Results tagged “society”

From Texas, a reminder that modern life has its downside. Apparently the children taken from that FLDS compound are headed for foster care, at least temporarily. And apparently the Texas child protection authorities have a long list of ways in which these children differ from most children in foster care: they're polite and modest. They're used to eating fresh vegetables from gardens they helped tend, and meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals they helped raise. Educationally, they're probably at least equal to and possibly ahead of students their age from public schools.

Regardless of whether the allegations against the FLDS are true, it ought to be possible for us all to agree that maybe their parents were doing something right. We're in a pretty sad state as a society when polite, educated children with healthy diets are seen as unusual.

Internet bubble? That's so last century. Or not. (Video link.)

Update: Apparently someone complained to YouTube about copyright infringement by the above video. It can also be seen here and here.

One of the great shared assumptions of the American middle class is that America is a land of opportunity: work hard, save your money, and you've got an excellent chance to have a better life than your parents did. This assumption drives much immigration to the US, past and present. It also drives much American social policy: if you can't get ahead in the land of opportunity, then either you aren't working hard (the conservative view) or you have somehow been deprived of a fair chance (the liberal view), or some combination of both (the moderate view). Among people who share this assumption, working hard is clearly the rational, self-interested thing to do.

Long term poverty is therefore a paradox. Poor people will see a larger improvement in their lives from each extra dollar, and therefore should be even more motivated to save and work hard. Yet study after study shows that poor people are less likely to finish school, more likely to make poor financial choices, more likely to develop crippling addictions. From a conventional economic point of view, this is clearly irrational behavior, which can only be explained by some combination of laziness, poor role models, lack of accurate information, and dependence on government handouts. (Liberals and conservatives are likely to pick different mixes of these characteristics.)

But what if you assume that poor people are as rational as anyone else? Steven Pearlstein explains that a rational model of the behaviors seen in very poor communities might reach a very different conclusion. If the chance of building a better life appears to be zero, then maybe blowing that $100 bill on a night out isn't so irrational after all. Sure, saving it might help pay this month's rent, but it won't help with next month or the month after that. Enjoy it now and it won't get stolen, either.

A rational person model has important implications for social policy, as it implies that trying to "fix" the apparently irrational behavior of people in poor communities is pointless. Rather, the goal of social policy should be to try to align the rational decisions of poor people with those of the middle class. That probably means closing the gap: encouraging poor people to believe that the middle class is accessible to them.

It's an interesting article. Pearlstein makes a far more rigorous argument than most people on either end of the current political debate. Agree or disagree, he at least offers a new way to think about the issues.

Education researchers and school systems invest enormous sums in figuring out the best ways to teach students with learning disabilities. Students at the far upper end of the IQ scale tend to get much less attention. They're smart, they'll do okay anywhere, right?

No, actually they won't. It turns out that gifted students have about the same dropout rate that students with learning disabilities do, probably due to boredom. Sometimes they blossom when they reach schools like MIT or Stanford, where they find peers for the first time in their lives, but sometimes they never get that far. Time explains the lost potential these kids represent, and considers ways to keep them from falling through the cracks.

Sometimes, privacy advocates raise serious issues that should worry all of us. What happens, say, when your bank records, medical records, and credit card purchase records are all accessible through giant databases? What happens when poor security at one retailer puts millions of people at risk for identity theft?

And sometimes, you have to wonder why they don't spend all that energy on world hunger or something. The latest non-issue concerns Google Street View, which shows street level photos of a particular address. For instance, one woman found an image of her cat sitting in her apartment window. Panic ensued.

Never mind that the courts have repeatedly held that there is no expectation of privacy on a public street. Google has a larger audience, but newspapers, law enforcement, and your neighbors have always been free to watch and take pictures from outside your property lines. If you don't want people or their cameras to see in your windows, close the curtains or plant a hedge.

(Full disclosure: My husband works for Google, though not on this project. It would be a silly non-issue even if he didn't, though.)

Someone left a lengthy response to yesterday's post on literacy. My reply got too long to wedge into the comment box, so I decided to make it an independent post. You might want to read yesterday's comment for context first.

The overwhelming majority of the country was purple, not red or blue, in the 2004 election. Which is to be expected with only a 3% popular vote margin nationwide.

The literacy study didn't break things down to the level of individual publications, so there's no way to tell (from this data) whether people are reading The Nation or The National Review. Presumably a bit of both. Access to the Internet in particular means access to a vast array of opposing views, which can only help informed debate.

Even a bad New York Times article contains more facts than a good Fox News (or CNN, or CBS, or pick your favorite TV news) story. That's simply the nature of the medium. You can fit far more information into 3000 words than you can into three minutes. (Try it. Read the front page of any newspaper aloud for three minutes and see how far you get.) As for bias, well, the most recent major embarrassment for the Times involved Judith Miller's blatantly pro-administration reporting.

The statistics correlating social ills with voting are actually quite interesting. For example, Massachusetts, a blue state if there ever was one, has lower teen pregnancy, divorce, and crime rates than ultra-red Texas. That probably has more to do with other social variables than with politics, but provides at least one counter example to the claim that pro-Bush areas have fewer social ills. (Yes, some of the statistics quoted are a little old. Anyone who can find links to newer data is welcome to post them.)