The Role of the Family in Changing Inequality in the U.S.

Thanks to John Mauldin for pointing to an article by Roy Boshara of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, detailing the differences between "thrivers and strugglers" in the U.S. This article is a very good bit of supplemental reading for my Chapter 10 on the Family and Household Transition. The article is lengthy and detailed, and I can't do it justice in a single blog post, so I encourage you to read it thoroughly on your own, but here are some highlights. First, the issue at hand:

Given wealth’s importance, it is disturbing that the wealth gap has grown dramatically during the last few decades. The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances5 shows a massive shift in wealth away from those we are calling strugglers, who generally are younger, less educated, and non-white, and toward those we are calling thrivers, who generally are middle-aged or older, better educated, and white or Asian.6 Although thrivers’ share of the population has risen 9 percent since 1989, their share of the nation’s wealth has grown 23 percent. Stated another way, thrivers used to command less than one-half of the nation’s wealth, but now they own about two-thirds, despite accounting for slightly less than one-quarter of the population. [Note that Boshara uses data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, but the results are the same as from the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation.]

Boshara discusses the various demographic predictors of the differences--age, race/ethnicity, education, and marital status. You will recall all of these from my Chapter 10. The most well-off people in the U.S. are older married whites with a graduate level education. But Boshara points out that the trends in marital status play an especially key role:

A growing number of academics on both the political left and right appear to now be coming together around concerns over declining rates of marriage14 and rising rates of single-parent households, especially among less-educated persons. Their common economic concern: the ability of single parents to make it on one income and get their kids on a track for upward mobility. Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution recently remarked, “There’s a growing danger that marriage, with all its advantages for stability, income, and child well-being, will look like a gated community for the baccalaureate class, with ever-shrinking working-class participation. We’re not there yet, but that’s the trajectory we’re on.”15 June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, authors of Marriage Markets, report that four out of five couples are married in the top 20 percent of earners, while fewer than one in five couples are married among the bottom 20 percent; they also observe that increasing income inequality influences the markets for marriage.16

Robert Putnam in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis focuses on the implications of this growing class divide for children.19 He notes that one in three children is being raised by married, college-educated parents, who are investing more time and money in their children than any previous generation. In fact, research by Shelly Lundberg and Robert Pollak finds that marriage is thriving among better-educated couples precisely because it is being used as a commitment device to raise highly successful children.20

These are themes that I have discussed over time. I was a bit disappointed to see that Boshara's perspective is that we cannot likely change the trends toward less family solidarity among those with lower levels of education, so we have to do other things to help strengthen the lives of kids as they grow up. I don't disagree with his policy initiatives, but my own view is that we should, in fact, put kids first and in my view a society committed to having kids within marriage, so that they can have the greatest amount of possible resources available to them, is not too lofty a goal to achieve (or, in fact, re-achieve). 

World Health Day--Can We Make Ourselves Healthier?

April 7th is annually known as World Health Day by, of course, the World Health Organization, and it comes in the middle of National Public Health Week, as named by the American Public Health Association. Last year the focus was on safe food, as I noted at the time, whereas this year the emphasis is on beating diabetes. The WHO notes, in particular, that the incidence of diabetes is growing most quickly in developing countries. Certainly, our research in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa, shows that obesity is rising rapidly and with it the risk of diabetes. In our Women's Health Study of Accra in 2008-09, we found that women who were obese (based on BMI measurements) were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with diabetes as those who were not obese. Based on data for the entire country of Ghana from the Demographic and Health Survey in 2008, you can see in the map below that woman of reproductive age are much more likely to be overweight in the urban regions, which are located largely in the southern half of the country. Since Ghana, like most developing nations, is rapidly urbanizing, this is not a healthy trend.

The Cultural Components of Sustainability

If you have read my book, you will know that I have always been critical of the concept of sustainable development. It is the development part to which I object. It seems impossible to me that we can all aspire to use ever more resources (which is the bottom line of development) in a sustainable way. Fortunately, the new UN Sustainable Development Goals soften that a bit and sometimes talk only about sustainability--hanging on to what we have. Those goals are focused on increasing levels of living mainly among people in developing nations. But there are a lot of cultural impediments in the way of sustainability and a group of researchers, including one my SDSU Geography colleagues, has just published a paper in Science that identifies a set of indicators that might help us crack and track those cultural codes. The paper is behind a subscription, but the SDSU Newscenter has a summary:

Physical and economic indicators such as carbon emissions and gross domestic product (GDP) are frequently tracked in sustainability studies and monitoring programs, mainly because it’s comparatively easy to account for such numbers, said San Diego State University assistant professor of geography and study co-author Arielle Levine.

“For the most part, researchers and policymakers are trying to find things they can easily quantify,” Levine said. “Things that you can’t quantify easily—values, human agency, power, cultural context—often get lost in the process.”

The paper, led by Christina Hicks of Lancaster University, argues that researchers and policymakers need to engage with these key social concepts as well as science if fair and lasting changes to the environment are going to take hold.

The concepts identified are:
--wellbeing
--culture
--values
--inequality
--justice
--power
--agency (a sense of self-determination)

The authors argue that these concepts are critical to informing decision-making and shaping policies for a more sustainable future.

In the Science article, the authors provide concrete examples of international data sets that can be used to monitor these trends, going beyond just identifying the concepts themselves. 

Supreme Court Upholds "One Person, One Vote"

Almost a year ago, the US Supreme Court agreed to take up a case challenging the way that state legislative boundaries are drawn in Texas, as I noted at the time. The Supreme Court had already ruled that district boundaries at the state level--as at the US Congressional level--needed to be drawn so that each district had the same number of people. At the national level, there is no question that this includes everyone, regardless of age, race/ethnicity, citizenship or anything else. If you are counted in the census, you count for redistricting. The plaintiffs in Texas argued, however, that at the state level it should only be eligible voters who are counted. Even the State of Texas disagreed with this idea, and the Supreme Court was today unanimous in its rejection of that approach. CNN summarized the issue:

The Obama administration and state of Texas opposed the lawsuit. Civil rights groups watched the case carefully, fearful that if the court were to rule with the plaintiffs, it could potentially shift power from urban areas -- districts that tend to include a higher percentage of individuals not eligible to vote such as non-citizens, released felons and children -- to rural areas that are more likely to favor Republicans.

Civil rights groups feared that Latino communities in certain states with nonvoting residents, as well as children and others, would be sharply disadvantaged if the court were to side with Evenwel. "Drawing districts to equalize people is the only way to ensure that the communities where people live and work are fairly represented in the nation's legislatures," Michael Li, counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program said after oral arguments.  

Also supporting Texas was Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School, who said that if the court were to say that the Constitution requires states to use the voting population, it could unleash a series of questions regarding the reliability of voter lists and surveys. "A national database of eligible voters does not exist and will not exist in the foreseeable future," he said in an amicus brief.

Keep in mind that the Constitutional basis of the census in the US is to count everyone so that Congressional districts can be drawn on the basis of population counts. When the country was founded, the fraction of people eligible to vote was actually pretty small, but that didn't matter in terms of drawing Congressional district boundaries. With today's Supreme Court decision, it appears that we will continue to follow the time-honored pattern of drawing both national and state legislative boundaries on the basis of total population numbers, not on the basis of some select group within the population.  

Reproductive Rights and Choices in America

Abortion has been legal in the US since the 1973 Supreme Court decision supporting that right. The Republican Party has long been opposed, however, and has worked diligently with a variety of state legislatures to restrict access. These issues came to the fore this week with Donald Trump's assertion (subsequently "walked back") that women who sought an abortion should be punished. His walk-back targeted doctors instead of women, and of course doctors performing abortions have been under attack for a long time, as I noted a few months ago. The attacks on Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health organizations have the potential to make it even more likely that a woman might be put in a position of thinking about abortion if she is unable to readily access other methods of birth control. On that score, there was some good news this week in that the US Food and Drug Administration approved some changes in the use of abortion-inducing drugs, as CBS News reported:

A federal agency approved a new label for a common abortion-inducing drug that will undermine restrictions on medication abortions passed by several states, allowing women to take the drug later in a pregnancy and with fewer required office visits.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) notified the manufacturer of the drug Mifeprex in a letter on Tuesday that the drug is safe and effective for terminating a pregnancy in accordance with the new label. Also known as mifepristone, the drug is used in combination with another drug, misoprostol, to end a pregnancy.

While abortion providers in most states already are using the protocol outlined in the new label, laws in effect in Ohio, North Dakota and Texas prohibited "off-label" uses of the drug and mandated abortion providers adhere to the older protocol approved in 2000. Similar laws in Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma have been on hold pending legal challenges.

Under the new label, a smaller dose of mifepristone can be used up to 70 days after the beginning of the last menstrual period instead of the 49-day limit in effect under the old label. Also, the second drug can be taken by a woman at home and not be required to be administered at a clinic.

Of course, those who oppose a woman's right to an abortion were ready for this. Today's NYTimes reports that the governor of Arizona yesterday signed a law requiring abortion providers to use the old FDA guidelines rather than the new ones. It seems unlikely that this will withstand a court test, but the goal is obstruction of what is already legal, and this is just part of the war on women's reproductive rights--waged disproportionately by white males, so there is yet another demographic angle to this.