January 08, 2018

From The Economist:

NatCen Social Research, an independent institute, has been surveying Britons’ attitudes to sex and marriage since the early 1980s. In almost every respect, it finds that people are becoming more liberal. In 2016, for example, 75% of Britons declared that premarital sex was not wrong at all, up from 42% in 1983. With each passing survey, fewer people say that couples who want children ought to marry first. But there is an important exception to this easy-going rule. All Britons, especially young ones, now take a more critical view of affairs. Marriage seems ever less necessary but also ever more inviolate.

From The Economist:

In the first quarter of 2017, 65% of top professional adults in Britain were married, according to the Labour Force Survey. For people in routine jobs the proportion was 44%, and for the unemployed and those who had never worked 40%. Among women with young children the social divide is even sharper. The Marriage Foundation, a charity, calculates that 87% of women in the highest-earning quintile with children under five are married, compared with only 24% in the lowest-earning quintile.

From NBER:

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv) a higher degree of positive assortative mating; (v) more children living with a single mother; (vi) shifts in social norms governing premarital sex and married women's roles in the workplace. Macroeconomic models explaining these aggregate trends are surveyed. The relentless flow of technological progress and its role in shaping family life are stressed.

From Harper's:

Donald Trump telephoned ­NASA astronauts in space. “That’s what we like, great American equipment that works,” he said.

From Psychological Science:

Air pollution is a serious problem that influences billions of people globally. Although the health and environmental costs of air pollution are well known, the present research investigates its ethical costs. We propose that air pollution can increase criminal and unethical behavior by increasing anxiety. Analyses of a nine-year panel of 9,360 U.S. cities found that air pollution predicted six different categories of crime; these analyses accounted for a comprehensive set of control variables (e.g., city and year fixed effects, population, law enforcement) and survived various robustness checks (e.g., non-parametric bootstrapped standard errors, balanced panel). Three subsequent experiments involving American and Indian participants established the causal effect of psychologically experiencing a polluted (vs. clean) environment on unethical behavior. Consistent with our theoretical perspective, anxiety mediated this effect. Air pollution not only corrupts people’s health, but also can contaminate their morality.