Faculty of Children and Health
Thomas Coram Research Unit
Dr Claire Cameron: Gender and caring work; early childhood services and the welfare state
Possible ESRC Studentship application in 2009 or 2010: Gender Issues in Early Childhood Care and Education Services
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) remains one of the most highly gendered fields of employment. Using reflective analytic techniques, based on viewing films made of nurseries in different countries, this study will investigate male and female workers’ understandings of practice in early childhood work and identify differences based on gender and gender identity as well as providing one way better to understand the implications of a gendered workforce for practice in early childhood care and education services. The study will also throw light on why so few men work in ECEC services, and why the situation is so resistant to change. The findings will inform the development of policies and practices that more effectively recruit male and female workers into early childhood services and retain them.
IOE researchers find that:
"Reading to the child every day and having a mother who thinks it is important to stimulate young children are positively associated with all cognitive outcomes and negatively with problem behaviour."
Children who were read to daily did better in the naming vocabulary cognitive test, which involved the children being shown a picture and asked to identify the object.
They also performed better in the foundation stage profiles and had higher behaviour scores.
Youngsters whose mothers thought it was important to talk to them and teach them the alphabet also did better than their peers in tests where children were shown a picture of an object and asked to identify a similar object among a number of other pictures, and when asked to reproduce patterns using coloured blocks.
These children also had better foundation stage profiles, whereas children who watch three or more hours of TV a day, on average, achieved lower scores on the tests
If programmes to encourage family literacy catch on with the working class, that will be good. But I wonder: will it mean that the children of the worst parents will be that much further behind? That is, could the most disadvantaged 5% find themselves even more polarised?
This would be an interesting question to pursue. How would I do it?
What about the economics of health literacy? The woman at UCLA expresses her parental paediatric health literacy improvement in terms of its savings in health care dollars, mostly through reduced emergency room visits. What are the key economic issues related to health literacy? Do we have an idea how much poor health literacy costs in the UK and EU? is there any way that I could research the economic side of health literacy, given my shaky educational foundations?
In terms of health, scientific, civic and possibly even financial (fiduciary?) literacy, it would be interesting to look at public understanding the economics of health care, for example opinions about and understanding of the role of NICE. To me, this does fall under the ambit of health literacy, particularly in terms of understanding that individual health is often a collective problem requiring collective solutions, sacrifices and -- most importantly -- negotiation.
As welfare states shift to healthcare models in which individuals are expected to make more choices, be better informed and do more self management of their own health care, individuals and families with poorer literacy, numeracy and/or health literacy skills at a particular disadvantage? If so, what are possible solutions and what are states attempting?
If I'm going to do a PhD -- and I am -- then I have to develop myself in a discipline. At my age and with my shady background, sociology is the leading and possibly the only contender. It's probably too late for psychology, and definitely too late for economics.
The need to develop myself and discipline has implications for where and what I study.
I wonder if the social practice (as opposed to skill) argument is even stronger for health literacy than for literacy itself. I suspect that it is. And that this would be an interesting research topic. How would I investigate it?
This looks interesting, but I certainly can't afford to pay to do it:
Measuring the level of health literacy in the UK and mapping its distribution geographically
Supervisors: Dr Joanne Protheroe and Professor Gill Rowlands
The National Primary Care Research & Development Centre invites applications for the following three-year PhD project. Applicants must have self-arranged funding as there is no financial support tied to the project. The anticipated composite tuition fee for this project is £3, 300p.a for UK/EU candidates.
The purpose of this study is to examine the current measures of Health Literacy available in the US and to develop a corresponding measure in England. This will then be used to examine distribution of Health Literacy in England.
Health literacy is ‘the capacity of an individual to obtain, interpret and understand basic health information and services in ways that are health enhancing’. Much of the research in health literacy has been conducted in the US and Canada. There is limited research on health literacy in the UK.
The initial objective of this project would be to develop a measure of health literacy which could then be retrospectively applied to a 2003 dataset of education, literacy and numeracy skills in England in a secondary analysis. This would then allow geographical mapping of levels of health literacy and comparisons could be made with deprivation scores, health outcomes and other geographically available data. This would result in important policy-relevant data to allow the development and prioritising of interventions designed to improve health literacy.
The successful applicant will be sited within the Self-Management Research Theme of the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre (NPCRDC). This is one of the four central research themes within the Centre. The proposed PhD would provide an excellent grounding for a future career in health services research.
Applications are welcomed from candidates holding, or expecting to obtain, a first or upper second-class honours degree in health sciences or a related subject. A Masters in an associated area and good grounding in quantitative research skills are desirable.
Formal applications should be submitted in the form of a CV and covering letter outlining suitability for the study to the School of Community Based Medicine Postgraduate Research Director Dr Peter Bower (peter.bower@manchester.ac.uk).
Contact details for two academic or professional referees should also be provided.
Deadline: There is no closing date for applications but as this project is due to commence ahead of October 2009 early expression of interest is advised. For further information on the project please contact Dr Joanne Protheroe at joanne.protheroe@manchester.ac.uk or
NPCRDC website
It would be extremely interesting to work with a children's hospital such as Great Ormond Street to better understand the impact of parental literacy and numeracy and health literacy levels on the care of children with chronic illnesses or disabilities. Key issues would be what challenges poor literacy skills do (and do not) give rise to, and, where challenges exist, how parents -- possibly working with their children, other family members or other parents of children with similar conditions -- negotiate them. It would also be very interesting to see what steps the health care system takes to assess and assist with literacy, numeracy and/or health literacy needs -- both at organisational/structural level (e.g. the hospital as an entity) and at individual level, e.g. nurses, doctors, etc. Are patient education materials developed with the input of low literacy families and/or children themselves? How much of a difference to improved efforts in this area make to patients and their families, both in terms of health and satisfaction with the service? And what are the economics of improved attention to family literacy and numeracy issues?
A great deal of current government health policy is predicated on the notion that improving health information or providing more health information to purportedly under informed citizens will improve their health behaviour. What is the evidence for this supposition? What is the evidence against it? What social and policy factors have contributed to the current government emphasis on information provision? Is the government overemphasising the power of information, for example by assuming that if underprivileged citizens have the same health (e.g. diet and exercise) information as more privileged citizens, their health behaviours will converge? Would governments have a greater impact on health by focusing on structural or systemic factors such as urban planning or national food policies that emphasised and subsidised the production and distribution of healthier foods, rather than, for instance, corn syrup? What social and political factors impel governments to focus on individual behaviour and choice rather than structural change? For example, the UK government has in recent years provided parents and children's with a great deal of information about the benefits of exercise and healthy diets -- yet childhood obesity rates continue to rise. Is the government taking the right approach? Are other viable approaches available to it?
These questions may be particularly significant given the rise of the obesogenic environment, not just in countries that have a recent tradition of unhealthy diets -- e.g. the US and UK -- but also in countries such as those of the Mediterranean that in the last decade have seen a rapid rise in unhealthy eating. A particularly interesting PhD project might be to compare the strengths, weaknesses, successes and failures of information-driven health (especially diet) behaviour campaigns in the UK, US and Spain, while also looking at the arguments and debates within each country.
If I researched this topic under the aegis of health literacy, my focus would have to be on the literacy/numeracy related aspects of information delivery, information seeking and/or avoiding, individuals' beliefs about the importance or lack of importance of health information in their lives, and governments' understanding of the role of information in motivating behaviour, especially among different social classes or family types. LSBU or UCL. Elsewhere?
If I researched it under the aegis of child health, my focus could be broader.
On a general level, it would be extremely interesting to research the relationship between information and behaviour. I think the current government understanding is based on the notion that if only you can help individuals ovecome their various information deficits, you can markedly change their behaviour is in ways that economically benefit the state and would purportedly benefit the individuals. I think this notion is very simplistic, and does not take into account societal Contexts and structures.
In this PhD project, I would re-write a patient information leaflet (or a patient information webpage) so the instructions in it were significantly easier to understand. Such an information leaflet would likely be targeted at patients with a chronic condition that requires understanding and adherence, for example, a leaflet explaining how to use a diabetes stick pen. Rewriting such a leaflet would draw on my experience writing patient education materials for low literacy adults in the United States, but would also require collaboration and ultimate sign off by medical professionals here in the UK before the new patient information leaflet could be trialled. Working with a hospital or primary care trust or other health agency, I would then trial this more user-friendly patient information leaflet in comparison with the original leaflet, preferably in a random control trial. A successful trial -- e.g. one in which revised PIL led to increased adherence or higher patient satisfaction with the medical service -- would be inherently beneficial and would point to the urgent need for patient information leaflets that took greater account of patients' literacy and numeracy levels. An unsuccessful trial -- e.g. one in which neither adherence nor satisfaction or any other key variable increased -- might point to weaknesses in the revised PIL, or might possibly highlight the complex challenges associated with increasing patient understanding, adherence and satisfaction, potentially highlighting shortcomings of information-centred approaches to improving patient outcomes. That is, it might provide evidence that improved health information does not necessarily improve health behaviours.
As a follow-up to my earlier post, here is an EPPI systematic map of reviews of research into preventing obesity, with a specific focus on childhood obesity. Again, however the emphasis appears to be on information rather than on structural changes. I know this is inevitable to a large degree: it's much easier to alter and experiment with information than it is to change the shape of a city.
We located 54 reviews of obesity-relevant research with a social and environmental focus, of which 32 were systematic reviews. Our results reflect the rapid recent growth in interest in this topic. Over half the reviews were published in 2004 or later.
Most of the reviews covered the population as a whole and did not have a specific focus on children or young people. The reviews covered a wide range of intervention types and settings. Some were focused on specific intervention strategies such as mass media campaigns, financial instruments or point-of-sale information. Some investigated multi-component interventions which integrated social and environmental change with education and strategies for individual behaviour change, in either school or community settings. A number of reviews included studies covering all of these areas.
Many reviews focused on studies which evaluated interventions which aimed to alter the social values attached to food and exercise, using, for example, education or social marketing techniques. We found few reviews which included studies evaluating large-scale structural changes to the physical environment or the availability or cost of food, exercise or sport.
I find this rather irritating.
Few people know and understand the �government's guidelines on healthy eating, smoking and drinking despite the millions of pounds spent on awareness campaigns, it emerged today.
Data from the annual Health Survey for England revealed that although obesity has nearly doubled in the last 14 years, two-thirds of men and women do not know the amount of exercise they should be taking. Only 27% of men and 31% of women eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.
Less than a third knew the maximum amount of alcohol they should drink a day, the report found. And only 14% of men and 11% of women could always correctly identify a portion of fruit or vegetables.
These sorts of "gotcha" surveys -- or more accurately, "gotcha" reporting of survey results -- add little to our understanding or to our ability to improve public health. The frame of reference in this type of reporting is one that postulates that health is mostly about individual knowledge and information, rather than decision-making and the environment's role in shaping behaviour. And it postulates that it's about having exactly the right knowledge, as opposed to having pretty good knowledge but living in an environment that encourages good (if unwitting) health behaviours.
I mean, exactly how much exercise should I be taking? I don't know. Is it 30 minutes a day, every day? would knowing the exact recommendation shape my behaviour? And look at the use of the word "always" in the final sentence of that quote. That suggests to me that most people get it mostly right most of the time, which does turn out to be the case, as the article later concedes. More importantly, the article also notes that "Despite their lack of knowledge of what the government recommends, people's consumption of fruit and vegetables and exercise levels have gone up."
To me, this is the most important bit. We don't have to make everyone in expert, or make them able to pass a pop quiz. What will work best is shifting society as a whole so that Cork trauma or is about diet and physical activity shift enmasse towards the good.
In a Times Educational Supplement article on England's excellent performance in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), I read the following boneheaded statement:
Timss appears to provide little evidence to support the view that cutting class sizes will raise test performance. The country with the best results in primary science, Singapore, also has the largest classes: 95% of pupils are in classes of more than 32.
I'm not sure, but is this the equivalent of saying that since you don't need to peel pears, you don't need to peel oranges? There are likely to be huge cultural differences in Singapore that eliminate many of the problems faced in western nations when we have large class sizes. The key variable is disobedience in the classroom: you can clearly get away with large class sizes absent significant disobedience, but when that variable is factored in the maximum acceptable number of students in the class must surely need to go down. So the Singapore number has little to say about our own questions about class size, given the inevitability of widespread disobedience in our classrooms.
Below, the text of a Department of Health tender on a programme to get families walking. What's interesting here is that this programme is specifically trying to alter behaviour without altering the social determinants of that behaviour, especially environment in the form of walkable cities. Though there may be other programs that are seeking to address the problem from that (structural) side.
The Department of Health requires a contractor to develop and deliver a pilot community-based walking project.
The outcome of the pilot is for there to be a sustainable increase in the number of children, young people and families walking as part of their daily lives and as a first choice mode of travel.
The work contributes towards Healthy Weight Healthy Lives ambition to get at least a third of England walking at least 1,000 more steps daily by 2012.
The Change4Life marketing programme is targeting 4.7 million families with children under the age of 11. With behaviours and attitudes being developed in formative years this is a key group in which to bring about change.
Proposals should:
Work may either be based on or build on an existing or new delivery structure but should, amongst other things, reinforce the wider health and well-being benefits of walking and walking briskly, demonstrate sustainability, consider how variations between rural and urban communities and consider any complementary work with adult walking programmes.
In related news:
Nearly one in four children are obese or overweight when they start primary school and one in three are too fat by the time they leave, according to official figures.
The new data from the government's national child measurement programme in schools showed there had been no progress since last year in reducing the numbers of overweight children and provoked calls for greater efforts to tackle the obesity epidemic in the young.
National Obesity Forum spokesman Tam Fry said: "We had high hopes that there would have been a marked improvement after all the money that is being thrown at the problem but it seems that more radical measures will be needed to reduce obesity levels."
But is this programme not working, at least somewhat? if the trend has been towards increased obesity, and that trend has been arrested, whether through this programme or through other means, then that counts as at least a draw, doesn't it?
On that note, I remember a friend of mine once complaining that even though she had started walking a lot, she hadn't lost any weight. She didn't seem to notice or appreciate the actual impact, which was that she had stopped gaining weight.
Matthew Norman, writing in the Independent:
Perhaps I do David Freud, architect of the White Paper on welfare reform, a disservice. Maybe, during all his years raising £50bn for the likes of Railtrack and EuroDisney, Mr Freud sat up night after night with the ProPlus, studying the issue until dawn broke over a lavish home far removed, we may guess, from the sink estates he claims he wants to salvage from workless despair.
And yet, by his own words, it seems not. "I didn't know anything about welfare when I started," he told The Daily Telegraph in February, "but that may have been an advantage... In a funny way, the solution was obvious." The special hilarity here, apart from the notion of any obvious answer to so ferociously complex a social conundrum, is how long he took to travel from absolute ignorance to omniscience.
Hired by the Works and Pensions Secretary James Purnell to address this small matter, it took him – wait for it now; just wait for it – three weeks to research and write his initial report. Admittedly by New Labour policy-creation standards, this is hardly a rush job. But by any more conventional measure, 21 days is on the brisk side for so monumental an intellectual challenge.
Still, let's not fall into that very trap by rushing to judge Mr Freud as a man prone to the lure of the simplistic. Indeed, writing in yesterday's Times, he touched impressively on the thinking behind the wizard wheeze of forcing long-term incapacity benefit claimants back to work. "Some of our greatest national heroes suffered from disabilities," he explained, "from Nelson with his lost eye to Churchill with his 'Black Dog' depression, to the physicist Stephen Hawking..."
If a straw man argument is when someone invents an easily tackled enemy that isn't actually there, what do you call it when someone completely ignores highly visible evidence that refutes their thesis? An 'ostrich man' argument?
Here's some dimwit in the Guardian writing a moany piece about how the Bourne Ultimatum has no strong characters, while almost completing ignoring Pamela Landy.
I mean, she actually asks the question 'why can't women in action movies ever do anything useful?' I won't spoil the film, but let it hereby be noted that 'doing something useful' pretty much sums up the Pam Landy character.
A well written article on the role of environment, architecture and work in shaping people's bodies. Nothing new here, but nicely put. However, the following assertion is overstated:
In forgetting to think about how our environment shapes us, it becomes easy to think that our food is made for us. The difficult truth is that, increasingly, capitalism makes us for our food.
No, capitalism does not 'make us for our food'. But it would be very fair to say that our food is not made for us, it is made for our lifestyles (and those are to a large degree made by capitalism).
Today's schmuck of the day club inductee is medical student Alex Thomas, who whines
The constant analysis of GPs' salaries is really starting to irritate me. If the public think it is such an easy ride being a GP, why aren't there more of them applying for the job themselves?
[...]
in addition to A grades in chemistry and biology, applicants may have to be able to discuss Proust or be almost fluent in Spanish or be able to quote extensively from Chaucer, in the original Middle English.
Does this sound easy so far?
Erm, do you sound like a twat so far, Mr Proust Discusser?
So irksome did I find Mr Thomas that I: a) launched the Schmuck of the day club; B) started blogging again; and C) overcame my usual lethargy and wrote a letter to the (Guardian) editor. Well done, Alex - just the cure! Here's that letter:
Let’s hope that medical student Alex Thomas ( Fancy becoming another one of those overpaid GPs?, 17 August) is better at reading patients’ symptoms than he is at plain old reading. In complaining that the public believes that GPs are overpaid and that their job is easy, he is erecting a straw man: the vast majority of the public don’t think being a GP is easy. We do, however, think they are getting a jammy deal. Just because a job is hard and demands great commitment doesn’t mean it should command a six-figure salary, particularly when nurses, whose job is at least as hard as a GPs, are so poorly remunerated.
New health advice:
The new guidelines say:
· 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day is still the minimum, but vigorous as opposed to moderate activity should be "explicitly" recommended
· Combining days of moderate exercise with other days of vigorous exercise is better for you
· Moderate exercise should be in addition to daily activities such as casual walking, shopping or taking out the rubbish
· People should do two weight-training sessions a week
I would imagine that this would help dissuade many people from bothering to do even moderate exercise, since they'll reason that it's not enough.
It'd be fun to do a PhD comparing the strengths and weaknesses of how America educates disaffected teens with how England does it.
Practice exam question: Explain why policy makers should invest more time in understanding processes internal to the family.
Hmm, can start here with Okin's notion of justice, and her contention that underlying all the inequalites specifically affecting women is the unequal distribution of unpaid labour in teh household. And Hobson's contention that the family is a site of great inequality, of a sort which doesn't mirror societal inequality. They should invest more time in understanding it because we have limited understanding of it - i'll discuss the theories of household bargaining that we have. But mainly they should invest more time in understanding it because, as feminist theorists observe, social policy is both shaped by and shaping of what goes on within the so-called black box of the family. And social policy understanding has always been skewed towards the public sphere, but as Hobson argues, the policy divide between public and private is arbitrary, ideological, and not gender neutral. Because women take on more of the caring duties within the family and tend to have weaker bargaining positions economically, policy which does not seek to peer into the black box is policy that tacitly supports, approves of and furthers the current gender gap.
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As taylor-Gooby has argued, the home is the site of the majority of
welfare in society. Why should it not be investigated and understood.Traditionally policy makers have been far more interested in the public domain than in the private world of the family. Reasons include the difficulty of forming policy that is meant to play out within the household as compared to in public institutions such as schools or workplaces (Waldfogel), as well as the notion that the public private divide is one that should not be crossed. Hobson argues that this notion is ideological and gendered. More importantly, though, have been tacit, gendered assumptions about unpaid labour and women's roles in teh household. In the early days fo the welfare state, those assumptions were not so tacit. Beveridge argued, eg, that women's role was in the home, enabling her husband to produce the labour on which the nation depended. Beveridge valourised this womanly role, calling it all important. However, Hobson points out that resources are distributed unfairly within families.
Current thinking, particularly by conservatives, often harkens back to Beverdige's day, particularly the idealised 1950s of the nuclear family and family wage. However, what is idealised is not necessarily just. For example, Allan Bloom in the US cites this model of the family - man as worker, woman as carer - as the ideal model. Sandel does as well, quoting Ruskin's view of the family as 'the place of peace' and the shelter from 'all terror, doubt and division'. This image of the family as a haven from the woes of the world is highly gendered: here males escape the slings and arrows of the public world - but are women faced with the slings and arrows of the private one? Hobson, like many feminist scholars, argues that the family is the site of great inequality for women, and finds that inequality for women does not mirror inequality in societies as a whole - that is, the two are separate functions, and must be studied separately. Within the household, she argues, it is essential to understand the role of voice and exit within the household. Hirschmann, coiner of the concept, felt that loyalty was the key component of intra-household bargaining, but feminist scholars have argued that without understanding the gendered weakness of voice and exit for women, we cannot understand ineuqality within the household. Okin argues that to understand the the ineuqality that women suffer from in the world, we must look into the black box of the family, because, as she says, all inequality specific to females springs from the unfair division of unpaid labour.
One of the first economists to peer into the black box of the family was Gary Becker, whose Treatise on the Family advanced the New Home Economics. Much like those who idealise the nuclear family of the 1950s, Becker's NHE postulated that the family was a single unit with shared interests, working together rationally to achieve shared aims. As Sen argues, Becker waved away conflict within the family. Instead, Becker substituted altruism on the part of the head of household (the male), and a shared utility function within it. Working from these assumptions, Becker argued that families are economically rational actors, which function best when the males and females specialise in different types of work: paid work in the public sphere for men, unpaid work in the private sphere for women.
Not surprisingly, many scholars have been extremely critical of the NHE. Bergman, pointing to Becker's "proof" that polygamous marriages were more beneficial to women than monogamous ones (the former showed better utility curves), called his theories preposterous. If becker was to be judged by teh simplicity of his theorem, he was a success, she said, but if he were to be judged by its capacity to actually explain the phenomenon it purported to explain, he was a completel failure. Worse than this, by arguing that fheads of household are inherently benevolent and that families are inherently good for everyone in them, Becker's message for policy was that intervention in the internal processes of the familly was at best misguided and at worst deleterious to welfare.
A more enlightening approach to intra-household dynamics can be found in cooperative bargaining models, such as that put forth by Nash. In these models, several improvements are made over the unitary or complementary model offered by the NHE. There is no single unitary utility function, instead, and more inkeeping with the real world, household members have different, often conflicting interests, despite their strong affection for each other. In order to deal with these conflicts, each household member has bargaining power, which is shaped by their access to external resources. When in conflict, the key is each household member's threat point or fallback position - that is, their estimation of the utility or quality of life they will have if cooperation breaks down. In effect, it is their estimation of the outcome of exit. For example, a mother might judge that it is better to stay in an unhappy relationship because she knows that divorce tends to financially penalise women; a father, knowing that divorce tends to result in a better economic position for men, might have a different fallback position. On the other hand, the father's desire to not lose his children will affect his fallback position. While Nash's framework was better than Becker's it lacked dynamism, something that has been added later via an understanding of the first mover advantage: that is, decisions made now can affect the later decision-making process. For example, by discouraging his wife from working, a husband can reduce her chance of working in the future, giving him greater bargaining power within the relationship. Cooperative bargaining models also benefited from understanding that conflict can exist within collusion: cooperative solutions may be more beneficial to one player than the other.
While cooperative bargaining models utilise players' estimations of the results of exit, they make the mistake of assuming that each player has equal power of exit. As Sen argues, this is often not hte case: there is assymetry of exit, and thus assymetry of voice. This can come about through a variety of reasons, eg internalised beliefs by women that they should put first not their own well-being, but the well-being of children or husband. As one example, it has been found that in low income households where the woman controls the money, she tends to ensure that her male partner gets more of it than she does; the reverse is not true when the male controls it. Sen argues that self-interest is often socially determined, and that there are perceived interest responses and perceived contribution responses: that is, when there is collusion, if one perceives one's own self-interest as less important than that of others, one is likely to benefit less from the cooperative solution. With perceived contribution, the person perceived to make the biggest contribution is likely to get the best cooperative result. Perceived self-interest is a highly gendered issue, as women are socialised to put others' needs before their own. Sen discusses India, but this is also the case in, eg, the US, where Douglas documents the rise of the New Mom-ism: an attempt to valourise women's role as a carer first and an individual second.
Katz argues that non-cooperative bargaining models give a stronger understanding of household power dynamics than any other. These models take account of assymetry of information within the relationship, as well as enforcement problems and inefficiency. With regard to enforcement problems, an excellent examples can be found in Hichschild's Second Shift, where workign mother after working mothers complains that they feel forced to nag their husbands into contributing equally to unpaid labour, but this is a form of enforcement that is both uneffective and highly unpleasant for both parties. With regard to efficiency, Becker assumed that household decisions were inevitably based on maximising overal utility, but there is extensive evidence of the willingness to reduce household efficiency in order to maximise individual power. The most common example would be when a husband discourages or refuses to allow his wife to work, despite need for the money. Another example might be in terms of care, when mothers refuse to allow fathers to help as much as they would like, in an effort to maintain a "caring superiority" or stronger relationship with the child.
These means of looking at economic processes internal to the family give us varying degrees of insight into household dynamics, and it is only by understanding such dynamics that we can get a fuller picture of welfare as a whole, particularly for women. Hobson, for instance, argues that women's economic dependence within the family is key to perpetuating the weak bargaining position of women in the paid labour market. Hobson finds that decision making wiht families is linked to earning power outside of it, and notes that woman's breadwinner status is correlated wtih better houshold division of labour. The household must thus be seen not as a unitary body but as a site of negotiation, in which econoimc power and gender play key roles. And whereas for Hirschmann the family was like a merger of two firms, Hobson points out that it tends to be the merger of two firms of markedly different levels of power. Hobson's analysis of economic dependency with the household can shed new light on inequality. For example, she finds that in Germany and the Netherlands, states with relatively low inequality, inequality between men and women within households is high. As "women's economic dependency within the family is both directly and indirectly built into social policy in welfare states", it is only through understanding that dependency within the household that we can improve the welfare of women.
UPDATE: While my criticism of Blythman's article focused on the idiocy of her belief that public health policy can be based on middle class behaviour and assumptions, the article also deserved a right royal bollocking for its dodgy use of research. Adopting the faux objectivity characteristic of so much of the American press, it pretended to present two sides of the story by: A) offering accepted scientific evidence, then B) providing oppositional critiques of the mainstream science. See the trick here? It presents two sides of teh argument, but only lets one side critique the other. Thankfully, wiser men than me have called her on it. The best bit is the second letter, which points out that one of her key critics of putting folic acid in bread runs an online health food shop that sells - you guessed it - folic acid. Joanna, you got played.
This is one of the most egregious, up its own ass articles I've ever read. Joanna Blythman's normally pretty good, but in this piece she seems to be willfully myopic about the ways that socio-economic realities and the diets of the poor. Eg, she quotes, approvingly, this guy:
"It is noticeable that the FSA isn't proposing adding it to wholemeal bread because it already contains it. Why doesn't the FSA just tell people to eat more wholemeal bread?"
Um, because that wouldn't work, especially not with the mums who need this. (Hint: they don't have the same approach to food as you.)
Ok, that's one stupid question answered; how about another one?
The other main objection is that fortification is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The estimate is that adding folic acid to bread will save 120 babies in the UK every year from spina bifida, but for every baby saved, half a million people, male and female, will have to take the added folic acid. "Why not target potential young mothers rather than mass-supplementing the population at large ?" asks Holford.
Hey, toughie! How about 'Because the young mothers who need this don't respond to government messages on health and diet?' You do; they don't - wishing ain't gonna change that. Or maybe the poor all quit smoking when I wasn't looking.
Pathetic.
Via Ezra Klein, here's an american example of the genre, in which well-off journalists who work from home bash those who don't make the time to cook proper meals after a 10-hour day.
The very good Mike Baker of the BBC writes:
As Blair departs, many will hope for an end to "initiative-itis" and policy overload. No more targets. No more bully-pulpit politics. No more "modernising" of the comprehensives. But they will be disappointed. Gordon Brown is just as fond of targets. He will insist on a something-for-something return for every extra pound that goes to education.
In a recent interview, he told me education would be "my passion ... my priority". The big question for Brown is: why, after so much more investment, do teachers, lecturers and parents still feel dissatisfied?
I think Julian Le Grand's "knights and knaves" work answers that final question.
At least once a week now, the Guardian has a column bemoaning the cruelty and arrogance of atheists, and the dire lot of the religious in this country. For example, Madeline Bunting recently railed against outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins.
Don't get me wrong, I think Dawkins is a bore. But when they criticism him and his anti-religion ilk, Bunting and the burgeoning religious crew writing inthe Guardian appear to operate under the fallacy that it's only the anti-religious lot who are attempting to impose their values, and that religion is a poor bullied weakling. Tell that to the gays, Madeline (famous apologist for homophobic Muslim clerics). And tell that to the 17-year-old girl in Ireland who the religious crew is trying to force to stay in Ireland and bring her baby to term, rather than go to England for a termination, even though the baby has no head, and is guaranteed to die within three days of birth. And tell it, Madeline, to the UK women unfortunate enough to have as a doctor one of the 40% of GPs who say they would refuse to refer a woman on for an abortion, on 'moral grounds'.
Religion has been imposing itself on the rest of us for thousands and thousands of years. Just because in a relatively enlightened country such as the UK it has less power to do so than before, doesn't mean it still isn't doing it all the time, and still trying to do it even more. Just because you take this for granted, Maddy, doesn't mean it isnt' happening. So enough with this silly notion that religion is the victim because a handful of verbal atheists are giving it a heckling. It's been bullying us for years, and isn't going to stop until we force it to.
Earlier today I posted a John Quiggin bit to delicious - I thought it was a great piece of political analysis. Yglesias agrees:
John Quiggen makes an important point. An awful lot of the recent changes in American history can be understood as efforts to graft a proper two-party dynamic onto a country that thanks to both an unusual institutional set-up and the legacy of the Civil War and Jim Crow didn't really have one. The rise of the "New Right" essentially turned the GOP into one half of a two-party system, at which point it became devastatingly effective because the opposition was still behaving like one half of the old, more fluid system. Much recent progressive activism has centered around trying to turn the Democrats into "the other party" of a two-party system.
A Kenan Malik-led talk on childcare in the early years.
Lovely guide on how to set up a regularly updating online collection of different types of feeds, aggregating info in fields you're interested in. I'll definitely do something like this for adult ed.
What does it mean to be so rich that it's almost literally impossible to spend your wealth faster than the interest accrues on it? Via Ezra:
They're just not like you and me -- they're so very much richer:
Mr. Ellison’s net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16 billion and a 10 percent rate of return, Mr. Ellison would need to spend more than $30 million a week simply to keep from accumulating more money than he already has, to say nothing of trying to spend down the $16 billion itself.
He spent something like $100 million on his Japanese-style mansion in Woodside, Calif., making it among the more expensive private residences ever built. But that is only about three weeks worth of the interest he earns on his wealth. And a house doesn’t actually spend down his net worth because it is an asset that can be resold. At least part of the $100 million is just a different way of saving.
Mr. Ellison would have to spend that $30 million a week — $183,000 an hour — on things that can’t be resold, like parties or meals, just to avoid increasing his wealth.
This article has some fairly shocking information. For instance, and here I quote Ezra quoting the author:
"only 4 percent of the richest Americans said that providing an inheritance ranked in their top five reasons for saving." Weirder yet, "the data shows that elderly super-rich people who do not have children save just as much as the ones who do."
So why do the super-rich hoard their wealth? Status, power and greed, basically.
Some economists have dived into the question, and their hypotheses basically boil down to greed. "[The superrich] get something different from having money — clout, power, the ability to dominate an industry. Or perhaps these are just competitive people who care about their position compared with other people on the list." Maybe so. Or maybe this is just humankind's innate loss aversion -- our tendency to irrationally avoid loss even more than we court gain -- at work.
Can you imagine how much good all that money could do? And how much better off countries would be if people with this much money didn't spend so much time fighting for lower taxes?
And they're good enough for today's kids, too. Hi-tech 'educational' toys offer nothing that parental interaction doesn't, according to research.
A government-funded study examining the role of technology in the lives of three- and four-year-old children and their families found that the hi-tech devices - one of the fastest growing sectors of the toy market, aimed at infants as young as nine months - are no more effective than traditional ways of introducing basic literacy and number skills.
Toy laptops and mobile phones were of greater value to young children as an aid to imaginative play such as pretending to make phone calls than in teaching specific skills, researchers at the University of Stirling concluded after tracking families for 15 months.
Youngsters also gained an understanding of the social role of technology simply by watching their parents use computers, digital cameras and mobile phones for work and leisure - far outstripping the benefits of using computers for unrealistic exercises and games while at nursery.
[....]
Lydia Plowman, professor of education at Stirling University, said parents interviewed experienced "a lot of anxiety" about the role of new technology, and felt under pressure from manufacturers to buy educational electronic toys such as Leappads and games consoles.
Professor Plowman, announcing her research yesterday at a conference, Happy Families?, hosted by the Family and Parenting Institute, said such toys were neither harmful nor "particularly beneficial".
She said: "I don't think there is any problem about children having these toys at home, but in terms of basic literacy and number skills I don't think they are more efficient than the more traditional approaches."
Mark Kleiman discusses the role of teacher unions in determining the quality of schools (research verditc: somewhat helpful). The unfoggedetariat discusses.