Browsing PBH By Articles

U.S. Companies Thrive As Workers Fall Behind

The Article: U.S. Companies Thrive as Workers Fall Behind by Floyd Norris in The New York Times.

The Text: AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.

The major change in the latest comprehensive revision of the national income and product accounts — known as NIPA to statistics aficionados — is to treat research and development spending as an investment, similar to the way the purchase of a new machine tool would be treated by a manufacturer, rather than as an expense. That investment is then written down over a number of years.

The result is to make the size of the economy, the gross domestic product, look bigger, and to appear to be growing faster, in years when new research spending is greater than the amount being written down from previous years. For the same reason, corporate profits also look better in those years.

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FOX News, Driving Force In Climate Change Denial

The Article: Fox News found to be a major driving force behind global warming denial by Dana Nuccitelli in The Guardian.

The Text: A new study published in the journal Public Understanding of Science (PDF available here) surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 Americans in 2008 and 2011 about their media consumption and beliefs about climate change.

The results suggest that conservative media consumption (specifically Fox News and Rush Limbaugh) decreases viewer trust in scientists, which in turn decreases belief that global warming is happening. In contrast, consumption of non-conservative media (specifically ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post) increases consumer trust in scientists, and in turn belief that global warming is happening.

The study also examined previous research on this issue and concluded that the conservative media creates distrust in scientists through five main methods:

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Why It’s Hard To Talk About Race

The Article: The challenges of talking about race by Harvey Young in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: Race is a topic that most people would prefer not to address. The widespread reluctance to talk about race frequently stems from the anxieties and stress that occur with the admission (or confession) that we not only perceive differences in complexion as well as cultural and religious practices but also apply meaning to them.

To enter such a difficult dialogue would threaten our credentials as twenty-first century thinkers who have advanced beyond last century’s logic of the “colour line” and possess the capacity to see beyond the rigidly defined racial categories of the past.

To talk about race feels dangerous. There is the possibility of slippage, a verbal gaffe or, perhaps worse, a sincere and honest opinion that does not jibe with contemporary group think. Will we say something that may evidence that we may not be as enlightened as we imagine ourselves to be? Will a slip of the tongue accidentally give both credence and a sense of materiality to a concept (race) that we know does not really exist and is simply a fiction invented to divide people?

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Solitary Confinement Is Cruel And Ineffective

The Article: Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and Ineffective in The Scientific American.

The Text: Some 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, according to the latest available census. The practice has grown with seemingly little thought to how isolation affects a person’s psyche. But new research suggests that solitary confinement creates more violence both inside and outside prison walls.

Prisoners in solitary confinement—also known as administrative segregation—spend 22 to 24 hours a day in small, featureless cells. Contact with other humans is practically nonexistent. Because solitary confinement widely occurs at the discretion of prison administration, many inmates spend years, even decades, cut off from any real social interaction. More than 500 of the prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison in California, for example, have been in isolation units for over a decade, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

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Are Suburbs Killing The American Dream?

The Article: Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die? by Matthew O’Brien in The Atlantic.

The Text: Rumors of the American Dream’s demise have been greatly exaggerated — at least in parts of America.

That’s the message of a new study that looks at the connection between geography and social mobility in the United States. It turns out modern-day Horatio Algers have just as much a chance in much of the country as they do anywhere else in the world today. But if you want to move up, don’t move to the South. As you can see in the chart below from David Leonhardt’s write-up in the New York Times, the American Dream is on life support below the Mason Dixon line.

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