Category: Inequality

Wednesday Round Up #10

Hierarchy

Anthropology.Net, The Social Brain Hypothesis: Are Our Brains Hardwired to Deal with Hierarchies?
Subconsciously processing dominance hierachies

Marc Dingman, Neuroimaging and the Social Ladder
Social hierarchy: can we see it in an fMRI?

Ira Flatow, Mapping the Social Brain
How the brain responds to social status

Constance Holder, A Head for Social Hierarchy
More on the work by Caroline Zink: superior players change our own thinking

Free Will

Cognitive Daily, Changing Belief in Free Will Can Cause Students to Cheat
No free will, more likely to cheat—if responsibility doesn’t count, who cares?

Foolish Green Ideas, Tight Fit
Very funny take on the “no free will” research

Brain Mechanisms

Chris/Mixing Memory, Emotion, Reason and Moral Judgment
Brain damage, moral scenarios, and general vs. personal rationality

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #10”

Inequality and Drug Use

By Mary Kate McNamara, Emily Schirack, Dana Sherry & Amy Vereecke

Close your eyes. Imagine a crack addict. What do you picture? A wealthy man in an Armani suit and tie? Or a poor man clothed in baggy jeans; violent, dark and dangerous? Is she seated behind a mahogany desk on the 22nd floor of an office building in Manhattan or is she standing on a graffiti-covered street corner in East Harlem?

We know that a person’s drug of choice is influenced by his or her social status, from the high-powered lawyer with a penchant for powder cocaine to the pill-popping rock star to the alcoholic factory worker to the unemployed crack head. Here we will show something more important about a person’s relationship with drugs: an individual’s decision to use drugs is embedded in an unequal social structure, a social structure that produces unequal outcomes for drug users contingent on their social status.

By being poor, under-educated and of a low-status ethnic group, a person is at a greater risk for not only social marginalization, but becoming a victim of addiction (Baer, Singer & Susser 2003: 131). As David Courtwright argues in Forces of Habit, social inequality is promoted by the elite to maintain control over a minority group of laborers. By suppressing the lower classes in a cycle of substance abuse and addiction, the wealthy are able to increase their own power and profits. At the expense of people they deem inferior—simply because these people lack the material means to rise from their position—the elite sustain their authority. “Next to profits and taxes, the utility of drugs in acquiring, pacifying and fleecing workers proved to be their greatest advantage to the elites…” (Courtwright 2001:135)

In analyzing society’s abuse of drugs, Courtwright comments that “a pattern of drug use can become so entrenched in a culture that it is impossible to permanently suppress and delegitimate it” (Courtwright 2001: 199). This entrenchment is facilitated by a cycle of poverty, inequality and addiction.

Continue reading “Inequality and Drug Use”

David Brooks, Part Two: Demography Is King

In his editorial Demography Is King, Brooks describes how in recent decades in the US, “some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.”

He relates how Barack Obama has won “densely populated, well-educated areas” while Hillary Clinton has carried “less-populated, less-educated areas.” “For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties… This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.”

His argument? “In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.”

What makes the editorial interesting is how he bucks the trend of buying into popular explanations about social identity. “Over the years, different theories have emerged to describe the educated/less-educated divide. Conservatives have gravitated toward the culture war narrative, dividing the country between the wholesome masses and the decadent cultural elites. Some liberals believe income inequality drives everything. They wait for an uprising of economic populism. Other liberals divide the country morally, between the enlightened urbanites and the racist rednecks who will never vote for a black man.”

Continue reading “David Brooks, Part Two: Demography Is King”

Dying Sooner: The New US Pattern

What the hell is wrong with this country? That is what came to my mind when I read a recent PLoS article “The Reversal of Fortunes: Trends in Country Mortality and Cross-County Mortality Disparities in the United States.” The basic conclusion: life expectancy is going DOWN in parts of the United States. How can that be?!

Here is what the PLoS article tells us: From 1983 to 1999, life expectancy declined significantly in 11 US counties for men and in 180 (!) counties for women. Why? “Life expectancy decline in both sexes was caused by increased mortality from lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, and a range of other noncommunicable diseases, which were no longer compensated for by the decline in cardiovascular mortality [driven largely by better drugs and interventions]. Higher HIV/AIDS and homicide deaths also contributed substantially to life expectancy decline for men, but not for women.”

In their conclusions, the authors Majid Ezzati, Ari Friedman, Sandeep Kulkarni, and Christopher Murray single out some specific health problems: “The epidemiological (disease-specific) patterns of female mortality rise are consistent with the geographical patterns of, and trends in, smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. In particular, the sex and cohort patterns of the increase in lung cancer and chronic respiratory disease mortality point to an important potential role for smoking.” So cigarettes kill.

But before we blame it all on individual behaviors, recall that these data are also geographic, by county. Where did life expectancy go down for 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population? “The majority of these counties were in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia, extending into the southern portion of the Midwest and into Texas.” In the worst performing counties, life expectancy dropped SIX years for women and two and a half years for men. In contrast, in the best US counties, life expectancy rose by as much as five years.

Continue reading “Dying Sooner: The New US Pattern”

Wednesday Round Up #6

Gaming

Sqrl, Link Between Online Gaming and Violence Killed Off
“People who play violent games online actually feel more relaxed and less angry after they have played”

GameSpot News, Study: Gamers Show Autistic Traits
“the closer gamers were to being addicted to their hobby, the more likely they were to display “negative personality traits.”

Jackie Burrell, Game on Too Long: A Fine Line Separates Addiction, Fun
Relaxed or autistic?! A more balanced consideration of how much is too much

GameSpot News, Video Game Addiction a Mental Disorder?
The comments by gamers—the debate among themselves—provide plenty of insight into the cultural and health issues at stake

Vaughan Bell, Internet Addiction Nonsense Hits the AJP
A critical take on attempts to define internet addiction as a mental illness

Science Daily, Occupational Therapists Use Wii for Parkinson’s Study
The interactive Wii makes for functional fun

Health

Rense Nieuwenhuis, Disentangling the SES-Health Correlation
Poor health and lower class. Going beyond the chicken-or-the-egg to consider pathways

Eric Brunner, Biology and Health Inequality
Online PLOS Biology article: The translation of social differences into biological differences

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #6”

The Decisions They Are-A-Changin’

Bob Dylan sang in his iconic The Times They Are-A-Changin’:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

The Waters Have Grown

We are on the verge of a sea-change in our thinking about decision making. Rather than the universal and utilitarian approach of rational choice and subjective rankings, we are coming to recognize that our every-day decisions, the ones that drench us to the bone, that sink or change us, come in the moment. Our choices are driven by often poorly articulated but deeply held values, linked to the meanings culture give us, and shaped by the unequal circumstances of our lives.

Continue reading “The Decisions They Are-A-Changin’”