This and that for your Sunday reading. – Larry Elliott reports on a Resolution Foundation study showing that while the UK’s 1% has fully recovered from the 2008 financial crash, the rest of the population hasn’t been so lucky and has faced extended stagnation at best: Families on low and
Continue readingTag: child poverty
Accidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – The Economist observes that the effects of climate change fall disproportionately on poorer people, rather than the wealthier ones who have caused more of the damage: The costs of global climate change will again be unevenly (and uncertainly) distributed, but harm will often
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Susanna Rustin reports on a new study from the London School of Economics demonstrating the lifelong personal impacts of childhood poverty. And Colleen Kimmit writes that the solution to food insecurity (along with other elements of personal precarity) is a guaranteed income,
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Josh Bivens notes that U.S. corporations are already paying a lower share of taxes than has historically been the case – meaning that there’s no air of reality to the claim that handing them more money will produce any positive economic results.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Clive Hamilton discusses the accelerating calamity of climate change which we’re allowing to happen: Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Olivia Loveridge-Greene comments on new research showing how many workers may be forced to keep working into their 70s or beyond in order to be able to stay afloat. And Don Pittis explains why tax-free savings accounts and other giveaways to the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Evening Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Olivia Loveridge-Greene comments on new research showing how many workers may be forced to keep working into their 70s or beyond in order to be able to stay afloat. And Don Pittis explains why tax-free savings accounts and other giveaways to the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Naomi Klein writes that Donald Trump’s cabinet represents a direct takeover of the U.S. government by the corporate oligarchy – and comments on what the progressive movement needs to do to fight back: Let us be clear: This is not a peaceful transition
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne comments on the importance of the labour movement in ensuring that economic growth translates into benefits for workers: The findings of a study released this month by the Canadian Centre for Study of Living Standards, an Ottawa-based think-tank, reinforces why there
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Baratunde Thurston makes the point that even beyond income and wealth inequality, there’s an obviously unfair distribution of second chances in the U.S. depending on one’s race and class. Denis Campbell reports on the link between poverty and childhood obesity, while Jen
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – David Boyle discusses how the principle of free trade – once intended to empower consumers against monopolies – is instead being used to lock in corporate control: (T)he original idea of free trade was not a simple licence to do whatever you
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Mary O’Hara notes that even a relatively modest and incomplete set of progressive policies has created some important movement toward reducing poverty. And conversely, Caroline Mortimer writes that child poverty is exploding under the Conservative majority government in the UK. – Dean
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Graham Lowe and Frank Graves examine the state of Canada’s labour market, and find a strong desire among workers for an activist government to ensure improved pay equality and social supports. Oxfam reaches sim…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Erika Hayasaki surveys the developing body of research on how poverty and deprivation affect a child’s long-term brain development:Early results show a troubling trend: Kids who grow up with higher levels of…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.
– Erika Hayasaki surveys the developing body of research on how poverty and deprivation affect a child’s long-term brain development:
Early results show a troubling trend: Kids who grow up with higher levels of violence as a backdrop in their lives, based on MRI scans, have weaker real-time neural connections and interaction in parts of the brain involved in awareness, judgment, and ethical and emotional processing.
…Though it’s still largely based on correlations between brain patterns and particular environments, the research points to a disturbing conclusion: Poverty and the conditions that often accompany it—violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs—can affect the interactions, formation and pruning of connections in the young brain.
Two recent influential reports cracked open a public conversation on the matter. In one, researchers found that impoverished children had less gray matter—brain tissue that supports information processing and executive behavior—in their hippocampus (involved in memory), frontal lobe (involved in decision making, problem solving, impulse control, judgment, and social and emotional behavior) and temporal lobe (involved in language, visual and auditory processing and self-awareness). Working together, these brain areas are crucial for following instructions, paying attention and overall learning—some of the keys to academic success.
…
The second key study, published in Nature Neuroscience , also in 2015 , looked at 1,099 people between ages 3 and 20, and found that children with parents who had lower incomes had reduced brain surface areas in comparison to children from families bringing home $150,000 or more a year.“We have [long] known about the social class differences in health and learning outcomes,” says Dr. Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. But neuroscience has now linked the environment, behavior and brain activity—and that could lead to a stunning overhaul of both educational and social policies, like rethinking Head Start–style programs that have traditionally emphasized early literacy. New approaches, he says, could focus on social and emotional development as well, since science now tells us that relationships and interactions with the environment sculpt the areas of the brain that control behavior (like the ability to concentrate), which also can affect academic achievement (like learning to read).
– Adria Vasil discusses the worldwide trend of water being made available first (and for inexplicably low prices) to for-profit bottlers over citizens who need it. And Martin Regg Cohn examines how the story is playing out in Ontario in particular.
– Mike De Souza reports on how the National Energy Board, rather than acting as a neutral regulator, misled Denis Coderre to try to take free PR for both the NEB itself and fossil fuel development in general. And Carrie Tait points out how the Husky oil spill is raising questions about Saskatchewan’s fully captured regulatory system.
– Ian MacLeod reports on a sudden and unexplained increase in CSE interception of private communications.
– Finally, Andray Domise discusses what Colten Boushie’s shooting and its aftermath say about the blight of racism in Canada.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here (via PressReader), on how Brad Wall is preaching neglect and delay as a response to violent racism (even as he’s fully prepared to use as much political capital as he can muster pitching the idea of a SaskTel selloff). For further reading…- Wall…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how Brad Wall is preaching neglect and delay as a response to violent racism (even as he’s fully prepared to use as much political capital as he can muster pitching the idea of a SaskTel selloff). For further reading…- Wall’s comments which …
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading.- Nora Loreto slams the Wynne Libs’ “red tape” gimmick, while highlighting the need for people to claim a voice in rules largely intended to protect them as workers and consumers:One person’s red tape is another p…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week.- Branko Milanovic points out how the commodification of our interactions may create an incentive for short-term exploitation:Commodification of what was hitherto a non-commercial resource makes each of us do m…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week.- David Blanchflower notes that there’s virtually no dispute that the UK is headed into an economic downturn – meaning that there’s also no excuse to hold off on fiscal relief for the public. And Brad DeLong po…
Continue reading