When researchers recently looked at data on how parents perceive their overweight young children, they learned that 94.9 percent believe the kids' size to be "just right." As startling and unsettling as that statistic may be, it had been shown before in smaller populations and wasn't the worst news out of the study.
More disturbing was what the researchers found when they compared the results with the same survey taken about two decades earlier. Over the years, they realized, the chances of a child "being appropriately perceived by the parents declined by 30%."...
Despite hand-wringing about the institution of marriage, marriages in this country are stronger today than they have been in a long time. The divorce rate peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s and has been declining for the three decades since.
About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist (who also contributes to The Upshot).
There are many reasons for the drop in divorce, including later marriages, birth control and the rise of so-called love marriages. These same forces have helped reduce the divorce rate in parts of Europe, too. Much of the trend has to do with changing gender roles — whom the feminist revolution helped and whom it left behind.
The Christian share of adults in the United States has declined sharply since 2007, affecting nearly all major Christian traditions and denominations, and crossing age, race and region, according to an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center.
Seventy-one percent of American adults were Christian in 2014, the lowest estimate from any sizable survey to date, and a decline of 5 million adults and 8 percentage points since a similar Pew survey in 2007.
The Christian share of the population has been declining for decades, but the pace rivals or even exceeds that of the country’s most significant demographic trends, like the growing Hispanic population. It is not confined to the coasts, the cities, the young or the other liberal and more secular groups where one might expect it, either.
“The decline is taking place in every region of the country, including the Bible Belt,” said Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at the Pew Research Center and the lead editor of the report.
The decline has been propelled in part by generational change, as relatively non-Christian millennials reach adulthood and gradually replace the oldest and most Christian adults. But it is also because many former Christians, of all ages, have joined the rapidly growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or “nones”: a broad category including atheists, agnostics and those who adhere to “nothing in particular.”
You know all those “salute to the troops” stuff thrown up on football scoreboards? It turns out that the NFL charges for at least some of them. And we’re the chumps footing the bill.
No, this is not from the Duffel Blog or Onion. Christopher Baxter of NJ.com reports that the Pentagon, which is begging Congress for big bucks, actually paid NFL teams $5.4 million of your hard-earned money.
For example, the Jets were paid nearly $400,000 for several promotions, including, according to the contract, “A videoboard feature – Hometown Hero. For each of their 8 home game [sic], the Jets will recognize 1-2 NJARNG Soldiers as Home Town Heroes. Their picture will be displayed on the videoboard, their name will be announced over the loud speaker, and they will be allowed to watch the game, along with 3 friends or family members, from the Coaches Club.”
This, then, is the unpleasant implication: human beings change our behavior as we are being observed, and the males among us more so than the females.
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What would be curious, indeed, then, is if property crimes did not increase during large public protests during which the police turn out in force, and stand around providing a target at which protestors can express their ire. The more apparent it becomes that the police are concentrated in some areas, and unable to respond to property crimes they normally respond to, the more likely and widespread we should expect looting and theft to become. And while we would not expect only males to rob and steal, we should expect that more males than females will do so.
Finally, a rarely appreciated irony of the “riot patrol” response of most governments to large groups of public protest is that it actually increases the likelihood of looting. When we stop to think through what we know about human beings, social order and government, this is really not very hard to see. That, in my view, is the most interesting aspect of all of this: politicians and police have a strong tendency to make themselves worse off, and very few of them realize it. I will elaborate in a future post, but before getting to that one, I have some other questions to answer. Stay tuned.
It’s been well-documented that America’s banks and financial institutions are no longer the loose-and-easy lenders they were several years ago. But newly released data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reveals a less explored implication of that credit tightening: A new geographic divide in how easily Americans can borrow money.
Those who live in the upper Midwest, particularly Minnesota and the Dakotas, still have the healthy borrowing profiles they did before the Great Recession. Those in many other states have seen only modest declines in the ability to borrow. But those in the Deep South — especially in states hugging the Gulf Coast — have seen their access to credit drop off significantly, even though it was already weak to begin with.
The consequences of a credit freeze in the Deep South are daunting. The region is already economically distressed, with disproportionately high poverty levels, and restrictions on credit access limit the ability of those living there to start businesses, make investments, or manage unforeseen expenses. If enough people in an area cannot borrow, the community itself becomes less resilient, said Kausar Hamdani, a senior vice president at the New York Fed.
“It’s the ability to access resources,” Hamdani said. “Not just for emergencies, but to grow a dream, to start a business.”
