The Social Consequences of a Poor Economy
The LA Times had one of the strangest articles about the economy:
“Deaths go down when unemployment goes up,” says Christopher J. Ruhm, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who for the last few years has been publishing counterintuitive and controversial papers on the economy and health. Put total mortality numbers on a spreadsheet, he’s found, and the population’s physical well-being improves as just about every measure of economic health dips.
No one — certainly not Ruhm — is arguing that recessions are good. For unemployed individuals and for people who fear financial disaster — relentlessly forecast in headlines and top-of-the-hour newscasts — the outcome is mixed. Mental health worsens even for the vast majority who maintain their jobs, as the onslaught of bad news causes anger, anxiety and depression. And prenatal problems increase, leading to more miscarriages and higher infant mortality rates.
But even as people are worrying more, they’re smoking, drinking and driving less, reducing their risks of heart disease, liver disease and car crashes. People who have lost jobs likely cut back because of lost income, whereas those still employed may be cutting back as they stare down inflation and stagnant incomes.
Science News explains laid off workers spend more time alone:
“What we find is that even just one disruption in employment makes workers significantly less likely to participate in a whole range of social activities — from joining book clubs to participating in the PTA and supporting charities,” said Jennie E. Brand, a UCLA sociologist and the study’s lead author. “After being laid off or downsized, workers are less likely to give back to their community.”The first study to look at the long-term impact of job displacement on social participation, the research found that workers who had experienced just one involuntary disruption in their employment status were 35% less likely to be involved in their communities than their counterparts who had never experienced a job loss due to layoff, downsizing or restructuring, or a business closing or relocating. Moreover, the exodus from community involvement continued not just through the spate of involuntary unemployment, but for the rest of the workers’ lives.
“Social engagement often involves an element of social trust and a sense that things are reciprocal — that you give some support if you get some support, and you benefit from society if society benefits from you,” said Brand, an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA. “When workers are displaced, the tendency is to feel as though the social contract has been violated, and we found that they are less likely to reciprocate.”
…”Workers can be displaced early in their career, and they’re still less likely to be participating at age 60 than their counterparts who have never been displaced,” Brand said. “It’s not like displaced workers rebound and return to involvement. Displacement seems to change their whole trajectory of participation.”
The effects are strongest on young people, and anecdotally I can relate to this. During a prolonged period of unemployment a few years ago, I also happened to be living in the suburbs. Gas prices weren’t what they are now, but I rationalized many other reasons why I shouldn’t bother to meet up with friends in the city. Too late, too many errands, too much else. I kept mainly to myself during those months.
Thinking back, I realize it was that I didn’t want to burden others with my frustration. Facing the inevitable questions discouraged me. How do you explain what you did all day, apart from sending resumes out? “Yeah, still looking.” Small talk is so much more aggravating without any positive news.
On that note, the recession might benefit soup and coffee manufacturers: lonely people crave warm drinks. Psychologists say “social exclusion literally feels cold.” It also appears that during a recession marriage rates go down — and divorce rates too. Fewer people relocate or take other kinds of risks. People want to stand still, where they are…with a hot beverage.
Images by Joshua Jensen-Nagle
This brief Scientific American article mentions books with “backward time” like Einstein’s Dreams, Time’s Arrow, and Slaughterhouse Five. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is going to make this sci-fi plotline huge. Maybe someone will finally film my favorite, Philip K Dick’s underrated Counterclock World.
Butterfly graffiti. Also, news on a graffiti alarm system: a “set of microphones attached to the surface is connected to a computer program that has been trained to distinguish background noise from the tell-tale signature of graffiti scratches…When the computer picks up signs of vandalism in action, it triggers an alarm to scare off the perpetrators and call the authorities to investigate.”
Wired on “Gandhi Pills,” University of Sheffield’s Sean Spence case for morality enhancing drugs. He believes drugs might “target and increase a prosocial feeling and behaviour such as ‘kindness.’”
Mapping Memories
South African artists Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter interviewed a number of Senegalese immigrants for their 2006 project UrbaNET: Hillbrow/Dakar/Hillbrow. Hillbrow, a poor neighborhood in Johannesburg is home to a number of Dakar expats. The artists asked the Senegalese immigrants to draw maps for them to use during their two-week residency in Dakar. From Rhizome:
Over the course of the residency, the artists documented their journey in photographs and video and even visited friends and relatives of the mapmakers. For the 2007 exhibition of their project at University of Johannesburg, Neustetter and Hobbs conducted a twenty-person walk from the campus, in Auckland Park, to a Congolese nightclub in Hillbrow, where the project was discussed by art-goers, neighborhood residents and the mapmakers. Neustetter and Hobbs’ project thus does not profess to establish any authoritative study of the respective cities it maps, but rather overlays remembrance, map-making, navigation and the documentary image to tell the specific tales of a group of immigrants and a broader story about home, migration and place.
If you Google around, you’ll see memory maps are often assigned in grade schools. I wish my teachers were that creative. There is a Memory Map Flickr pool and last year, Kottke made a list of a projects. Al
Fraken can draw the United States from memory, which makes one wish there 
were a quiz show/pictionary component to political debates.
Veering in a different direction, City of Memory compiles stories and anecdotes marked by contributors on a map of New York City. Next Great Thing suggests with a “mobile component, people could lifecast their past, in a way, letting place serve as a trigger for recollection.”
A great book about recollecting memory is Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. It’s a story about a man awarded millions in compensation after an accident. He constructs buildings and hires actors to act out the parts of a memory he remembers only slight details about, but keeps coming back to mind.
Nothing is more frustrating then realizing a memory isn’t coming back. And there’s not much you can do it about it. The more you revisit a memory the more you damage it. It gets tainted by present events and reanalysis.
Art by Kunie Sugiura.
The real life Doctor Manhattan. Think Artificial on how chemist Louis Alexander Slotin’s lethal exposure to the “radiation, equivalent of being 1500 meters away from a detonation of an atomic bomb” was possibly inspiration for Alan Moore’s famous Watchmen character.
Fascinating article from the Boston Globe on why “21st century bird-watchers - to say nothing of doctors or architects - still consult watercolors and gouaches for information” rather than photographs. Speaking of John James Audubon, the man responsible for “Birds of America,” writer Dushko Petrovich reminds us of something people learn in sketch classes: it’s not always what you draw but what you don’t. “Audubon preemptively limits the context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we know at a glance what’s important and what isn’t.” (Previously.)
Scientific American reminds us why many highly intelligent children do poorly later in life: they never need to put effort into their studies. “If the scholastic achievement of highly intelligent children remains below average for an extended period, many teachers will fail to recognize their potential. As a result, such students may not get the encouragement they need, further depressing their desire to learn. They may fall far behind in their schoolwork and even develop behavior problems. Boys may turn aggressive or become class clowns. Girls often develop performance anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms.” The trick for educators is to both challenge gifted students and reward persistence as well as excellence.
Our nervous systems are only equipped to conjure images in three dimensions. Yet Étienne Ghys of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France is creating videos to help people see in four. “How on earth can we visualize such a thing? Ghys and his colleagues begin by pointing out that our challenge in visualizing four dimensions is very similar to the one that would be faced by a perfectly flat creature who lived in two dimensions and tried to visualize three, like the inhabitants of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland or the lizards in the page in Escher’s Reptiles. A cube or a sphere would be nearly unimaginable for the two-dimensional lizards, since they are unable to rise out of the plane.” (via.) Maybe next they could make a movie out of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World.
“A brand is always a story well told,” a buyer at Henri Bendel tells the New York Times, in this story about a young Chicago woman who sought out the help of Michel Roudnitska — the Brian Eno of perfumers — to create a fragrance in memory of her grandmother, Ellie and Ellie Nuit. Also, NYC readers: Next Wedcnesday, the Secret Science Club hosts Dr. Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. Topics discussed: “Is love in the eye of the beholder—or in the schnoz? How do different animals detect smell? How do sweet and stinky scents influence behavior? And why does camembert cheese smell like heaven to some people and offal to others?”
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