Meanderings, 11 January 2025

Good morning! We are praying for and grieving with the many who are suffering in Los Angeles due to the fire and its apocalypse-like destructions.

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This is Jubilee for many:

About three months ago, Pastor Joel Southerland of Peavine Baptist Church in Rock Spring, Georgia, began asking members to give toward a “Christmas Project.” The catch, however, was he couldn’t tell them what it was for.

Members and guests found out at the church’s Christmas Eve services.

“Medical debt is the No. 1 cause of consumer bankruptcy in the United States,” Southerland told the crowd. “It gets on your credit report. It can stop you from getting a house loan [or] car loan, sometimes a job. Twenty-six percent of Americans deal with the crippling effects of medical debt.”

When medical debt reaches a status of non-payment, hospitals make that debt available to purchase for pennies on the dollar (or even less than a penny on the dollar) to collection agencies or charitable groups like Undue Medical Debt, a national organization founded in 2014 by former debt collection executives. Donors such as Peavine, which partnered with Undue Medical Debt, make it possible for the erasure of such debt.

Formerly known as RIP Medical Debt, the organization claims to have eliminated nearly $15 billion in medical debt since its inception.

If you did not read this interview with Katie Gaddini, please do. Why are the conservative evangelical women voting for and supporting Donald Trump?

On election night, Gaddini, an associate professor at University College London who studies Christian women in US politics, was at San Francisco International Airport, boarding a red-eye to Virginia to do research for her next book, due out in 2026. “Trump had just won Georgia,” she recalls. “It was like a funeral in that airport. Faces were drawn. It was silent.” When Gaddini arrived the next morning at the far-right Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Trump had retaken the White House, and the mood was euphoric. Decked out in MAGA gear, women students were just as thrilled as the young men—maybe more so. “They felt like this was God’s will,” Gaddini says. “He has spared the nation by giving us Trump. Even after we’ve made so many mistakes, He’s giving us one last chance to get it right.”

These young women aren’t just relying on Trump to transform the country into a Christian bastion—this is their fight, too. “A new generation of them are entering politics,” Gaddini says, “influencing and controlling this country.” Yet many on the left, she says, dismiss Christian women “as being kind of brainwashed, just servants to the patriarchy and not free-thinking,” thus minimizing both their agency and their effectiveness. Among progressives, “there’s an inability to see how intelligence and political acumen could lead you to a place of supporting Trump,” she adds. “And yet it has for millions of women, and they’re not going away.”

The Walmart effect in a community re-assessed:

No corporation looms as large over the American economy as Walmart. It is both the country’s biggest private employer, known for low pay, and its biggest retailer, known for low prices. In that sense, its dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there.

Two new research papers challenge that view. Using creative new methods, they find that the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, before tech giants came to dominate the discourse about corporate power, Walmart was a hot political topic. Documentaries and books proliferated with such titles as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and How Walmart Is Destroying America (And the World). The publicity got so bad that Walmart created a “war room” in 2005 dedicated to improving its image.

When the cavalry came, it came from the elite economics profession. In 2005, Jason Furman, who would go on to chair Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, published a paper titled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story.” In it, he argued that although Walmart pays its workers relatively low wages, “the magnitude of any potential harm is small in comparison” with how much it saved them at the grocery store. This became the prevailing view among many economists and policy makers over the next two decades.

Fully assessing the impact of an entity as dominant as Walmart, however, is a complicated task. The cost savings for consumers are simple to calculate but don’t capture the company’s total effect on a community. The arrival of a Walmart ripples through a local economy, causing consumers to change their shopping habits, workers to switch jobs, competitors to shift their strategies, and suppliers to alter their output.

The two new working papers use novel methods to isolate Walmart’s economic impact—and what they find does not look like a progressive success story after all. The first, posted in September by the social scientists Lukas Lehner and Zachary Parolin and the economists Clemente Pignatti and Rafael Pintro Schmitt, draws on a uniquely detailed dataset that tracks a wide range of outcomes for more than 18,000 individuals across the U.S. going back to 1968. These rich data allowed Parolin and his co-authors to create the economics equivalent of a clinical trial for medicine: They matched up two demographically comparable groups of individuals within the dataset and observed what happened when one of those groups was exposed to the “treatment” (the opening of the Walmart) and the other was not.

John Hawthorne and the laser point’s red dot:

It’s twelve days until the beginning of Trump’s second term. I’ve been thinking a lot about my news consumption and the related emotional well-being as things get underway.

I’ve decided to stay away from op-eds that work through “what if” scenarios or fantasize about what Trump’s intentions are. I’m skipping analysis stories that report on what various talking heads say about the administration.

One of Trump’s most successful political strategies has been to keep himself at the center of the news cycle. From 2015 to 2021 this was done on then-Twitter. Since 2021 it has happened on his Truth Social site. Even though most people don’t follow him on TS, the print media, broadcast media, and social media repeat his “Truths” and proceed to treat them seriously.

We have to stop doing that. We are less likely to make sense of the latest Truth or Mar-a-Lago press gaggle than that cat is to catch the laser dot once and for all. …

The press — and the rest of us by default — fail to grasp this lesson and treat all statements as actual policies. Even the policies that were proposed during the campaign seem to be constantly shifting. Just this week, administration sources told the Washington Post that Trump was going to scale back his massive tariff plans. Trump immediately countered that these sources were made up and nothing had changed.

Jim Larrañaga’s decision will prompt others — free market college sports is not so free because the market forces are unmanageable:

A move that once felt shocking is becoming less so: Another men’s college basketball head coach is walking away.

Miami Hurricanes men’s basketball head coach Jim Larrañaga – the winningest head coach in program history – has stepped down from his position in the middle of his 14th season in Coral Gables, Florida. His decision comes less than two years after he led Miami to its first men’s Final Four.

His reasons for his sudden departure echo former head coach Tony Bennett, who stepped down at Virginia ahead of the start of the season.

“At this point, after 53 years, I just didn’t feel like that I could successfully navigate this whole new world that I was dealing with,” Larrañaga, referencing name, image and likeness deals (NIL), said to reporters in a press conference Thursday.

The Hurricanes’ record currently sits at 4-8, and they went 15-17 the previous season. Assistant coach Bill Courtney has been named interim head coach.

“There’s one thing you’ve got to constantly ask yourself: Are you going to give everything you have, the commitment that it deserves, 100% of yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?” Larrañaga, 75, said. “And quite frankly, I’ve tried to do that throughout my life and throughout my time here, but I’m exhausted.”

Miami athletics director Dan Radakovich said that Larrañaga came to him Sunday saying he wanted to discuss stepping down. The decision was finalized Monday.

“Like all of us in intercollegiate athletics, there is so much uncertainty,” Radakovich said. “The change in rules. Name, image and likeness demands from agents. Unlimited transfers, et cetera. You can go on and on in these changing times. All of which takes so much time, effort and energy away from actually coaching.”

A hoard of Hasmonean coins found in Israel:

In what they called an “archaeological Hanukkah miracle,” a University of Haifa team discovered on Friday a rare hoard of some 160 coins, dating from the Hasmonean period, during a dig in the Jordan Valley, the university said Sunday.

The coins were discovered in what is thought to have been a roadside station, on what was then a main road along Nahal Tirzah that ascended to the Alexandrion Fortress, also known as Sarbata, north of Jericho in what is now the West Bank.

The coins were dated by experts to the reign of “King Alexander Jannaeus, whose Hebrew name was Jonathan… He reigned from 104–76 BCE. He was the son of Johanan Hyrcanus, [and] the grandson of Simon the Hasmonean (brother of Judah Maccabee),” the statement said, noting that the Alexandrion Fortress, near where the coins were discovered, was built by Jannaeus. [HT: JM]