Tuesday, March 27, 2018

ANS -- Busting the Myth of ‘Welfare Makes People Lazy’

This article is in case you ever find yourself arguing with someone who says welfare makes people lazy.  There is scientific evidence that that hypothesis is not true.  
--Kim


Busting the Myth of 'Welfare Makes People Lazy'

Cash assistance isn't just a moral imperative that raises living standards. It's also a critical investment in the health and future careers of low-income kids.

A girl looking at the sky, seen from behind
Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

"Welfare makes people lazy." The notion is buried so deep within mainstream political thought that it can often be stated without evidence. It was explicit during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA (Works Progress Administration) was nicknamed "We Piddle Around" by his detractors. It was implicit in Bill Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it." Even today, it is an intellectual pillar of conservative economic theory, which recommends slashing programs like Medicaid and cash assistance, partly out of a fear that self-reliance atrophies in the face of government assistance.

Many economists have for decades argued that this orthodoxy is simply wrong—that wisely designed anti-poverty programs, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, actually increase labor participation. And now, across the world, a fleet of studies are converging on the consensus that even radical welfare programs—including basic-income programs and what are called conditional cash transfers—don't make people any less productive.

Most notably, a 2015 meta-study of cash programs in poor countries found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work" in seven different countries: Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Philippines, Indonesia, or Morocco. Other studies of cash-grant experiments in Uganda and Nigeria have found that such programs can increase working hours and earnings, particularly when the beneficiaries are required to attend classes that teach specific trades or general business skills.

Welfare isn't just a moral imperative to raise the living standards of the poor. It's also a critical investment in the health and future careers of low-income kids.

Take, for example, the striking finding from a new paper from researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. They analyzed a Mexican program called Prospera, the world's first conditional cash-transfer system, which provides money to poor families on the condition that they send their children to school and stay up to date on vaccinations and doctors' visits. In 2016, Prospera offered cash assistance to nearly 7 million Mexican households.

In the paper, researchers matched up data from Prospera with data about households' incomes to analyze for the first time the program's effect on children several decades after they started receiving benefits. The researchers found that the typical young person exposed to the program for seven years ultimately completed three more years of education and was 37 percent more likely to be employed. That's not all: Young Prospera beneficiaries grew up to become adults who worked, on average, nine more hours each week than similarly poor children who weren't enrolled in the program. They also earned higher hourly wages.

This finding has direct implications for the United States, where a core mission of the Republican Party is to reduce government aid to the poor, on the assumption that it makes them lazy. This attitude is supported by many conservative economists, who argue that government benefits implicitly reward poverty and thus encourage families to remain poor—the idea being that some adults might reject certain jobs or longer work hours because doing so would eliminate their eligibility for programs like Medicaid.

But this concern has little basis in reality. One of the latest studies on the subjectfound that Medicaid has "little if any" impact on employment or work hours. In research based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working hours, adults don't typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead, they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more desirable job.

But the standard conservative critique of Medicaid and other welfare programs is wrong on another plane entirely. It fails to account for the conclusion of the Prospera research: Anti-poverty programs can work wonders for their youngest beneficiaries. It's true north of the border, as well. American adults whose families had access to prenatal coverage under Medicaid have lower rates of obesity, higher rates of high-school graduation, and higher incomes as adults than those from similar households in states without Medicaid, according to a 2015 paper from the economists Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry. Another paper found that children covered by Medicaid expansions went on to earn higher wages and require less welfare assistance as adults.

"Welfare helps people work" may sound like a strange and counterintuitive claim to some. But it is perfectly obvious when the word people in that sentence refers to low-income children in poor households. Poverty and lack of access to health care is a physical, psychological, and vocational burden for children. Poverty is a slow-motion trauma, and impoverished children are more likely than their middle-class peers to suffer from chronic physiological stress and exhibit antisocial behavior. It's axiomatic that relieving children of an ambient trauma improves their lives and, indeed, relieved of these burdens, children from poorer households are more likely to follow the path from high-school graduation to college and then full-time employment.

Republicans have a complicated relationship with the American Dream. Conservative politicians such as Paul Ryan extol the virtues of hard work and opportunity. But when they use these virtues to inveigh against welfare programs, they ignore the overwhelming evidence that government aid relieves low-income children of the psychological and physiological stresses that get in the way of embracing those very ideals. Welfare is so much more than a substitute for a paycheck. It is a remedy for the myriad burdens of childhood poverty, which give children the opportunity to become exactly the sort of healthy and striving adults celebrated by both political parties.


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ANS -- Paul Ehrlich: 'Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades'

Remember Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb?  This is what he has to say today, fifty years later.  
--Kim



Paul Ehrlich: 'Collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades'

By 
Cities
Overstretched cities

Fifty years after the publication of his controversial book The Population Bomb, biologist Paul Ehrlich warns overpopulation and overconsumption are driving us over the edge

The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich.
 The toxification of the planet with synthetic chemicals may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Linh Pham/Getty Images

Ashattering collapse of civilisation is a "near certainty" in the next few decades due to humanity's continuing destruction of the natural world that sustains all life on Earth, according to biologist Prof Paul Ehrlich.

In May, it will be 50 years since the eminent biologist published his most famous and controversial book, The Population Bomb. But Ehrlich remains as outspoken as ever.

Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University.
Pinterest
 Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The world's optimum population is less than two billion people – 5.6 billion fewer than on the planet today, he argues, and there is an increasing toxification of the entire planet by synthetic chemicals that may be more dangerous to people and wildlife than climate change.

Ehrlich also says an unprecedented redistribution of wealth is needed to end the over-consumption of resources, but "the rich who now run the global system – that hold the annual 'world destroyer' meetings in Davos – are unlikely to let it happen".

The Population Bomb, written with his wife Anne Ehrlich in 1968, predicted "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death" in the 1970s – a fate that was avoided by the green revolution in intensive agriculture.

Many details and timings of events were wrong, Paul Ehrlich acknowledges today, but he says the book was correct overall.

"Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita, is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people."

Ehrlich has been at Stanford University since 1959 and is also president of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, which works "to reduce the threat of a shattering collapse of civilisation".

"It is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems," he says. "As I've said many times, 'perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell'."

It is the combination of high population and high consumption by the rich that is destroying the natural world, he says. Research published by Ehrlich and colleagues in 2017 concluded that this is driving a sixth mass extinction of biodiversity, upon which civilisation depends for clean air, water and food.

High consumption by the rich is destroying the natural world, says Ehrlich.
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 High consumption by the rich is destroying the natural world, says Ehrlich. Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters

The solutions are tough, he says. "To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men.

"I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable."

He estimates an optimum global population size at roughly 1.5 to two billion, "But the longer humanity pursues business as usual, the smaller the sustainable society is likely to prove to be. We're continuously harvesting the low-hanging fruit, for example by driving fisheries stocks to extinction."

Ehrlich is also concerned about chemical pollution, which has already reached the most remote corners of the globe. "The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults."

He treats this risk with characteristic dark humour: "The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the Republican debates in the US 2016 presidential elections – and the resultant kakistocracy. On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging."

Plastic pollution lying on remote frozen ice in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
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 Plastic pollution found in the most remote places on the planet show nowhere is safe from human impact. Photograph: Conor McDonnell

Reflecting five decades after the publication of The Population Bomb (which he wanted to be titled Population, Resources, and Environment), he says: "No scientist would hold exactly the same views after a half century of further experience, but Anne and I are still proud of our book." It helped start a worldwide debate on the impact of rising population that continues today, he says.

The book's strength, Ehrlich says, is that it was short, direct and basically correct. "Its weaknesses were not enough on overconsumption and equity issues. It needed more on women's rights, and explicit countering of racism – which I've spent much of my career and activism trying to counter.

"Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources."

Accusations that the book lent support to racist attitudes to population controlstill hurt today, Ehrlich says. "Having been a co-inventor of the sit-in to desegregate restaurants in Lawrence, Kansas in the 1950s and having published books and articles on the biological ridiculousness of racism, those accusations continue to annoy me."

But, he says: "You can't let the possibility that ignorant people will interpret your ideas as racist keep you from discussing critical issues honestly."

More of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's reflections on their book are published in The Population Bomb Revisited.


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Monday, March 26, 2018

ANS -- The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked

This is an article with some scientific evidence that carrying guns doesn't make people safer.  It's moderate length.  Read at least the first third.  
--Kim


The Good Guy with a Gun Theory, Debunked

Analyzing 37 years of data, a Stanford team finds no basis for a theory at the heart of the modern gun-rights movement.

Alex Yablon

Jul 2 2017, 9:00pm

Photo by George Frey Getty Images

This article was published in partnership with the Trace.

In the four decades that the modern, militant gun rights movement has been around, one of its most significant victories occurred not at the ballot box, on a president's special signing desk, or in the courtroom. Rather, one of the biggest battles pro-gun partisans have ever won took place in the minds of millions of Americans.

Since the late 1970's, the National Rifle Association and other firearm advocates have successfully fought to make armed self defense increasingly acceptable in everyday life. A wealth of survey data—the most recent of which came via a major Pew poll released last month—shows that Americans have grown more comfortable with the toting of concealed guns in public. Self defense is now the most common reason cited for owning a firearm, leading handguns to become the most popular kind of weapon in the American arsenal. Those attitudes and behaviors mark major shifts: In the mid 1990s, Americans primarily owned guns for recreation, and as recently as 2005, a strong plurality thought only police officers should carry guns in public.

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At the heart of this campaign for the hearts, minds, and holsters of America has been an article of faith that the NRA and its allies have preached since at least the 1990s: that people enhance public safety by carrying guns to defend themselves. Economist John Lott first developed this "More Guns, Less Crime" theory in his 1998 book of the same title, and has since popularized it via frequent legislative testimony and op-eds. The NRA has deployed Lott's work to beat back calls for new curbs on guns and their use. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, when NRA leader Wayne LaPierre made his infamous assertion that the "only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he was tapping into the already well-seeded notion that hidden guns at arm's reach of their private owners increase public safety.

It's a powerful, seductive idea, particularly to Americans who favor personal liberty over communitarian ideals. It's also completely wrong, according to a new analysis of nearly 40 years' worth of crime data.

For years, the question has been, is there any public safety benefit to right to carry laws? That is now settled. The answer is no." —John Donohue, Stanford Law School

In a new working paper published on June 21 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, academics at Stanford Law School ran that data through four different statistical models—including one developed by Lott for More Guns, Less Crime—and came back with an unambiguous conclusion: states that made it easier for their citizens to go armed in public had higher levels of non-fatal violent crime than those states that restricted the right to carry. The exception was the narrower category of murder; there, the researchers determined that any effect on homicide rates by expanded gun-carry policies is statistically insignificant.

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While other studies conducted since 1994 have undermined Lott's thesis, the new paper is the most comprehensive and assertive debunking of the more-guns-less-crime formula.

"For years, the question has been, is there any public safety benefit to right to carry laws? That is now settled," said paper's lead author, John Donohue. "The answer is no."

Watch the Motherboard documentary about the strange history of smart gun technology in America.

Donohue and his co-authors looked at crime data from 1977 to 2014, both nationally and in 33 states that implemented "Shall Issue" concealed-carry laws during that period. The statutes are the handiwork of the NRA, which has by now successfully lobbied politicians in all but a sliver of state capitols to relax their standards for issuing permits to carry concealed guns. "Shall Issue" states, which Donohue refers to as right to carry (RTC), require that concealed-carry licenses be granted to anyone who meets basic criteria. Unsurprisingly, they accept permit applications at a higher rate than "May Issue" states, where authorities have greater discretion to decide who is fit to go about the world armed.

Since lowering the bar for concealed-carry licenses gradually leads more people to get those licenses (Florida alone has nearly 1.8 million people permitted to carry concealed guns, and Pennsylvania and Texas each have around one million), and because more guns in public is supposed to reduce crimes, then we should expect states to see less crime as "Shall Issue" laws kick in.

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The Stanford team found precisely the opposite: "Ten years after the adoption of RTC laws," they write, "violent crime is estimated to be 13-15 percent higher than it would have been without the RTC law."

Prior assessments of right-to-carry statutes came earlier in the waves of "Shall Issue" laws that first swept states in the 1980s and mid-1990s. One of those was a well-known 2004 report from the National Research Council that also poked holes in Lott's conclusion—but could not say definitively which way right to carry tilted crime rates, because there weren't yet enough years of data to sift. Because the Stanford team was able to look at what was happening in states where expanded carry had been in place for a decade or more, it reached much stronger estimates of the effect of "Shall Issue" laws on crime.

The Stanford team suggested that the increased carrying of guns could have contributed to rising crime through several means. As more law-abiding residents arm themselves, so might the criminals in the same communities—rather than the other way around. Lawful gun-permit holders, the researchers theorize, could contribute to a street-level arms race by bringing more weapons into public, where they are more likely to be lost or stolen, making their way to the black market. The more that people become aware that their environs are filling with guns, their perceptions of society could become colored by fear and anger, thus leading them to more readily become violent.

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"I wasn't surprised to find violent crime went up," Donohue said. "You'd expect guns to contribute to violent crime."

The Stanford findings fly in the face of not just the NRA's message, but common understandings of crime trends over the last two decades. By national measures, violent crime has fallen dramatically after peaking in the early 1990s, and that drop has largely coincided with the expansion of the freedom to carry concealed guns. Lott and others are eager to point to declining national crime numbers as evidence for their theory, or at least to blunt concerns that more guns in public would lead to widespread bloodshed.

The problem with drawing a connection between the rise of concealed carry and the drop in the national crime rate, as Donohue and his co-authors point out, is that crime has not fallen equally in all parts of the country. Instead, the decline in violent crime has been most pronounced in states that maintained strict control over the right to carry guns, like New York and California. When other states decided to make it easier for residents to pack firearms, they appear to have missed out on reductions in crime of the same magnitude. Yes, in raw terms, crime declined in those right-to-carry states as well—but not nearly as much as it could have.

Examining statistics from the US Census Bureau and the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data, the authors estimate that states with stricter concealed-carry laws saw crime fall by 42 percent from 1977 to 2014. That drop is more than four times greater than the 9 percent decrease seen in right-to-carry states.

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In conducting their analysis, the Stanford researchers wanted to make sure that it was differences in concealed-gun laws, and not some other factor—diverging economic fortunes or police staffing, for example—that sent crime plunging in some places but not others.

To find out, the team projected what would have happened in right-to-carry states had they not relaxed concealed-carry standards, accounting for differences in demographics, policing, and economic growth.

Here, too, the team was able to run calculations that were not possible in the 90s and mid-2000s, when the academics who first subjected Lott's theory to scrutiny had significantly fewer years' worth of data to crunch.

The Stanford findings rest on two statistical methods with obscure-sounding technical names: panel data analysis and synthetic controls analysis. Panel data essentially tries to break down complex social phenomena—crime being very much one of those—by studying their smaller, more easily measurable components, like incarceration rates, police staffing levels, poverty, income, and population density.

Synthetic control analysis allows researchers to compare data recorded after the introduction of a change—like a right-to-carry law—with projections based on what might have happened had the change never occurred. The synthetic controls projection is based on demographic data and outcomes in demographically similar places.

Different researchers make different judgments about which factors have the most power to drive crime up or down. Rather than rest their analysis on a single set of variables, the Stanford team ran their 37 years of crime data through four different panels: their favorite, called DAW; one developed by the nonpartisan Brennan Center; the panel John Lott used in More Guns, Less Crime, and a fourth favored by a pair of pro-gun researchers named Carlisle Moody and Thomas Marvell.

Projections made with all four panels showed that states with right-to-carry laws would have had even greater decreases in violent crime had those places not loosened their gun laws.

"The panel data gave no hint that anything good was coming from the right to carry," Donohue said.

Take Texas, for example. Donohue's projections found that ten years after the Lone Star State put right to carry into effect, violent crime was more than 16 percent higher than it would have been without that law, as laid out in the graph below. The dotted line, labeled "synthetic control unit," is a projection of what might have happened to Texas' violent crime rate had it not loosened its concealed-carry statute, based on a composite of demographically similar states.

The only difference between projections using the pro-gun scholars' preferred variables and the other two panels came when singling out murder. The highest purpose of the armed citizen, in the rationale of the NRA and gun sellers, is to subdue or incapacitate marauding psychopaths before the killers can take innocent lives. But when the Stanford team ran the pro-gun researchers' formulas, the graphs showed that right-to-carry laws actually propped uphomicide rates.

The DAW and Brennan Center panels, on the other hand, showed only that non-fatal violent crime would be lower if states had never opted for the "Shall Issue" route. And they showed that in all 33 states where they ran the simulation, with no exceptions.

But does better research actually mean better real-world outcomes?

For that question, Donohue relies not on sophisticated math, but his years of experience studying the gun issue. "Many people have such strongly fixed ideas about guns," he conceded. "It's hard to influence their thinking."

Donohue may be understating the challenge that he and other scholars confront. Sociological and anthropological research suggests that Americans' feelings about firearms and whether to carry them for self defense are driven by elemental notions like identity and masculinity, rather than empirical measures of safety gained or lost.

The NRA has gone to great lengths to foment the idea that the right to carry guns is the bedrock of American citizenship, and the option of lethal self defense is "the first freedom." Gun companies market firearms to appeal to consumers' need to see themselves as powerful and, often, hyper-masculine protectors. It's hard for an academic paper to break through those kinds of beliefs.

But policymakers and judges are a different kind of audience than gun buyers or voters. Donohue hopes his findings make it in front of those influential eyes.

"The Supreme Court is eventually going to have to decide if there's a right to carry," he said, speaking the day after the justices declined to hear a challenge to California's restrictive right-to-carry law. "What will they make of this evidence?"


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Wednesday, March 21, 2018

ANS -- How weight gain could be reducing your sense of taste

This was very interesting to me, as I have been losing my sense of taste.  I've got to lose weight!
--Kim


How weight gain could be reducing your sense of taste

SCIENCE

a day ago
A new study in mice has revealed how weight gain could be changing the way you...

A new study in mice has revealed how weight gain could be changing the way you taste food(Credit: lightsource/Depositphotos)

An important new study from researchers at Cornell University has found that when mice become obese they can also lose up to 25 percent of their taste buds. This connection between obesity and taste has previously been observed in humans, but this is the first research to potentially uncover a biological explanation behind the phenomenon.

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A few years ago John Morton from the Stanford University School of Medicine presented some research, inspired by his clinical practice, finding obese patients reported an increase in taste sensitivity following bariatric surgery. Morton's study found 87 percent of patients reported a change in how food tastes following the surgery, but at the time there was no evidence to suggest that there was any fundamental anatomical change occurring.

Now new research conducted on mice is suggesting that weight gain causes an inflammatory response in the body that results in a significant decline in the volume of taste buds. The lifespan of a taste bud is relatively short – around 10 days. In the mouse models it was found that the number of taste bud progenitor cells declined in conjunction with a high-fat diet leading to obesity. This meant that the normal renewal process for taste buds was notably disrupted by weight gain.

"These data together suggest that gross adiposity stemming from chronic exposure to a high-fat diet is associated with a low-grade inflammatory response causing a disruption in the balancing mechanisms of taste bud maintenance and renewal," says Robin Dando, senior author on the research.

Further research revealed the mechanism behind this taste bud change stemmed from an increase in a pro-inflammatory cytokine called TNF-alpha. When mice engineered to not produce TNF-alpha were fed high-fat diets they were found to have no reduction in taste bud production despite becoming obese. And when TNF-alpha was administered directly into the tongue of healthy, lean mice, a direct decrease in taste buds was identified.

The hypothesis, if this same mechanism is also occurring in humans, would be that obesity results in a spiraling cycle that reduces a person's sensitivity to taste leading to them seeking out more intense, rich flavors. This would mean favoring foods with more sugar, salt, and fat – the golden triangle of fast food.

The good news is that this process is potentially reversible with Dando suggesting that "this is a two-way mechanism." The researcher's note this discovery should pave the way for new obesity treatments that can target this dysfunction in taste bud production.

The new research was published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Source: PLOS via Eurekalert


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