Behind the Veil: Mysticism and the Reply to Hiddenness in the Work of Travis Dumsday

Ever since J. L. Schellenberg formulated his infamous atheistic argument from hiddenness in his 1993 book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, the problem of divine hiddenness--the question of why a good God would hide Himself, even from those actively seeking Him--has troubled theists. Schellenberg\u27s argument from hiddenness has proven notoriously difficult for theists to answer, and perhaps this is why it is now second only to the problem of evil in popularity with atheists. While many theists have tried to find an adequate answer to the problem of hiddenness, and many have made good attempts, no response has been quite complete. Many such replies have been made by Dr. Travis Dumsday of the Concordia University of Edmonton. Dumsday has written prolifically on the subject of divine hiddenness, but in this paper I will look at only three of his replies to Schellenberg\u27s argument from hiddenness. These three responses, while each insufficient on their own, become a far more formidable reply to the problem of hiddenness when combined and synthesized around a more mystic conception of God imported from the Christian mystic tradition. Drawing upon the mysticism of Saint Francis of Assisi and the rigorous philosophy of Dumsday, I argue that the great mystery that we call God remains hidden in order to preserve the well-being of nonbelievers, and that He does indeed reveal Himself, but only to those who cultivate the requisite level of moral virtue and seek Him diligently

The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition and Quality of Police

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments. My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on workforce composition is a 14 percentage point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers. Evidence on police performance is mixed. Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation. However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees.

Use of cryopumps on large space simulation systems

The need for clean, oil free space simulation systems has demanded the development of large, clean pumping systems. The assurance of optically dense liquid nitrogen baffles over diffusion pumps prevents backstreaming to a large extent, but does not preclude contamination from accidents or a control failure. Turbomolecular pumps or ion pumps achieve oil free systems but are only practical for relatively small chambers. Large cryopumps were developed and checked out which do achieve clean pumping of very large chambers. These pumps can be used as the original pumping system or can be retrofitted as a replacement for existing diffusion pumps

The Effect of Female Education on Fertility and Infant Health: Evidence from School Entry Policies Using Exact Date of Birth

This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman%u2019s mate and have generally small, but possibly heterogeneous, effects on fertility and infant health. We argue that school entry policies manipulate primarily the education of young women at risk of dropping out of school.

The Deterrence Effect of Prison: Dynamic Theory and Evidence

Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2 percent decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with standard errors ruling out declines of 11 percent or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker’s (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negative than -0.13 for young offenders.Prison, crime, deterrence, incarceration

Crime, Punishment, and Myopia

Economic theory predicts that increasing the severity of punishments will deter criminal behavior by raising the expected price of committing crime. This implicit price can be substantially raised by making prison sentences longer, but only if offenders' discount rates are relatively low. We use a large sample of felony arrests to measure the deterrence effect of criminal sanctions. We exploit the fact that young offenders are legally treated as adults--and face longer lengths of incarceration--the day they turn 18. Sufficiently patient individuals should therefore significantly lower their offending rates immediately upon turning 18. The small behavioral responses that we estimate suggest that potential offenders are extremely impatient, myopic, or both.

Incomes in South Africa since the fall of Apartheid

This paper examines changes in individual real incomes in South Africa between 1995 and 2000. We document substantial declines—on the order of 40%—in real incomes for both men and women. The brunt of the income decline appears to have been shouldered by the young and the non-White. We argue that changes in respondent attributes are insufficient to explain this decline. For most groups, a (conservative) correction for selection into income recipiency explains some, but not all, of the income decline. For other groups, selection is a potential explanation for the income decline. Perhaps the most persuasive explanation of the evidence is substantial economic restructuring of the South African economy in which wages are not bid up to keep pace with price changes due to a differentially slack labor market.

New Evidence on the Finite Sample Properties of Propensity Score Matching and Reweighting Estimators

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting performs far worse than even the simplest matching estimator. We resolve this puzzle. We show that the findings from the finite sample analyses are not inconsistent with asymptotic analysis, but are very specific to particular choices regarding the implementation of reweighting, and fail to generalize to settings likely to be encountered in actual empirical practice. In the DGPs studied here, reweighting typically outperforms propensity score matching.treatment effects, propensity score, semiparametric efficiency