(studyBE) Inclusive Cities; First 100 Days of K-12; "Sociophysics" Predicts 2020
A quick selection of recent research B|E Note editors think you should read ...
Publisher’s Notes
Special insights heard daily at #RealityCheck on WURD every Mon - Thur, 10am - 1pm ET LIVE at wurdradio.com or facebook.com/forwurd (10.20.20 edition)
“Which Cities Became More (and Less) Racially and Economically Inclusive over the Past Few Years?” Read more …
A few years ago, we explored how 274 of the largest US cities ranked on racial, economic, and overall inclusion across four decades. We defined inclusion as the opportunity for all residents to contribute to and benefit from economic prosperity. Journalists, advocates, city leaders, and practitioners then used our data feature and report to reflect upon their policies and programs and to hold leaders accountable to inclusion goals.
To help cities continue advancing inclusion, particularly during the pandemic, which is highlighting the already-wide disparities in these very indicators of inclusion, we updated the feature to evaluate inclusion in the same cities in 2016. Using these data, we found that many cities improved on inclusion since 2013, but some worsened.
“Costly and Unavailable: America Lacks Sufficient Child Care Supply for Infants and Toddlers” Read more …
The United States was facing a child care crisis before the pandemic began, but the ongoing health and economic impacts of the coronavirus have brought the child care industry to the brink of collapse. This situation is especially dire for infant and toddler child care, which is costly to provide and expensive for families.
While the prevalence of child care deserts—areas in which licensed child care supply is far short of the population of children—is becoming more widely understood, analyzing child care supply by grouping together all children younger than 5 does not tell the whole story.6 The United States’ licensed child care shortage is driven in large part by the lack of options for families of infants and toddlers.
When child care is unavailable, employment declines for mothers. While 77 percent of mothers who do not find child care are employed, that figure jumps to 89 percent for mothers who do find child care.25 Parents of infants and toddlers are more likely than mothers of older children to report problems accessing child care or a “lack of available slots” being the main child care problem that they encounter.26 Furthermore, 2 million Americans make job sacrifices every year due to problems with child care, and those who do are disproportionately people of color.27
“Will Trump win again in the 2020 election? An answer from a sociophysics model” Read more …
In 2016, Trump was unanimously seen as the loser in the November 8 election. In contrast,using a model of opinion dynamics I have been developing for a few decades within the framework of sociophysics, I predicted his victory against all odds.
According to the model, the winning paradoxical martingale of 2016 has been Trump’s capability to activate frozen prejudices in many voters by provoking their real indignation. However, four years later, Trump’s “shocking” outings do not shock anymore, they became devitalized, losing their ability to generate major emotional reactions. Does this mean that this time around he will lose the 2020 election to Biden, as nearly all analysts, pundits and commentators still predict? No, because although frozen prejudices will remain frozen, this time the spontaneously activated prejudices are benefiting to both Biden and Trump. The main ones are the fear of the other candidate’s policy and the personal stand facing a danger. In addition, since the Trump presidency has polarized a large part of American voters into narrow-minded anti-Trump and narrow-minded pro-Trump, those I designate in my model as inflexibles, will also drive the dynamics. Both effects, prejudices and inflexibles can either compete or cooperate making their combination within each state, to determine the faith of the state election. Tiny differences can make the outcome. Based on my rough estimates of associated proportions of inflexibles and prejudices, the model predicts a Trump victory in the 2020 November election.
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