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Why Is the Poverty Rate in New York So Low?

July 1, 2016

In the wake of the Great Recession, poverty rose nationally and in all the largest cities, except one: New York City.

How was New York, of all places, able to defy national trends and make progress in the fight against poverty? As Linda Gibbs and Robert Doar detail in an essay series for Washington Monthly, one key was that the Bloomberg administration, of which they were a part, focused on experimenting with new ideas and using data and evidence to scale up successful initiatives and terminate failures.

Even today, after the recession, and the start of another administration, the city maintains a smaller share of residents below the poverty line than in Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix and Houston, among other large cities.

According to the authors, who are now senior fellows at Results for America, a national organization committed to using evidence-based solutions, for community and family issues,

The first step in New York City’s strategy was to create a “laboratory” for experimentation. In 2006, (New York City Mayor Michael) Bloomberg launched a new citywide apparatus to fight poverty—the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO). Over the next several years, CEO would roll out more than 30 new initiatives, each to be tested, each with an evaluation strategy, and each taking a risk.

Some of these efforts would prove controversial, such as Family Rewards, a program that provided cash payments to the poor if they took such positive actions as sending children to school. Other efforts – such as a program called “Paycheck Plus” – was aimed at tackling a growing conundrum: falling work rates for low-skilled men. As Bloomberg once noted, “Fathers are missing from our strategy to drive down the poverty rate.”

Another key element of the city’s strategy on poverty was a commitment to evidence and data. Many of the ideas proposed by Bloomberg and implemented by the CEO would take time to reach fruition; and some would succeed, while some would not. But at every step of the way, we made a commitment to measure the results and to learn from both our failures and successes.

For example, the effects of the Family Rewards program were, in fact, “more modest than had been hoped,” according to a 2013 report by MDRC, a nonprofit research organization studying the initiative. But rather than being discouraged, Bloomberg wore this failure as a badge of courage and used his muscle to scale back or terminate what didn’t work.

On the other hand, low-income participants in “Paycheck Plus” are punching the time clock in New York City with some extra cash in their pockets because of bonus payments created by the program – with so far promising results. But like all CEO initiatives, the program is funded through a closely monitored “innovation account,” and control of program resources will not be handed over to the implementing agency until results demonstrate success.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life

Could Poverty Be Alleviated With a Tweak to EITC?

June 27, 2016

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wasn’t successful in every venture he tried to implement to improve the city, and he earned a fair amount of grief for some of his ideas. But as a successful businessman, and one of the world’s wealthiest people, he was the kind of politician who served the same way he ran his corporations — with a willingness to take risks.

It’s that kind of leadership that enabled the mayor to drive New York City’s poverty rate down at a time when poverty rates nationally were rising. Several of the experiments that animated New York can be credited with keeping the city’s poverty rate among the lowest in the nation’s 20 largest metro areas even today.

Though Bloomberg has been out of office for a while, the city’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) launched more than 60 initiatives over an eight-year period, some of which have become national models for success or “are showing enormous promise for their scalability and replicability across the country,” according to Robert Doar, who was commissioner of Bloomberg’s Human Resources Administration during that time.

Now, Doar reports that, while years in the making, one of those initiatives is finally reaching the demonstration project-testing phase, and, if successful, could have a much broader impact.

“Started 40 years ago to offset payroll taxes, the (Earned Income Tax Credit) EITC has become one of the nation’s most successful antipoverty policies. Yet noncustodial parents and single individuals receive an EITC of one-tenth the full value, hardly enough to fatten a paycheck. While the EITC was a powerful tool for helping women and dependent children, it was far less beneficial to fathers of noncustodial children. …

We began by advocating an expansion of the federal EITC for single workers and noncustodial fathers, with the goal of attracting more men into full-time employment and providing them with enough earnings to be a meaningful presence in their children’s lives. The end result would be a reduction of poverty in both parents’ households.

But when our proposal went nowhere, we conceded that the best path to overcoming resistance was to prove it worked at a smaller scale and use the evidence to advance it further.

Today, ‘Paycheck Plus,’ a pilot program to simulate an expanded EITC for low-income single workers without dependent children, is being implemented and evaluated in two cities. The pilot test in New York City began in late 2013 and in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2015. …

If it proves effective, there will finally be concrete evidence that the EITC should be further reformed and expanded on the federal level.”

Filed Under: Life, News

Is College Worth It? Colorado Website Measures ROIs

June 27, 2016

If you’re thinking of going to college, or sending someone to college, it’s typical to wonder, is college worth it?

Well, according to a new website, these hot jobs may be, or maybe not.

— Accountant/Auditor
— General and Operations Manager
— Market Research Analyst and Marketing Specialist
— Registered Nurse
— Software Developer, Applications
— Computer Systems Analyst
— Construction Manager
— Cost Estimator
— Management Analyst
— Software Developer, Systems Software

What does it mean to be “hot”? Launch My Career Colorado doesn’t answer that question directly, but it does offer an interactive tool to determine the “Return on Investment” (ROI) for a college degree. The ROI isn’t measured as a percent return on the cost of college per se, but the difference between what an individual would make in his or her chosen industry over 20 years if armed with various degrees and certificates rather than merely a high school diploma.

A traditional four-year college education isn’t for everyone, and the state of Colorado makes clear that it has its own interests at heart as well as students’, boasting that the site “helps you see just how much continuing your education after high school might pay off for you, your family, and Colorado!”

But the state website does offer some useful tools. It allows people to enter the major, job, industry, and school they are interested in, and fires back the best schools for the major, or conversely, the best majors for the school.

It also lists how much people make in hot jobs, and what are the top skills that employers in Colorado are seeking from employees.

Economist Mark Perry points out some other interesting findings, including that jobs like petroleum engineering have a large ROI while careers in women’s studies do not. He notes that some of the best ROIs aren’t earned in degrees received at four-year institutions.

Interestingly, Perry also notes that the average graduating student in the Class of 2016 walks away from college with a $37,172 debt. This is even more relevant considering that Cleveland Cavalier LeBron James last year pledged $41 million to send 1,100 kids to his alma mater, the University of Akron in Ohio. He’s giving each student nearly $9,500 per year. That’s $37,273 per student to finish a four-year education at Akron.

So clearly, Akron is par for the course. But as Perry points out, students at UC-Boulder, Colorado’s flagship public university, pay nearly $100,000 for tuition, fees, textbooks, and room and board over the four and a half to five years it takes them to earn their degrees.

That makes looking at the website all that more critical.

The site is only exclusive to Colorado schools right now, but being partly funded by the US Chamber of Commerce, it will be expanded to 12 other states. At the very least, the chamber recognizes that the value of an education lies not in whether a student attends a four-year school, but whether education gets students to where they need to be in their lives, whether via a four-year accounting degree or a two-year emergency medical technician training program, or something else that will pay off in the long-run.

Most importantly, the site points out that better education not only helps a person land more income, but “people who continue their education after high school report better health and more involvement in their community than those who don’t.”

And that’s probably the most valuable takeaway of continuing education.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness

Lost Equality of Opportunity Is Biggest Threat to Education

June 25, 2016

Diamonds are forever. Desegregation orders will be, too, if our end goal for Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is merely to color-code American classrooms rather than to create equality of opportunity.

The latest case comes from the state of Mississippi. On May 13, to meet a desegregation order that began in the 1960s, a U.S. district judge ordered the state’s Cleveland School District to consolidate its two middle and high schoolsbeginning in the 2016-’17 school year. According to Judge Debra M. Brown, Cleveland’s failure to consolidate its largely racially separate schools in the past had “deprived generations of students of the constitutionally guaranteed right to an integrated education.” This is just one of hundreds of cases like it; the Justice Department currently has 177 open desegregation cases.

Enforcing desegregation orders is important because desegregation’s effects on American schooling have been positive. For example, a 2015 report found that black children born between 1945 and 1968 who attended a desegregated school were more likely to complete college, more likely to earn a higher salary, less likely to be incarcerated and had better health than their peers.

Read more about the lost equality of opportunity due to an overdependence on desegregation policy.

Filed Under: Education, Happiness, News

A New Social Science Scandal

June 24, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Professors are mere human beings. Naturally, then, each has his or her guilty pleasure. In my case, it was candy corn and circus peanuts.

Other academics’ guilty pleasures seem to be less benign. For example, some scholars cannot resist the allure of research findings that can be weaponized into ad hominem political attacks — and then cash in on a little media buzz as a result. Every couple of months, it seems, we see headlines trumpeting the latest juicy, data-driven potshot aimed squarely at conservative Americans. “New study shows conservatives can’t count. And they hate puppies!”

This kind of motivated reasoning is hardly universal. I can report firsthand that most academics, whatever their personal predilections, are above this kind of bad behavior. But they still happen pretty regularly.

For a prime example, consider a 2013 study published in the American Journal of Political Science. It was entitled “Correlation Not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies.” The paper’s main aim was to debunk the idea that a person’s personality type leads directly to their political ideology. But buried deep in the study’s empirical findings was a pretty provocative data point: Compared to liberals, the authors wrote, conservatives scored significantly higher on measures of psychoticism.

Sounds pretty bad for conservative citizens, right? You don’t need a PhD to understand this is basically saying “conservatives are dangerous.” To add insult to injury, the study also seemed to lavish praise on the personalities of conservatives’ political opponents. Left-leaning individuals reportedly scored higher on scales of “social desirability,” meaning they possessed a greater predisposition to try to please others.

But this time, it was actually conservatives who got the last laugh. It turns out the scholars made a pretty big mistake. At some point, someone misread the way the political ideology data were coded in the research. They mistook the data on liberals for the data on conservatives, and vice versa. What does this mean? These controversial results were actually the exact opposite of what the authors reported.

Conservatives are justifiably enraged. But so are some liberals. I originally heard about this egregious case of academic maleficence in a tweet from an accomplished left-leaning economist.

Of course, this story raises pressing questions about the impact that ideological prejudice may be having within academia. As a former professor, this is a topic I care deeply about, and I’ve written about it at some length in the New York Times.

But this little episode has me thinking about another bigger-picture issue. The cognitive problem of confirmation bias — people letting their mental guard down when a claim gels with their preconceived notions — does not impact only social science research. It plays out in our everyday lives, shaping everything from our political debates to our professional lives to our interpersonal relationships.

So I’m mulling a longer piece that would look at the broad impact of confirmation bias across American life. Keep your eyes out for my take as I dig into this more in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, feel free to drop this fun story at your next cocktail party. If you’re a conservative, maybe it will reassure your family and friends that you are not, in fact, crazy.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight

The Other Campus Free-Speech Problem No One’s Talking About

June 21, 2016

During the past few years, responding to ever-more draconian codes on secular campuses aimed at constraining free speech, dissenting voices have been raised here and there across the political spectrum, defending free expression and free association for all. This addition of conscientious objection outside conservative and religious ranks is a welcome development. It also brings us to one other large threat to free speech in education these days—one that’s still in the closet.

Secularist progressivism claims to champion diversity, but its activists today do not tolerate genuine diversity, including and especially in the realm of ideas, as revealed by today’s legal and other attacks on Christian colleges, Christian associations and clubs, Christian schools, Christian students, and Christian homeschooling. …

H. L. Mencken memorably defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” By similar logic, neo-puritanism appears to be the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be a Christian exercising the right to free association with other Christians. To survey today’s attacks on religious education is to understand that traditionalists have reason to believe they are being singled out for ideological marksmanship as others are not.

Read the rest of the article by Mary Eberstadt on campus free speech at The Federalist.

Filed Under: Education, Life

In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

June 13, 2016

Imagine that the United States were to scrap all its income transfer programs—including Social Security, Medicare, and all forms of welfare—and give every American age 21 and older $10,000 a year for life. This idea was greeted with skepticism in 2006 when Charles Murray first proposed it in his book “In Our Hands.” Yet, 10 years later, some European countries are doing just that.

In a revised and updated edition of “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State” (AEI Press, June 2016), political scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray demonstrates that this is financially feasible and that many goals of the welfare state—elimination of poverty, comfortable retirement for everyone, universal access to health care—would be better served under a UBI than under the current system.

Buy the Book:

Filed Under: Books, Life

The Talent Drain: Disincentives in The Federal Disability Program

June 10, 2016

On Jan. 18, 1979, Mike Zelley was heading home after a business meeting to celebrate his wedding anniversary with his wife. He was driving his car in the early dark, and turned onto a highway ramp. His car hit a patch of black ice and slid toward the guard rail. It being Detroit in the dead of winter, the plow trucks had pushed the snow out of the road and up against the rails, essentially forming a ski ramp. Zelley’s car flew up the snow ramp, 40 feet into the air, and down over the embankment onto its front end.

Zelley’s neck was broken. He was paralyzed.

Despite life-saving measures, he was to live the rest of his life as a paraplegic. He thought his life was over.

“Then something miraculous happened, something that changed my life,” Zelley told an audience in Washington, D.C. A friend of his brother, who was living life in a wheelchair, mentioned that he was a successful stockbroker. Zelley had an epiphany.

“If he can have a job and raise a family and have a career, and make money, and if he can live independently, if he can do all that, I can do that,” Zelley said he realized. “That peer support was a direct change in my life, right then.”

Since then, Zelley has been paying it forward. After returning to his successful business following rehab, he went on to launch the Disability Network, a consumer-driven, private nonprofit serving 6,000 individuals with disabilities based in Flint, Mich.

But paying it forward has been more difficult than he anticipated, in part because of the barriers created by a federal assistance program that ends up trapping people with disabilities rather than helping them return to their once-productive lifestyles.

SSDI, which is paid out through Medicare, provides a monthly cash benefit to disabled individuals to help them defray costs associated with their disability, like the costs of buying pedal controls for a van or new wheels for a wheelchair, or other household accommodations that help disabled people live as close to an independent life as they can.

But if a disabled person makes more than the allotted cash benefit each month, federal policy views that individual’s employment as “sustainable gainful activity” — wage replacement — and cuts off SSDI.

“It’s a spider trap,” said Zelley noting that $1,000 a month in income is below the poverty level.

And the web is getting larger. Fifty-four million Americans have a disability. In Michigan alone, 500,000 working-age people with disabilities are not employed despite 43 percent of them having a college degree.

In all, only one half of 1 percent of people on disability go back to work after becoming disabled. That’s a monumental talent drain considering 85 percent of disabled people acquire their disability during their lifetime, they are not born disabled. That means a lot of work experience, education, and other abilities is left on the table, displaced from the workforce.

“What is wrong with this picture? Why are we keeping people? Why are we trapping them?” Zelley asked.

“What a tragic waste of talent and skills,” he said, noting that the private workforce could also do more to encourage employment. “An accommodation is something that we all need (whether disabled or not). It’s not just good for business, it makes (all of us) more effective and productive.”

“My hope today is that you will see the importance of using all the talent that we have that is sitting on the sidelines. I am not my disability. … People are not their disability.”

As for Zelley, despite many prayers that he be able to walk again, he cannot. But he hasn’t lost his sense of humor about it.

Remembering once during Catholic services, when everyone stood for the gospel, he shifted his weight in his chair — something disabled people have to do to prevent pressure sores. The movement prompted the choir director to shout, “Holy Jesus, he’s going to walk.”

He won’t, but he said he wants to get more disabled “out of the spectator stands, off the bleachers, on the bench, beginning training, into the game.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: disabilities, federal disability programs, Medicare, Mike Zelley, SSDI, Vision Talks, work

School Choice Laws and the Parents They Ignore

June 6, 2016

At least 45 states and the District of Columbia have enacted 102 school choice laws, but those laws barely regard the role of parental rights and responsibilities, according to a new study of education statutes.

In all, the states and nation’s capital have 43 charter school laws, 25 voucher laws, 20 tax-credit laws, 9 tax-deduction laws, and 5 Education Savings Account (ESA) laws on the books, and many of these laws have been beneficial in helping students get out from under the yoke of ineffective education systems.

Nonetheless, says Gerard Robinson, a former commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia, the school choice laws really only pay lip service when it comes to the parents’ rights and responsibilities in their children’s education.

After analyzing results from 20 choice laws in particular, and reviewing 82 other choice laws in general, my research found that regrettably, existing choice laws demonstrate that parental rights and responsibilities in education statutes are little more than a dull roar. More often than not, when ‘parent’ is mentioned in a school choice law, it is about the legal structure of the program or is a brief hat tip toward parents — rather than language that empowers them when it comes to the education of their child.

The reason to involve parents in a child’s education is not just theoretical. Existing research has shown that parent involvement can boost the academic outcomes of students.”

This is not to say that parents are ignored in the laws. Robinson notes that parents are mentioned quite a bit, but mainly in the context of the authority to opt their children in or out of traditional schooling as well as in the funding of Education Savings Accounts.

Those mentions don’t really address the rights and responsibilities of parents in their children’s education, and to hear it told by mass media, students are better off if their parents don’t get involved. Googling “parental expectations” brings up an array of stories about the damage parental expectations can wreak on children’s performance and grades.

But really, that is a lot of hype.

Several studies show that not only do children assimilate better when they have behavioral norms placed on them by parents — punishment for bad behavior and reward for good — but involved parenting actually raises students’ performance in school by as much as four-tenths of a grade point across student age groups.

Several studies have shown how technology can play a role in enabling parents to participate in their children’s education, with a positive outcome. Programs already in existence in some areas include daily text updates to parents or portals for parents to review their kids’ assignments and their progress on curricula.

But the rights and responsibilities question goes beyond merely helping one’s child do his or her homework or keeping an eye on them while they’re out of sight. If parents are to be involved in raising their own children, why would they leave it to the state to determine what level of involvement they should have?

By insisting on greater rights and responsibilities in the educational system, Robinson contends and the evidence supports, schools are better equipped to teach, and parents are one step closer to improving their children’s outcomes.

Read Gerard Robinson’s survey on school choice laws and the acknowledgement of parents’ rights and responsibilities.

Filed Under: Education, Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: education, Gerard Robinson, parental rights, school choice

Get Out of Dodge? American Migration Slows, Homebodies Abound

May 25, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Geographic mobility has always played a big part in the “American dream.” For my part, I have moved between states or countries 10 times. But you don’t have to share my apparent wanderlust to realize that picking up and moving can inflect a person’s life for the better. Especially in a hyper-competitive economy, we would intuitively expect people to be moving more and more to seize opportunities and find the best occupational fits.

I recently got curious about this topic and whether reality matched my expectations. I spent an afternoon digging into some migration data from the Census Bureau. And what I found surprised me: People today are actually moving less often than the historical norm.

Much less.

The data are astonishing. In the 1960s, roughly 20 percent of the US population moved in any given year. Since then, that fraction has been cut almost in half. Looking at the numbers another way: While the U.S. population has increased by more than 75 percent since 1960, the total number of people who move annually is roughly the same.

Curiously, those who would seem most compelled to move appear to be especially stuck. Look at Mississippi, which has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates. One might expect to see outmigration to places such as North Dakota, where unemployment is about half as high. Yet Mississippians today are even less likely to move out of state than they were before the Great Recession.

Why the decline?

Reading through the possible explanations, one popular hypothesis was that our aging population explains a lot of this decline. Younger adults have always moved more relative to older people, and so a population in which they make up a declining share would be expected to be less mobile on average.

This is part of the story, but it doesn’t capture everything that’s going on. For example, it turns out mobility has dropped over time for all ages. In fact, since the onset of the Great Recession, the decline in mobility has actually been the most dramatic among millennials. Other factors must also be contributing. Chief suspects include a more broadly stagnant economy, a housing crisis that left many anchored to homes while they wait for values to rebound, and — especially interesting to me — a regrettable cultural shift that undersells the importance of entrepreneurial living.

Let’s talk solutions. First, we could reform our education system to better equip people with valuable skills that transcend particular organizations and localities. Reviving vocational and technical training programs via creative voucher schemes would be a good start.

Second, we can make moving easier. First and foremost, we should fine-tune welfare programs, many of which have policy quirks that can dissuade the vulnerable from relocating or from seeking employment at all. We could also experiment with small-scale programs in which the government offers relocation allowances or collects information about employment opportunities in other regions, and then rigorously assess their effectiveness.

But more than any policy tweak, we must set out to rebuild a culture that prizes dynamism and treating life as an entrepreneurial project. That starts with leaders who testify proudly to the true pillars of the American dream — courage, adventure, optimism, and a unique refusal to be tied down to our pasts.

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to our shores in the early 1800s, he didn’t find leaders who stoked — and sought to profit from — the masses’ fears of change. In fact, he found quite the opposite, noting that the American people embraced instability and churn as a source of wonder and self-improvement. Today, that sense of adventure is eroding and trepidation is taking its place.

Telling Americans they should be afraid or angry about our changing economy is exactly the wrong answer. The only acceptable response is to fight proudly and boldly for solutions. And I’m convinced that one of those solutions is to help people get out of Dodge.

This section is adapted from my latest New York Times piece.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Insight, Life Tagged With: American migration, community, family, US Census Bureau, workforce patterns

Why Western Civilization Classes Are Not Passé

April 17, 2016 by Sharon Kehnemui

Can you answer the following questions?

Who fought in the Peloponnesian War?

Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach?

Who was Saul of Tarsus?

Why does the Magna Carta matter?

What are one or two of the arguments made in Federalist 10?

Hard questions, right? Maybe not. Maybe you learned some or all of the answers in school, or you knew them at one time, but have now forgotten the details. Or perhaps you are devoted to a few events that you have internalized and helped form you into the person you are today.

But knowing the answers in great detail may be less important than recognizing the importance of the questions.

Unfortunately, Stanford University students may never realize how significant and meaningful these questions are because the student government earlier this week voted overwhelmingly against requiring students to complete a two-quarter course on Western civilization.

That’s right. Instead, the student leadership, validated by its Pravda-esque mouthpiece, The Stanford Daily, concluded that supporting Western civilization basically equated to “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

Filed Under: Happiness, Liberty, Life, News

The Economics of Homelessness

January 26, 2016

Turns out the 2008 recession didn’t increase the number of homeless while at the same time the number of sheltered homeless didn’t expand during or since the recession.

Nonetheless, the renewed effort since 2007 to count the number of homeless has ushered in a lot of politics into the issue of homelessness, a number that has not been optimally measured since the 1990s through today.

So what is the definition of homeless and what is its cause? Economics? Mental health care access? Drug abuse? Dissolution of families?

Kevin Corinth, a research fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a former lecturer at the University of Chicago investigating this troublesome phenomenon in America, discusses how public policy is addressing this problem and the best way to acknowledge a homeless individual’s humanity.

Listen to the Ricochet podcast here.

Filed Under: Life, News

The Real Victims of Victimhood

January 11, 2016 by Arthur C. Brooks

Many people believe that American culture is slowly transforming into a culture of universal victimhood — an ecosystem where the preferred path to get attention and settle grievances is to file constant, competing claims that you or your group has been victimized.

Think this is an extreme assertion? Maybe so, but remember a major story from the latter months of 2015. Student activists were upending campuses, outraged at perceived slights they called “microagressions.” They insisted their universities set up “safe spaces” to shield them from hurtful ideas. And the issue runs far deeper than overheated campus controversies. This is the topic of my most recent New York Times column.

The culture of victimization treats public discourse like an auction of escalating grievances, which strangles our politics. It makes resolving political and social disputes much more difficult. Why? Well, selfishness and entitlement are both antithetical to good citizenship — but those attitudes are exactly what victimhood culture tends to promote.

In the column I highlight one very telling study from a group of social psychologists at Stanford:

“In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups.

Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task.

The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled.”

Comically, the researchers even noted in the paper that the “victims” were more likely to leave trash behind. And steal the experimenter’s pen.

But it’s important to state our case against victimhood culture very clearly and carefully. To be sure, some people in our society have completely legitimate grievances. Victims of crime, deprivation, and discrimination deserve our compassion and justice.

So what is a reasonable, good-hearted person to do? How should we distinguish between the individuals we want to help and the broad attitude we must reject? In short, how do we advance real social justice without fueling victimhood culture?

Tough questions — but critically important ones. In the piece, I offer two guidelines to guide our thinking:

Look at free speech.
First, look at the role of free speech in a particular debate. Victims and their advocates always rely on free speech and open dialogue to articulate unpopular truths. They demand oxygen and assert everyone’s right to speak. Victimhood culture, by contrast, generally seeks to restrict expression in order to protect the sensibilities of its advocates. Victimhood is alleged to confer the power to say who is and is not allowed to speak.

Look at leadership.Look at the leadership of a given protest movement. The fight for true victims is led by aspirational leaders who challenge us to cultivate higher values. They insist that everyone is capable of — and has a right to — earned success. They articulate visions of human dignity. But the organizations and people who ascend in a victimhood culture? Those are very different. Some set themselves up as saviors; others focus on a common enemy. In all cases, they treat people less as individuals and more as aggrieved masses.

Some fear that our detour into victimhood culture is permanent. I admit that it’s easy to feel pessimistic. But we are emphatically not helpless, and the situation is far from hopeless. If we work hard to separate the struggle of real victims from the wider, toxic ecosystem of victimhood, we can turn the tide. We can promote a society that is instead based on hope and aspiration.

But until we succeed, I suggest keeping an eye on your pen.

Filed Under: Insight, Life

Science Behind the Factoid: Lottery Winners Are No Happier Than Quadriplegics

January 10, 2016

Here’s a frequently repeated, counterintuitive factoid: people who win large sums in the lottery are no happier, over time, than people who become paralyzed in traumatic accidents. This “fact” comes from Brickman et al’s 1978 paper called Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? The researchers interviewed 22 major lottery winners, 22 randomly selected controls from the same area, and 29 paraplegics and quadriplegics who had suffered the injury in the recent past. The lottery winners had won sums ranging from $300,000 (more than a million in 2013 dollars) to $1,000,000. Here are some of the results:

The respondents rated their happiness and their enjoyment of everyday pleasures such as hearing a good joke or receiving a compliment on a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 was the happiest. As you can see, lottery winners were not significantly happier than controls. They also derived significantly less pleasure from everyday events.

Read more about the breakthrough study on the relationship between happiness and winning the lottery.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life, News

Novelty or Surprise: A Study in Motivation and Learning

January 8, 2016

Novelty and surprise play significant roles in animal behavior and in attempts to understand the neural mechanisms underlying it. They also play important roles in technology, where detecting observations that are novel or surprising is central to many applications, such as medical diagnosis, text processing, surveillance, and security.

Theories of motivation, particularly of intrinsic motivation, place novelty and surprise among the primary factors that arouse interest, motivate exploratory or avoidance behavior, and drive learning. In many of these studies, novelty and surprise are not distinguished from one another: the words are used more-or-less interchangeably. However, while undeniably closely related, novelty and surprise are very different.

The purpose of this article is first to highlight the differences between novelty and surprise and to discuss how they are related by presenting an extensive review of mathematical and computational proposals related to them, and then to explore the implications of this for understanding behavioral and neuroscience data. We argue that opportunities for improved understanding of behavior and its neural basis are likely being missed by failing to distinguish between novelty and surprise.

Filed Under: Life, Research

Chicken or Egg: Does Happiness Itself Directly Affect Mortality?

December 9, 2015 by The Lancet

Background

Poor health can cause unhappiness and poor health increases mortality. Previous reports of reduced mortality associated with happiness could be due to the increased mortality of people who are unhappy because of their poor health. Also, unhappiness might be associated with lifestyle factors that can affect mortality. We aimed to establish whether, after allowing for the poor health and lifestyle of people who are unhappy, any robust evidence remains that happiness or related subjective measures of well-being directly reduce mortality.

Methods

The Million Women Study is a prospective study of UK women recruited between 1996 and 2001 and followed electronically for cause-specific mortality. 3 years after recruitment, the baseline questionnaire for the present report asked women to self-rate their health, happiness, stress, feelings of control, and whether they felt relaxed. The main analyses were of mortality before Jan 1, 2012, from all causes, from ischaemic heart disease, and from cancer in women who did not have heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive lung disease, or cancer at the time they answered this baseline questionnaire. We used Cox regression, adjusted for baseline self-rated health and lifestyle factors, to calculate mortality rate ratios (RRs) comparing mortality in women who reported being unhappy (ie, happy sometimes, rarely, or never) with those who reported being happy most of the time.

Findings

Of 719,671 women in the main analyses (median age 59 years [IQR 55–63]), 39% (282 619) reported being happy most of the time, 44% (315 874) usually happy, and 17% (121 178) unhappy. During 10 years (SD 2) follow-up, 4% (31 531) of participants died. Self-rated poor health at baseline was strongly associated with unhappiness. But after adjustment for self-rated health, treatment for hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression, or anxiety, and several sociodemographic and lifestyle factors (including smoking, deprivation, and body-mass index), unhappiness was not associated with mortality from all causes (adjusted RR for unhappy vs happy most of the time 0·98, 95% CI 0·94–1·01), from ischaemic heart disease (0·97, 0·87–1·10), or from cancer (0·98, 0·93–1·02). Findings were similarly null for related measures such as stress or lack of control.

Filed Under: Life, Research Tagged With: happiness, life, mental health