Inequality of the will

(Apologies for the lack of recent posts while I was ill – we’re back to our normal schedule now!)

Among the oldest of old political battles, liberals and conservatives have constantly sparred over the causes of poverty – whether it is due to failings in the individual, or whether the causes lie outside of people’s hands. A new twist on this old debate, however, comes from the latest psychological research on willpower, joining the long list of trendy behavioural economics research hitting the headlines. This research can help explain why people in poverty (on average) have less willpower, which in turn may partly explain worse parenting practices – but other research shows the political limits of  getting people to empathise with the problems of willpower .

Don’t Let the Data Fool You — Consumption Inequality Mirrors Income Inequality Over Time

Several important studies have shown an apparent paradox: even as income inequality has taken off over the last thirty years, differences in consumption between the rich and poor have changed slightly or not at all. Focusing on the bottom of the distribution, Bruce Meyer and James Sullivan (2009) actually conclude that consumption poverty has declined during time periods when income poverty was rising. Analysts know that both income and consumption data are measured with lots of error. Unless this error is completely random across groups, we should be concerned that either the trend in income, or consumption, is biased over time.

An ambitious new paper by Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst, and Luigi Pistaferri attempts to address measurement error in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), and comes to a different conclusion.

After Trayvon: Everyday Discrimination in the Lives of Young Black Men

The Florida shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, by a suspicious neighbor has been one of the top stories in the headlines for the last two weeks. It won’t always be. In days or weeks, perhaps, the media will have moved on to another story, but the underlying challenges affecting young black men will continue. In that light, it’s worth considering some results from the “African American Men Survey.” The survey was conducted in 2006 and included 400 respondents aged 18-29. The experiences of the respondents resonate today, even though the survey was conducted two years before the election of our first black president and one year before the start of a devastating economic downturn.

The figure above tells an important story. Twenty one percent of respondents had been to prison, but an additional 53 percent had a close family member or friend in prison. Two thirds had a close friend or relative who was murdered. Almost half of all respondents had been arrested at some point.

An Emotional Rollercoaster: Trends in Subjective Wellbeing During the Economic Downturn

Since 2008 Gallup has polled a random sample of 1,000 Americans daily (link here) about their subjective well-being. The data provide a rich basis for examining the short-run effects of the economic recession on self-reported happiness, life evaluation, and stress. In a masterful paper, Angus Deaton digs into the data to show how the population has responded to different economic indicators. The bottom line: self-reported wellbeing responded greatly to the fluctuations in the stock market from 2008 to 2010, and less to macroeconomic indicators like the unemployment rate. Most unexpectedly, respondents were highly sensitive to survey design – when wellbeing questions directly followed questions about feelings about national politics, ratings plummeted evidently because Americans feel very negatively about their government.

The harms of hidden research – Part II

Last week I wrote about the need for transparency in inequalities research -  how hidden research both reduces the truthfulness of its claims, and how it works against the collective nature of social science. This week I want to finish off my argument, and deal with the objections to transparent social science, and in particular to respond to Kat Smith’s wonderful warning. As she wrote on opendemocracy, when it comes to tobacco you can argue that ‘freedom of information reduces transparency’ rather than increases it.

Despite this, I think that all inequalities researchers should be as transparent as possible, and that the users of this research should demand transparency. Here’s why.

Bringing Religion Back into the Study of Health Inequality

It’s a story that is recounted in every introductory sociology course: in the 1890s Emile Durkheim conducted a groundbreaking study to understand the variations and causes of suicide within industrializing French society. As Durkheim discovered, religious affiliation was a major explanatory variable – specifically, Protestants were much more likely in his sample to commit suicides than Catholics, a finding he attributed in part to weaker social control among Protestants.

The spirit of Durkheim is alive and well in social epidemiology, but the study of religion as a moderator of health outcomes is a relatively niche topic today compared to other social cleavages like social class, gender, race/ethnicity, and community context. The leading textbook on Social Epidemiology, for instance, dedicates chapters to each of these topics, but religion garners only scant mention. I came to this realization recently when I wanted to answer a relatively simple question: is the gradient between health status and income flatter for some religions than others in the United States? More on this in a moment, but first let me make very briefly the case for renewed attention to religion.

The harms of hidden research

It’s all about the ‘killer facts’. If you want to get social science into policy, then – as Alex Stevens’ wonderful covert ethnography of high-level policymaking shows – killer facts are the name of the game.  And we try hard on the blog to get these across to you, as often and clearly as we can.

But sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back, and think about whether these killer facts are, well, ‘facts’ at all. These issues come up repeatedly on the blog, not least when debating the effects of inequality on society; indeed, the very first post on the blog was about the Spirit Level debates, and we’ve come back to this since.

In this pair of posts, I want to challenge every researcher (and every user of research) to demand another bit of credibility in fact-creation: full transparency.

Does College Make You Liberal?

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob… There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college — he wants to remake you in his image.” –Rick Santorum

After taking heat from the President, TV talk show hosts, and governors in his own party, Rick Santorum finally distanced himself from his controversial statement about the perils of a college education. As has been extensively discussed, Santorum’s premise was wrong: President Obama has never called for universal attendance of four-year college, although he did say that every American should receive some kind of training beyond a high school diploma.

It is easy to see the comment as another example of a Republican candidate pandering to the hardcore conservative base in an effort to gain some traction in a tight political race. But there is a deeper mystery that has not been discussed: people who identify themselves as strong Republicans are much more likely to be college educated than strong Democrats. Is Rick Santorum alienating his base?

The mysterious non-claiming unemployed

Throughout the financial crisis there’s been a puzzle gnawing at me, which seems critically important – yet has been barely mentioned. It’s glaringly obvious when looking at the BBC news reports after every release of the unemployment figures, the latest version of which is this (see also here):

I’m not talking about those aspects that the media & commentators have focused on: the very high unemployment total, or even how this figure itself is an underestimate of ‘underemployment’ (see here, here and here). Instead, I want to know: why do so few unemployed people claim unemployment benefits , compared to the last recession?

Why don’t we want to pay unemployment benefits? Pt.2

This is part two of my duo of posts on why support for unemployment benefits seems to have crashed over the last 15-20 years. Last time I focused on what’s been going on in people’s heads. I argued that people have developed a host of negative associations around the word ‘benefits’, and that most people’s thoughts about unemployment support are unavoidably coloured by these associations. This time I’ll press on to try and address why this has happened. First, where have these negative associations come from? And second, why have they come to taint the perception of almost all ‘people on benefits’?