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Why Does Duke Have So Few Low-Income Students? - The New York Times
An earlier study by the Opportunity Insights researchers, based on data from the early 2010s, came to a shocking conclusion: Dozens of colleges, including Duke, enrolled more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom 60 percent. The same appears to be true of the most recent graduating classes at Duke.
Why Does Duke Have So Few Low-Income Students? - The New York Times
Compared with other universities, Duke has not enrolled many low-income students. A recent academic study of 12 elite colleges — the eight in the Ivy League, as well as Duke, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago — found that Duke gave some of the largest advantages in the admission process to students from families making at least $250,000 a year. Only about 12 percent of Duke students in recent years have received Pell Grants, the largest federal scholarship program, which is typically available to families in the lower half of the income distribution, earning $60,000 a year or less. By comparison, the Pell shares at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, M.I.T. and Columbia have each recently hovered around 20 percent. Federal data suggests that Duke also has fewer middle-income students, coming from families that earn too much to qualify for Pell Grants but still less than $100,000 a year. The difference between Duke and its peers amounts to several hundred lower- and middle-income students who have been missing from its campus every year.
Why Are Rich People So Mean? | WIRED
tweak a game of Monopoly. The psychologists rigged the game so that one player had huge advantages over the other from the start. They ran the study with over a hundred pairs of subjects, all of whom were brought into the lab where a coin was flipped to determine who’d be “rich” and “poor” in the game. The randomly chosen “rich” player started out with twice as much money, collected twice as much every time they went around the board, and got to roll two dice instead of one. None of these advantages was hidden from the players. Both were well aware of how unfair the situation was. But still, the “winning” players showed the tell-tale symptoms of Rich Asshole Syndrome. They were far more likely to display dominant behaviors like smacking the board with their piece, loudly celebrating their superior skill, even eating more pretzels from a bowl positioned nearby.
People in higher social class have an exaggerated belief that they are better than others: Overconfidence can be misinterpreted by others as greater competence, perpetuating social hierarchies, study says -- ScienceDaily
Applicants were also required to complete a psychological assessment that would be used to assess their credit worthiness. Part of that included a flashcard game, a cognitive test where participants are shown an image that goes away after they press a key and is replaced by a second image. They then have to determine whether the second image matches the first. After completing 20 trials, applicants were asked to indicate how they performed in comparison with others on a scale of 1 to 100.
When the researchers compared the actual scores with applicants' predictions, they found that people with more education, more income and a higher perceived social class had an exaggerated belief that they would perform better than others, compared with their lower-class counterparts.
Another two investigations involving more than 1,400 online participants found a similar association between social class and overconfidence. In one, the researchers gave participants a trivia test. Those from a higher social class thought that they did better than others; however, when the researchers examined actual performance, it was not the case.
For the final investigation, the researchers recruited 236 undergraduate students, had each answer a 15-item trivia quiz and asked them to predict how they fared compared with others. They also asked them to rate their social class and for their families' income and their mothers' and fathers' education levels. A week later, the students were brought back to the lab for a videotaped mock hiring interview. More than 900 judges, recruited online, each watched one of the videos and rated their impression of the applicant's competence.
Infectious diseases could be diagnosed with smartphones in sub-Saharan Africa -- ScienceDaily
Still, the report's authors remain optimistic. As of 2016, global smartphone adoption has reached 51 per cent and is predicted to keep growing -- particularly in resource limited settings such as sub-Saharan Africa.
This means more and more of the world's population is equipped with a powerful pocket computer that can connect patients and share healthcare data.
Professor Stevens said: "This is an exciting opportunity for researchers and policy makers to develop new tools and systems that could drastically improve human health and wellbeing in the future."
Research: The Industrial Revolution Left Psychological Scars That Can Still Be Seen Today
Our research shows that a region’s historical industries leave a lasting imprint on the local psychology, which remains even when those industries are no longer dominant or have almost completely disappeared. We found that in regions like Blaenau Gwent in the UK and the Rust Belt in the U.S., people reported more unhappy personality traits, lower life satisfaction, and lower life expectancy than otherwise similar regions where these industries did not dominate (think Sussex and Dorset in the non-industrial South of England and regions in the American West). For example, in the UK, neuroticism was 33% higher, conscientiousness 26% lower, and life satisfaction 29% lower in these areas compared with the rest of the country. This effect was robust even when controlling for other historical factors that might have affected the well-being of regions, such as historical energy supply, education, wealth, geology, population density, and climate.
Lower class wiser about interpersonal conflict than middle class -- ScienceDaily
New research from the University of Waterloo finds that lower class populations are wiser than their middle-class counterparts in their ability to reason about interpersonal matters.
Among the contributing factors under consideration, they found that the strongest area-level predictor of high rates of psychotic disorders was a low rate of owner-occupied housing. The researchers used owner-occupied housing as an indicator of socio-economic affluence and stability.
"Areas with higher rates of owner-occupied housing have lower rates of psychosis, which may be linked to social deprivation. People in areas that are socially deprived may have more social stresses, which could predict psychosis incidence, as suggested by other studies. An alternative explanation could be that owner-occupied housing is an indicator of social stability and cohesiveness, relating to stronger support networks," said the study's first author, Hannah Jongsma (University of Cambridge).
In line with previous research, higher incidence of psychosis was also associated with younger age (although the authors also identified a secondary peak in middle age among women), males, and ethnic minorities. A related paper investigating psychosis incidence in a rural region of England, also led by Dr Kirkbride and published last week in JAMA Psychiatry, found that while people from ethnic minorities are more likely to experience a psychotic disorder, these rates become lower in areas with a high degree of ethnic diversity -- both for the majority- and minority-ethnic individuals, potentially suggesting that greater social connections between individuals from different backgrounds is protective against some mental health issues.
Childhood poverty can rob adults of psychological health -- ScienceDaily
In his study, Evans tracked 341 participants over a 15-year period, and tested them at ages 9, 13, 17 and 24.
Short-term spatial memory was tested by asking adult study participants to repeat increasingly complex sequences of lights and sounds by pressing four colored pads in the correct order -- similar to the "Simon" game. The adults who grew up in poverty had a diminished ability to recall the sequences, compared to those who did not. "This is an important result because the ability to retain information in short-term memory is fundamental to a host of basic cognitive skills, including language and achievement," the study said.
Although the participants were assessed on this measure only when they were adults, this test had the strongest association with childhood poverty of the four measures.
Helplessness was assessed by asking the participants to solve an impossible puzzle. Adults growing up in poverty gave up 8 percent more quickly than those who weren't poor as kids. Previous research has shown chronic exposure to uncontrollable stressors -- such as family turmoil and substandard housing -- tends to induce helplessness.
Mental health was measured with a well validated, standardized index of mental health with statements including "I argue a lot" and "I am too impatient." Adults who grew up in poverty were more likely to agree with those questions than adults from a middle-income background.
Chronic physiological stress was tested by measuring the participants' blood pressure, stress hormones and body mass index. Adults who grew up in poverty had a higher level of chronic physical stress throughout childhood and into adulthood.
Alt takes on unemployment
Yes, true: there are approximately seven million more Americans in poverty now than when Obama was elected. On the other hand, the economy under Obama has gained about seven times as many jobs as it did under Bush; even given the financial meltdown, the unemployment rate has dropped to just below the historical average. But, yes: the poverty rate is up by 1.6 percentage points since 2008. Then again the number of Americans in poverty fell by nearly 1.2 million between 2012 and 2013. However, true: the proportion of people who depend on welfare for the majority of their income has increased (although it was also increasing under Bush). And under Obama unemployment has dropped, G.D.P. growth has been “robust,” and there have been close to seventy straight months of job growth. But, O.K.: there has indeed been a “skyrocketing” in the number of Americans needing some form of means-tested federal aid, although Obama’s initiatives kept some six million people out of poverty in 2009, including more than two million children.
The economics of poor policing in poor towns
There are almost fifty municipalities in North County. The officers in some of the towns are not just fighting crime; they also issue countless traffic tickets and ordinance-violation citations. The local governments often rely on the fines generated by tickets and violations to balance their budgets. (In 2013, the town of Edmundson, which comprises less than a square mile, issued nearly five thousand traffic tickets.) Police officers, meanwhile, can be paid as little as ten dollars an hour, according to Kevin Ahlbrand, the president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police. Ahlbrand says that the low pay can create “unprofessional police officers,” adding, “You get what you pay for.”
Impact of housing vouchers
After the Los Angeles riots in 1992 the federal government tried to copy this scheme in other cities. Until recently, the results were considered disappointing. Those who moved out of public housing in crime-ridden places showed lower rates of diabetes than those who remained, and mothers who moved showed an increase in happiness similar to the effects of Prozac, an antidepressant. However, children did no better after moving and their mothers did not get better jobs.
In a paper published this month, however, Raj Chetty and colleagues at Harvard re-examined the numbers and found that the children who moved earned considerably more in their 20s. This was true only of children who moved before their 13th birthday: older children saw no benefit later on. More recently, Baltimore lost a public-housing case similar to the one in Chicago and, in 2005, provided vouchers for 7,000 families to move to other parts of Maryland. They are still there, and three-quarters of their children are attending much better schools, says Stefanie Deluca of Johns Hopkins. Yet since giving a golden ticket to every poor black family would cost about $30 billion a year, those stuck in highly segregated places will have to save in order to get out.
Growing Up on Easy Street Has Its Own Dangers
Using a variety of data that included families with median household incomes of about $150,000, she found that the adolescents in higher-income families had higher rates of substance abuse of all kinds than those in lower-income ones. This makes a certain amount of sense, since they can afford the drugs, the vehicles to go buy them and the fake IDs that help with the procurement of Stoli and Jägermeister.But there was more. The more affluent suburban youth stole from their parents more often than city youth with less money and were more likely to experience clinically significant levels of depression, anxiety and physical ailments that seemed to stem from those mental conditions. These things began emerging as early as seventh grade.
Smoking as a regressive tax
Consider a married couple with a $30,000 a year income. If each spouse smokes a pack a day and they live in a state where cigarettes cost an average of, say, $6.00 a pack, they will devote 15 percent of their very limited income to cigarettes. Six percent of their income will go to cigarette taxes alone. If they live in New York City, the city’s new minimum price per pack of $10.50 will drain a full quarter of their income. Some low-income New Yorkers surely pay more in tobacco taxes than they do in taxes to support Social Security and Medicare.
Smoking isn't a problem -- for the affluent
Why is there no Brown Ribbon campaign to combat cigarette smoking? We fear that the answer lies in the fact that smoking is largely a low-income problem, and the resulting illnesses and deaths are often blamed on the victims. In certain circles, cigarettes are not only common but practically ubiquitous. Yet for those who run the nation’s businesses, those who shape its policies, those who fundraise, blog, and tweet, those who read and vote in the highest numbers, the issue has largely disappeared from view.
