You wouldn’t claim to have identified a meaningful pattern in data if you had a p-value of 0.6. Gender is random at birth, but you wouldn’t try to publish a randomized trial if your randomization strategy involved putting boys in the intervention arm and girls in the control arm. And you wouldn’t try to attack […]
Monthly Archives: April 2016
As the life expectancy gap widens between the rich and poor and suicides increase at alarming rates, could financial stress be a contributor to both? Life expectancy continues to improve for the wealthiest top 1 percent. They’ve gained three years in this century alone. However, the poorest are not seeing the same gains. The […]
Not so long ago, people believed that because walnuts look like brains, eating walnuts must be good for the brain. In just the same way, it’s been easy to persuade people that because skim milk has its fat removed, it must help remove fat from those who drink it. Makes sense, dunnit? Except that […]
Arleen lost her 2 boys suddenly and by force. She had fallen behind on her rent and couldn’t pay the electricity bill. No electricity means no food in the refrigerator, no clock to get to school on time, no lights for evening homework. And for Arleen, no more kids. Child welfare determined that her sons […]
Banning abortions won’t stop them from happening; it will just make them more likely to result in health complications or even death. The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade landmark case in 1973 legalized abortion in all 50 states. However, in 1992 it was declared that states could pass restrictions that do not present an […]
Can outdoor preschools and farm-to-preschool programs help make our children healthier or are they just the latest trend? An urban farm preschool took first place this year at an international contest that focuses on innovative ideas in architecture, interior design, industrial design and urban planning. The idea is that children learn through experience, using their […]
As inequality reaches unprecedented heights in America, there is growing—and increasingly realistic—concern for social and political stability. Although inequality could be redressed by explicit redistribution, political gridlock in Washington and in many states makes this solution unlikely, and potentially economically disruptive. Yet many Americans, hostile to redistribution, are sympathetic to the need to create […]
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is getting serious about the damage done to African-American neighborhoods by highway construction. As Angie Schmitt reports: Growing up in Charlotte, Foxx’s own street was walled in by highways, he recalled in a speech today at the Center for American Progress. Building big, grade-separated roads through thickly settled neighborhoods devastated communities, uprooted residents, and cut off […]
Julien Sorel wishes to make his fortune. With intellectual talent but not much creativity, he understands that there are only two paths upward from his petty bourgeoisie background: the priesthood—the black—or the military—the red. He chooses the black. Two centuries’ time has changed a lot since Stendahl’s nineteenth-century novel The Red and the Black, […]
We think we control the size of our cities by restricting outsiders. How vain is human striving! At the level of individual neighborhoods, there is certainly control over whether outsiders are let in. Neighborhoods, and even some small cities, can simply refuse to build any new housing for years or decades. But the size […]