals

Social scientists typically draw a distinction between sects and cults (see note on use of the term, "cult," below). Both exist in a state of "tension" with their sociocultural environment. That is, their beliefs and practices often put them at odds with mainstream society. However, whereas sects have ties with an established religious tradition in that particular society, cults do not. Cults are independent religious movements that can arise either by being imported from another society (e.g., Hinduism in the United States or Christianity in India) or when someone has new religious insights and succeeds in attracting followers (e.g., Mormonism in the United States or Islam in seventh-century Mecca).

A surprising difference between sects and cults is that while sects tend to attract people of lower socioeconomic status, cults tend to attract people of higher socioeconomic status. Why? Because conversion to a new religion generally involves being interested in new culture and new ideas, and people with higher educations are generally more able of disseminating new ideas. It is also why in the United States Zen Buddhism primarily appeals to people with higher levels of education and why the Rajneeshpuram, which was a short-lived commune in central Oregon during the 1980s, attracted people primarily from the upper and middle classes:

Most of the sannyasins that lived at the communal city in Oregon in the '80s were more than thirty years old, and less the 5 percent of them were people of color. Two-thirds reported that they had degrees from four-year colleges. A substantial portion of these sannyasins represented the best and brightest of the baby-boon generation, who had excelled in college and in their late careers (Goldman 2011, p. 309)

Thus, we shouldn't be surprised that in China, intellectuals are attracted to Christianity. As Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang (2014, p. 1) noted:

A number of observers have noticed the very high rate of conversion to Christianity that is taking place among graduate students from China at American universities (Wang and Yang 2006; Yang 1998). Many also have remarked on the very Christian climate that prevails at the leading Chinese universities, where many students as well as many faculty members openly express their faith (Lin-Liu 2005), and a fine study by Fenggang Yang (2005) reported the prevalence of well-educated Chinese among urban Christians in China.

Why? Because in China, Christianity is a cult. It is an independent religious movement; it doesn't have a tie to an established Chinese religion. But that doesn't explain why Christianity rather some other independent religious movement is attracting educated converts. That is the topic Stark and Wang address in a recent article:

No one has adequately explained why Christianity seems to have such great appeal for the most-educated Chinese. In fact, if this is true, the special appeal of Christianity for educated Chinese is quite inconsistent with the still prevailing notion among sociologists that religion functions primarily to compensate the lower classes for their worldly deprivations. 

In this study, we first demonstrate that the most-educated Chinese are more likely than the less-educated to become Christians and to reject Buddhism. We then review previous research showing that new religious movements are nearly always based on elites. We explain this linkage as the result of spiritual deprivation. Turning to the particular situation of educated Chinese, we explore how the rapid influx of technical and economic modernity into a traditional society can create a crisis of cultural incongruity—a conflict between the cultural assumptions of modernity and those of traditional religious culture. This conflict results in spiritual deprivation, which can be relieved by conversion to Christianity and by rejecting Buddhism and other traditional religions.

Alas for the West's cultured despisers of Christianity, many of whom are attracted Eastern religions. If they grew up and lived in China, there's a good chance they'd find Christianity fashionable and be following Jesus instead.

Note: Because the public and media often use the term "cult" with negative connotations, social scientists sometimes use the term, "new religious movement." That, however, is misleading because many new religious movements are only "new" to the society in which they emerge. Thus, I prefer the either the term "cult" or "independent religious movement."

References

Goldman, Marion S. 2011. "Cultural Capital, Social Networks, and Collective Violence." Pp. 307-23 in Violence and New Religious Movements, edited by James R. Lewis. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lin-Liu, Jen. 2005. “At Chinese Universities, Whispers of Jesus.” Chronicle of Higher Education June 10:40.

Stark, Rodney, and Xiuhua Wang. 2014. "Christian Conversion and Cultural Incongruity in Asia." Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 10 (Article 2).

Wang, Yuting, and Fenggang Yang. 2006. “More Than Evangelical and Ethnic: The Eco-logical Factor in Chinese Conversion to Christianity in the United States.” Sociology of Religion 67: 179–192.

Yang, Fenggang. 1998. “Chinese Conversion to Evangelical Christianity: The Importance of Social and Cultural Contexts.” Sociology of Religion 59: 237–257.

Yang, Fenggang. 2005. “Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44: 423–441.

Bin Laden and Pakistan

Some time ago, I noted that the Pakistan government almost certainly knew that Osama bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad ("Umar Patek, Osama bin Laden and Abbottabad: Mere Coincidence?"). I also pointed out that just a few months before the raid on bin Laden's compound another high profile terrorist, Umar Patek, was arrested in the same town where bin Laden was found hiding. At the time I wondered

• Whether it was mere coincidence that two of the world's most sought-after terrorists sought refuge in the same Pakistani town?
• Wasn't it something of a stretch to believe that Pakistani officials were able to learn of Patek's presence in Abbottabad, while remaining completely ignorant of bin Laden's? 

A recent article in the New York Times Magazine confirms what I suspected ("What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden"). Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad and actually ran a special desk assigned just to handle him. It also appears that it has been lending support to the Taliban so that it can use them as a proxy force to eventually gain control of Afghanistan. According to the article's author, Carlotta Gall, 

America’s failure to fully understand and actively confront Pakistan on its support and export of terrorism is one of the primary reasons President Karzai has become so disillusioned with the United States. As American and NATO troops prepare to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of this year, the Pakistani military and its Taliban proxy forces lie in wait, as much a threat as any that existed in 2001.

I hope that Ms. Gall is wrong. I fear that she is right.