How loneliness kills

Flickr/cc/ewixx

Judith Shulevitz, in the May 13, 2013 New Republic has an interesting read “The Lethality of Loneliness.”

Excerpt:

“Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people….

“To the degree that loneliness has been treated as a matter of public concern in the past, it has generally been seen as a social problem—the product of an excessively conformist culture or of a breakdown in social norms. Nowadays, though, loneliness is a public health crisis. The standard U.S. questionnaire, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, asks 20 questions that run variations on the theme of closeness—“How often do you feel close to people?” and so on. As many as 30 percent of Americans don’t feel close to people at a given time….

“What He [God] wanted is for us not to be alone. Or rather, natural selection favored people who needed people. Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals, even most primates, and to develop what neuroscientists call our social brain, we had to be good at cooperating. To raise our children, with their slow-maturing cerebral cortexes, we needed help from the tribe. To stoke the fires that cooked the meat that gave us the protein that sustained our calorically greedy gray matter, we had to organize night watches. But compared with our predators, we were small and weak. They came after us with swift strides. We ran in a comparative waddle.

“So what would happen if one of us wandered off from her little band, or got kicked out of it because she’d slacked off or been caught stealing? She’d find herself alone on the savanna, a fine treat for a bunch of lions. She’d be exposed to attacks from marauders. If her nervous system went into overdrive at perceiving her isolation, well, that would have just sent her scurrying home. [John] Cacioppo thinks we’re hardwired to find life unpleasant outside the safety of trusted friends and family, just as we’re pre-programmed to find certain foods disgusting. “Why do you think you are ten thousand times more sensitive to foods that are bitter than to foods that are sweet?” Cacioppo asked me. “Because bitter’s dangerous!”

The article, well worth a read, discusses issues like that only about half of loneliness is hereditary, what areas of the brain light up when we are socially snubbed (the same portion that registers physical pain, i.e., the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex), what has been learned about the impact of the absence of loving parents on loneliness from the isolating experience of Russian orphans; and how Nobelist James Heckman is finding that many low SES children bear loneliness scars from poor parenting growing up (that is akin to the impact found by Steve Suomi and Harry Harlow on isolated rhesus macaques).

See other posts about the negative health effects and contagion of  loneliness and social isolation here.

State of economy for less-educated young people compounds growing Opportunity Gap

Pell City 2007 HS graduation; Flick/kwsanders

While parts of the economy have rebounded since the Great Recession of 2008, the effects have been much worse for the poor, and especially the less-educated young Americans, and those not fortunate enough to graduate from college.

Since 2008, the housing market has started to bounce back.

The stock market, for those fortunate enough to have net savings rather than a negative net worth has more than recovered its recessionary losses (pictured is the S&P500 index).

The economy has created 6.15 million jobs from March 2010 through April 2013 (based on provisional numbers for March/April 2013), enough to lower unemployment but only through many people giving up on finding jobs.  The  percentage of Americans employed in the population hasn’t budged over the last 3.5 years and remains fixed at between 58% and 59%. Larry Summers thinks that the numbers of long-term unemployed is the biggest problem facing this country and is at historically unprecedented in the period since the Great Recession of the 1920s and 1930s.

Put this together with the data that David Leonardt released (“The Idled Young Americans“) showing that the impact has disproportionately fallen on young folks.  Moreover, levels of employment among 16-24 year olds, even as recent as May 2013 remain stubbornly at 45%, at levels not seen in the US since the early 1960s.

Our own research on the fact that children born to less educated families are facing a growing opportunity gap.  American young adults from the bottom socioeconomic quarter are graduating from high school or dropping out with less of the hard academic skills or soft non-cognitive skills necessary for life success.  [We find significantly growing gaps between children from the top third or quarter of socioeconomic families and the bottom third or quarter on measures as diverse as involvement in extra-curriculars, involvement in sports, K-12 test scores, obesity, social trust, involvement with religion, social connectedness, volunteering, college attendance, and college completion.]

And the intersection of these two trends — consequences of the current lackluster economy being borne by the young adults and the growing opportunity gap — means that these gaps are borne disproportionately by less educated young adults.

For example, if one looks at employment to population ratios for 25-34 year olds in 2012, it was only 69.8% for those with a high-school degree (but no college), whereas it was 84.4% for those with 4-year college degrees or more.  Another way of putting this is that only 16% of college-educated 25-34 year olds were out of the labor market versus 30% of those with only a high school degree.

And if that were not enough, there is growing body of literature suggesting that experiences of unemployment or involuntarily being terminated from jobs create long-term scarring effects both on the lifetime earnings of these young people, but also their civic and social connectedness throughout their lives.  [See for example Davis/von Wachter or Gregg/Tominey or Brand/Burgard.]

[There is also unpublished data on this scarring effect in: Laurence, James, and Chaeyoon Lim. “The Long-Term and Deepening Scars of Job  Displacement on Civic Participation over the Life-course: A Cross-National Comparative  Study between the UK and the US.”]

We are brewing a recipe for long-term adverse consequences for these young Americans, especially the less educated ones, and our government ought to be POUND-wise, even if it is “PENNY-foolish” in the eyes of others and invest in jobs for these young 16-25 year olds to avoid the much longer long-term adverse effects.

Altruism the key to worker productivity and advancement?

The New York Times Sunday magazine (3/31/13) has an interesting long read by Susan Dominus “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” focusing on research by Wharton (U. Penn) workplace organization psychologist Adam Grant who believes, originally based on personal experience and later supported by hard-headed quant studies that altruism both motivates workers to work harder and helps them to advance.

Snippet:

“For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a time-sapping diversion from the actual work at hand; it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity. In some sense, he has built a career in professional motivation by trying to unpack the puzzle of his own success. He has always helped; he has always been productive. How, he has wondered for most of his professional life, does the interplay of those two factors work for everyone else?

“Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.”

At a university call center, Grant tried reinforcing the ties to needy students to motivate callers and tested its effectiveness.  He found in 6 repeated tests that even a 5 minute speech by a scholarship recipient now working for Teach for America and testifying how the scholarship had changed his life, on average meant that even a month later fundraisers spent 2.5x as much time on the phone, nearly doubled the number of calls made per hour, and average caller brought in 5x as much money per week.  These results were achieved even though workers used the same script and consciously discounted the impact of the student’s talk.   He and others have found other productivity benefits from “gratitude journals” or “thank you notes.”

“Over the years, Grant has followed up that study with other experiments testing his theories about prosocial motivation — the desire to help others, independent of easily foreseeable payback. In one study, Grant put up two different signs at hand-washing stations in a hospital. One reminded doctors and nurses, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases”; another read, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.” Grant measured the amount of soap used at each station. Doctors and nurses at the station where the sign referred to their patients used 45 percent more soap or hand sanitizer.”

Grant in his forthcoming book divides the world of workers “divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders.”

Grant says that the key to successful givers is being strategic about doing nice things for others — what he calls the “5 minute favor” and asking if you can add unique value to the person requesting your time, and if not, strategically connecting the asker with other givers or with matchers for whom you have done past favors.  One can easily imagine that if one is strategic about doing favors for others, social capital theory would suggest that one builds up an informal “favor bank” that as the askers move up in the world, put you in a much stronger position to request favors of others.  It increases his pool of willing collaborators and puts him in a larger web of information flows in an era where expertise and knowledge is often distributed.  It is interesting that the motivation for Grant at least in being a giver is not at all about advancement — for him it is the key to doing what he can to conquer mortality.  He endorses William James’ view that  ‘The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.’

Grant also notes that takers succeed in the short-term but don’t do as well over the long-term perhaps because others use online social networks to punish takers [see e.g., Matthew Feinberg, Joey T. Cheng and Robb Willer, "Gossip as an Effective and Low-Cost Form of Punishment", Behavioral and Brain Science 25(1), Feb 2012.]

He talks about his experience with the University of Michigan fundraising call center about 4 minutes into the following video. One person had a depressing sign on his desk saying “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit.  You get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”:

I wonder whether his strategy is equally effective for all social strata. Jean Rhodes and others found that post-Katrina low SES survivors  who were more connected with others suffered mental health losses in short-term because all their friends were making demands of them [discussed towards bottom of this blog post].  The workers, like Adam Grant, himself may be less surrounded by needy individuals and more likely to be providing favors to students who will go on to higher stations in life, but very interesting food for thought…

Read Susan Dominus “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?“

Read Adam Grant’s new book, “Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success” (April 2013)

Macolm Gladwell: Goliaths beware?

Malcolm Gladwell’s next book will be  David and Goliath (2013, Little Brown).

I haven’t read the book yet, but he wrote a related article in the New Yorker entitled “How David Beats Goliath” detailing that Davids (underdogs) win a surprising 1/3 of the time against much stronger Goliaths.  The article highlighted a poorly-trained California girls’ basketball team who reached the state finals through unconventional  defense like the press. [The article generated some controversy with Gladwell responding to some concerns about Rick Pitino.] Gladwell might have, but didn’t discuss Grinnell Basketball’s innovative strategy to take on better teams of running all out, “run and gun” and substituting in new players every 5 minutes so the team was always fresh.

In an interview with New Yorker’s, Nicholas Thompson in Canada in October 2012, he noted that “Traits that we consider to be disadvantages aren’t disadvantages at all. … As a society, we depend on damaged people far more than we realize. … They’re capable of things the rest of us can’t do [because] they look at things in different ways.”

One key factor in underdog’s success (in business or in life) is employing disruptive strategies that exploit their stronger opponent’s weaknesses. They often move quickly, lay low, channel the opponent’s energy against him or herself, or figure out dimensions along which their Goliath opponent will be slow to change.   [Looks like it might help reprise some of the theories of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.]

He focuses on events like Americans and Soviets losing to Afghanistan. the Americans losing to the Viet Cong, or Steve Jobs vaulting out of nowhere and overtaking wealthy Xerox.  Or Cezanne, who originally was a “failed painter” but comes from behind.  His book relates a bit to Randy Pausch’s advice that barriers are not put up to keep people from their goals but to separate out those who really want something from those who don’t.  [He might also have added to his list the success of the American minutemen in defeating the much better trained and funded British troops through a combination of knowing the terrain, early guerrilla warfare [hiding behind trees and rocks], wearing camouflage rather than bright red uniforms, etc.]

His mantra is embodied in the bible:

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [Ecclesiastes 9:11]

He believes that Americans shouldn’t focus on getting into the best colleges.  [More on that when books comes out, although maybe he's generalizing from his rise to stardom from a degree from University of Toronto's Trinity College...]

I haven’t read the book yet, but his book flies in the face of our research that suggests that over the last several decades, there is far less equality of opportunity in America than earlier.   These low-income “underdogs” seem to be far less likely to break out of  the low-education of the families they are born into than Gladwell’s optimistic statistics seem to assert.  Look forward to reading the book…

Here’s an interview of Gladwell with CBC’s Terry MacLeod.

Click here for interview with New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson on Underdogs.

For more on Outliers, his last book, click here.

Media Mis-colors American Poverty, Undermining Response

Flickr/everyday@adventures

We’re at work on a project chronicling that since the early 1990s American working-class youth face declining chances of equal opportunity .

We were thus intrigued by a 8/20/12 PBS NewsHour story – “In Rhode Island, Reinventing Summer School to Prevent Kids’ Learning Loss” — concerning efforts to combat summertime achievement gaps.

But the visuals were highly troubling. While the intro to the story correctly reported that this was about poverty, not race, the pictures were virtually all of African American kids, giving the impression that most if not all of the poor in America are black.

We brought this to their attention and the education correspondent for the NewsHour, John Merrow. [He graciously admitted that the story could have been edited better and his take on the whole episode is on his “Learning Matters” blog.]

There are three things worth amplifying beyond Merrow’s blog post:

1)      Just how off Americans (including well-educated Americans) are on the colors of poverty;

2) how the continued misportrayal of American poor as “non-white” helps continue the trope of poverty equaling race  and makes poor whites more invisible; and

3)  How mis-coloring “poverty” undermines a public response to the problem.

Point #1: The national expert on this issue is Princeton scholar Martin Gilens.  Here is Gilens’ summary of his findings in a landmark 1996 article (cited below):

 Over the past decades, the black urban poor have come to dominate public images of poverty. Surveys show that the American public dramatically exaggerates the proportion of African Americans among the poor and that such misperceptions are associated with greater opposition to welfare. In this article I examine the relationship between news media portrayals and public images of poverty. I find that network TV news and weekly newsmagazines portray the poor as substantially more black than is really the case.

More recent studies have fully confirmed Gilens’ original findings.  In fact, according to a 2000 CBS News poll, only 18% of Americans know that most poor people are white!

Moreover, our own analysis suggests that the misperception may be slightly greater among college-educated whites than among less educated whites, perhaps because the less-educated whites are actually more likely to know poor folks.

Well-educated whites (college graduates) think blacks make up over half of folks on poverty!  (According to the 1991 National Race and Politics Survey).

The right number?  Blacks comprise only 23% of folks in poverty in the US (according to 2010 Census estimates, Table 4 in the above link).

Point #2:  The invisibility of the poor whites in media accounts and hence (according to Gilens) in the resulting public image of American poverty hurts poor whites (by undermining any potential impetus to respond to their plight) and perpetuates the trope that poverty equals poor non-whites.  Politicians and concerned citizens can’t effectively talk about and think about responding to the problem of American poverty if they can’t picture what American poverty looks like.

Point #3: The progressive NewsHour surely aims to encourage viewers to take policy or direct action to thwart the poverty-based educational gaps the story describes. Ironically, Gilens’ book shows in great detail that support for help to the poor is dramatically undermined by this media distortion in who is poor.  Namely, the fact that Americans misperceive that most of the American poor are black, makes them less inclined to respond. With visuals that accurately show the whiteness of poverty in America, media outlets could help overcome this crucial, irrational impediment to effective action against class disadvantage in America.

For more detail on Gilens’ findings, see:

-  Martin Gilens, “Race and Poverty in America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media,” Public Opinion Quarterly (1996) 60:515-541

- Martin Gillen’s 1999 book Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy. University of Chicago Press.

More recent citations: van Doorn, Bas W. “Media Portrayals of Poverty and Race in Pre- and Post-Welfare Reform America.” Portland, OR: Western Political Science Association Annual Meetings, 2012.

Clawson, Rosalee A., and Rakyua Trice. 2000. “Poverty as We Know It – Media Portrayals of the Poor.” Public Opinion Quarterly 64(1), no. 1: 53-64.

See NewsHour story “In Rhode Island, Reinventing Summer School to Prevent Kids’ Learning Loss”  [Note:  the NewsHour has vowed to repost video that attempts to correct their incorrect portrayal so what you see may not be the original version that aired, but instead their attempt to correct the original misrepresentation of American poverty.]

White achievement gap by class exceeds black-white gap

White class gap in math test scores as great now as black-white gap in the racial backwater prior to Brown vs. Board of Ed.

The New York Times had a powerful and alarming story today “Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show“.

One thing that the story didn’t point out is that the class gaps even just within non-Hispanic whites are growing and this also exceeds the black-white test score gap.  I’ve appended a chart showing the within whites 90/10 math scores over time [comparing the math scores of a white child in a family earning $160,000 to the math scores over time of a white child in a family earning $17,500 in 2008].  [This is from an Appendix to Sean Reardon's paper, Figure 5.A2.]

The first graph shows that by 2000, the within white class gap (90/10) ratio has now risen to almost 1.25. It started rising with the birth cohort born around 1972, or in other words high school seniors around 1990.  This white class gap has risen about 65% from 0.75 in the early 1970s to almost 1.25 by 2000.   Reardon notes that 1.0 on this scale is about the difference in math between a 5th grader and an 8th grader.  So the white class gap is probably nearing the difference between an average 5th grader and a 9th grader.  [Interestingly, the white class gaps for math are greater than the class gaps within Blacks or Hispanics, probably because the wealth gap between the 90th and 10th percentiles for whites are wider than the similar wealth gap among Hispanics or Blacks.]

The second graph solid line shows whites and non-whites together but the dotted line on the second chart (the black-white racial gap) has been almost halved over the last 60 years from about 1.2, dropping to around 0.65 by 2000 (about the difference between a 5th grader and a 7th grader).

So even if you take race completely out of the equation, the class gap in math (and reading scores) within whites is almost DOUBLE the racial gap along these same measures and upper class whites are about 2 grade levels ahead compared to the black-white gap.  And the within white class gap in math test scores is about as great as the black-white test score gap in math was in the racial backwater leading up to Brown vs. Board of Education when the Supreme Court recognized that racially separate schools were inherently unequal.

The conclusion is that our focus on racial inequality in education has been important in halving these differences, but in an era of deindustrialization of America and the decline of good-paying high-school education jobs, we need to be paying as great attention to class gaps in math and English achievement if we hope to have vibrant social mobility in the decades ahead for the white working and lower middle class.

See somewhat related strong Op-Ed by Nick Kristof “The White Underclass” (2/9/12) (acknowledging some of the social truth of the cultural and family collapse of the white working class as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart does, while also identifying the much larger structural changes taking place as well which Murray does not).

See earlier blog post on social mobility in America.

City-wide social capital building efforts [UPDATED 3/2/12]

Connector Project

People frequently ask me of examples of city-wide efforts to build social capital.  The are several examples in Better Together of Tupelo, MS and what Portland did with city boundaries. Beyond this, Seattle had an interesting program called the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ Neighborhood Matching Fund (that provided mini-grants for neighborhood improvement efforts where residents provided matching sweat equity), Minneapolis’ Neighborhood Revitalization Program (where city power was devolved to local neighborhoods to set priorities), and the interesting Front Porch Alliance under Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith (which has not been as vigorously advocated in subsequent administrations).

NYC Service

I’m aware of several more contemporary examples:  NYC Service (and the Cities of Service effort to replicate this), Philadelphia’s Connector Program, and Social Capital, Inc.

NYC Service

Inspired by President Obama’s call for a new era of service, Mayor Bloomberg in his January 2009 State of the City address announced that New York City would lead the way in responding.

After consulting with volunteer groups that worked in the arts, with students, and with seniors to learn what was most needed, they launched NYC Service with Diahann Billings-Burford as their inaugural Chief Service Officer.  NYC Service would enable NYC  to do more with less (since economic times were tight) and help harness volunteers in “impact service”.

NYC Service, in its several years, has achieved impressive results.  They have used citizens to vaccinate over half a million individuals against H1N1; engaged over 400,000 students in school-based volunteering; trained over 10,000 people in CPR who then trained additional New Yorkers; and coated two million square feet of rooftop under their “Cool Roofs” program with reflective white material to lower building’s cooling costs in the summer and help alleviate global warming.

They also launched the Civic Corps, a full-time group of AmeriCorps stipended volunteers who work in the Mayor’s Office or with city non-profits to help those non-profits mobilize volunteers.  The Civic Corps in FY11 recruited almost three quarters of a million volunteers, raised $1 million in cash and $6 million in non-cash donations, such as professional services, clothing, food and books.

Over 2,500 volunteer opportunities have been posted to NYC Service (their volunteer clearinghouse website) and they have garnered over 600,000 unique website visitors looking for volunteer opportunities.   Between their website and the Civic Corps, NYC Service has mobilized over a million NYC volunteers.

Although NYC Service does not directly track this, one of the most important outcomes (above and beyond how many success mentors they train or how many square feet of roofs they paint white), is the social capital and civic engagement that NYC Service instills.  Studies have shown that for many governmental objectives (say keeping streets safe or increasing academic performance), a civic engagement strategy (through neighbors knowing each others’ first names or parents being more involved in their kids’ learning) is more efficacious than a top-down government-funded approach.

NYC Service is undoubtedly increasing citizens’ sense of efficacy (that they can and are making a difference on issues like the environment or school readiness or dealing with truancy).  This increased efficacy is likely to cause more New Yorkers to intervene elsewhere (e.g., when someone has fallen on a street or is having a heart attack, or when a neighbor needs assistance).

Implicitly, much of what government does is remediating for gaps in civil society.  For example, social service and safety nets step in where family and neighbors don’t.  Police are necessary where social sanction and control is insufficient to police social norms.  Paid Fire Departments are needed when all-volunteer fire departments can’t fulfill their duties.

The social capital created by NYC Service is likely to have a significant impact, way above and beyond the value of volunteer hours (which are important and sizeable in-and-of themselves).  Greater local participation down the road is likely to lead to: a) better crafted and more responsive local policies; b) better performing and less corrupt government since the civic engagement and transparency will hold government officials accountable; c) greater net ability to change citizen behavior relative to an approach that relies on mandates (which are harder to get enacted and less popular); and d) potentially less of a need for government down the road, if engaged citizens do their jobs effectively.

Replication of NYC Service: NYC Service is already being replicated. Mayor Bloomberg held a competition (funded by Rockefeller) and a selection panel chose 10 cities from the cities that applied in June 2010.  These winners received $200,000 each to cover some of costs of a Chief Service Officer (which they had to hire) and received wraparound technical assistance (with work-planning, and project management).  Rockefeller and Bloomberg Philanthropies  announced a second grant round with 10 winners and awarded them in June 2010.

Bloomberg Philanthropies created a “learning community” around these 20 cities [see Cities of Service] with the goal of cross-fertilizing learning, experience sharing, and developing best practices.  The CSOs came together face-to-face 2-3 times during the first year, engage in bi-weekly group conference calls, and receive individual technical assistance.

Bloomberg Philanthropies created a “Cities of Service Playbook” that specifies a process they recommend for Cities of Service in coming up with a service plan.  CSOs in the first round were hired by May 2010 and these 10 were first convened in June 2010 and provided technical assistance.  The first group developed service plans in Sept. 2010.  The second group developed service plans by March 2011.  [The first group consisted of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Nashville, Newark, Omaha, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Savannah and Seattle.  The second group consisted of Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Chula Vista, Houston, Little Rock, Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Richmond.]

New cities have also agreed to develop high-impact service plans that were not grantees in these two competitive rounds.   Some of the original cities  now have the CSO position supported by their budget or have indicated  they will include the CSO in their budget.

We’ll look forward to hearing more about NYC Service and their replication efforts.

Philadelphia’s Connector Program:

Started by Liz Dow in 2005 as the Connector Project and based on Bowling Alone and Malcolm Gladwell’s work on connectors and the Tipping Point, they are now in their third iteration, and have renamed themselves Creative Connectors. They identify leaders who use arts, culture and design to build community and create economic vitality.  Liz was struck by the observation in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” that “poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.”

From their three years they have identified 10 traits in connectors (what they call “the Connector Competency Model”) and convened these connectors to connect them with each other.

Liz wrote up her experience in 6 Degrees of Connection and a fuller description of the ten competencies which cutely spell out “CONNECTORS”:

1. C: Community Catalyst
2. O: Other-oriented
3. N: Network Hub
4. N: Navigating Mazes
5. E: Empowering Passion
6. C: Constantly Curious
7. T: Trustworthy
8. O: Optimistic
9. R: Results Achiever
10. S: Self-Starter.

The list of creative connectors was generated by an online survey circulated by partner organizations and through an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  While these connectors are important in Philadelphia, 3 out of 4 of the leaders identified had moved to Philadelphia from somewhere else, and they generally work in the non-profit sector.  Creative Connectors also looks for leaders who:

• “are hubs of trust, seen as trustworthy and credible.
• use art and design to mobilize people around an issue.
• foster one-to-one linkages among people they know.
• engage with diverse groups.
• consider the common good as well as personal agendas.
• convey a vision that generates excitement.
• think strategically, act decisively.
• have founded an organization or program.”

Each Connector was profiled and NPR will do a video on each one weekly over the next year.

Philadelphia’s Creative Connectors is being replicated by some other groups including Leadership Louisville and the Portland Connector Project.  [And I've learned that a Boston connector network already exists, no relation to the effort in Philadelphia, see comment below about Boston World Partnerships.]

Last week, Leadership Philadelphia convened all of the Connectors since 2005 to thank them for their contribution to the community, to connect them with the newest connectors, to have them brainstorm on an issue raised in Knight’s Soul of the Community report, and to send them out into the community to make a Pay It Forward contribution.  The latter was a gift of $50 cash with the instruction that they give it to someone in Philadelphia who needs it, and to report back to Leadership, stirring up some grassroots goodwill during the holidays.

Leadership Philadelphia has also initiated a This I Believe project, partnering with the local NPR station to have leaders and then other citizens write and then read their belief statements on air.

Read a news report on their most recent meeting of all their Connectors.   The group that launched Creative Connectors, Leadership Philadelphia has a website here.  The Connector Project website available here.

Social Capital, Inc.

Inspired by reading Bowling Alone, David Crowley, whom I regard as an unofficial mayor of social capital, decided to launch Social Capital, Inc.

David was moving to Woburn, MA (his home town) at the same time as he was inspired to see what he could do at a local level to rebuild social capital.  He launched SCI and focused on trying to increase social capital in Woburn.

As David puts it: “The process of reconnecting to his home community after some 12 years of living elsewhere provided tangible examples of barriers to building social capital in today’s society, but also suggested that there were many community assets that could be harnessed through collaborative, community-wide social capital building initiative. The basic idea of developing a local model that could be replicated in order to address the decline of social capital and civic engagement was born.”

SCI Woburn was launched in summer 2002. In 2004, SCI expanded to Dorchester and in 2006-07, SCI began work in Lynn.  They have now expanded to Fall River and Milford.

SCI sees their mission as developing new “social capitalists” and believes it can train young people in the “unique set of skills and attitudes that enables them to collaborate effectively, make connections, bridge differences, and nurture social networks to make a difference. David is an ardent evangelist for social capital.  They are in the process of developing tools for would-be social capitalists and we will let you know when those become available.

In 2010-2011, here are some of SCI’s accomplishments.

• SCI AmeriCorps members recruited over 2,500 community volunteers and a almost 70,000 residents of  Dorchester, Boston, Fall River, Milford, Lynn and Woburn have benefitted from their service. The AmeriCorps members & volunteers served almost 50,000 hours with a market value of $1.25 million (based on Independent Sector’s rates for volunteer service)
• 240 youth and other emerging leaders developed Social Capitalist skills with SCI this year.
• Over 4,015 food & clothing items have been generated by SCI AmeriCorps members and volunteers for people in need during these difficult economic times.
• Over 12,500 individuals use an SCI community portal every month to connect with local civic happenings.

No foreclosure from gift debt

Flickr/martingommel

Thomas Meaney, recently reviewed David Graeber’s DEBT: The First 5,000 Years for the NYT Book Review.  [Graeber helped inspire the Occupy Wallstreet movement.]

Meaney writes:

In 1925 the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published his classic essay “The Gift,” which argued that contrary to the textbook account of primitive man merrily trading beaver pelts for wampum, no society was ever based on barter. The dominant practice for thousands of years was instead voluntary gift-giving, which created a binding sense of obligation between potentially hostile groups. To give a gift was not an act based on calculation, but on the refusal to calculate. In the societies Mauss studied most closely — the Maori of New Zealand, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest — people rejected the principles of economic self-interest in favor of arrangements where everyone was perpetually indebted to someone else.

Picking up where Mauss left off, Graeber argues that once-prevalent relationships based on an incalculable sense of duty deteriorated as buying and selling became the basis of society and as money, previously a marker of favors owed, became valuable in its own right….

So what, then, is to be done? Graeber finds reasons for hope in some unexpected places: corporations where elite management teams often operate more communistically than communes; in the possibility of a Babylonian-style Jubilee for Third World nations and students saddled with government loans; and from his own study of the Malagasy people of Madagascar, who he claims were adept at evading the snares of consumer debt encouraged by the state. But there is a sizable gulf between Graeber’s anthropological insights and his utopian political prescriptions. “Debt” ends with a paean to the “non-industrious poor.” “Insofar as the time they are taking off from work is being spent . . . enjoying and caring for those they love,” Graeber writes, they are the “pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-destruction.”

It’s an old dream among anthropologists — one that goes back to Rousseau. In 1968, Graeber’s own teacher, Marshall Sahlins, wrote an essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” which maintained that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period rejected the “Neolithic Great Leap Forward” because they correctly saw that the advancements it promised in tool-making and agriculture would reduce their leisure time. Graeber approves. He thinks it’s a mistake when unions ask for higher wages when they should go back to picketing for fewer working hours.

Michael from the Front Porch Forum (FPF) in Burlington, VT writes in response to Meaney’s quote that he loves that others in his FPF community in Burlington have undertaken a voluntary life of ‘favor debt’ (owing someone a favor) in place of monetary debt:

“Perpetually indebted to someone else”… this sums up so much of what I love about my community life in Burlington, VT right now….

I was raised to value making my contribution to others while taking great pains to avoid accepting the same from others.  So were lots of folks here.  But that’s a recipe for setting yourself apart, for isolation.  As my family has learned to accept favors from those around us, it’s made our contributions to others that much more meaningful and personal.

Now, through Front Porch Forum, MealTrain, our church, school, neighborhood and other means, we ask and offer favors daily from hundreds of friends, neighbors and acquaintances.  Each request works against isolation and lays down another thread in the web of community that supports our life.  This is a crucial asset… as much as our house, my job, the kids’ college savings.

My brother and his family are planning a holiday visit to see us in Vermont this month.  We could all jam into our house, but I know they would sleep better if we had more space for the two families.  Hotels are expensive and distant… B&Bs too.  So, I put the word out to neighbors and got several offers of empty houses that we could use on our block.  These neighbors are traveling out of state and are glad to share their home while they’re away.  We’ve done this a dozen times over the past few years… offering or asking for empty-house guest lodging.  Make that hundreds of times if we include other favors… meals, rides, tools, advice, kids stuff, labor, baby/pet sitting, on and on.

This is incredibly generous and trusting of all involved… but it’s also keeping each of us “perpetually indebted to our neighbors” in a way that makes our community stronger with each exchange.

It’s a wonderful description of generalized reciprocity of the sort that undergirds social capital as discussed in Bowling Alone.

See somewhat related earlier post “Economists ignore a critical third of economy: the social economy“

Hat tip to Lew Feldstein for spotting the FPF post.

Two recent articles on the importance of groups for health

Flickr/EdsonHong

Tina Rosenberg (author of the recently blogged about Join the Club) had two recent opinion pieces in the New York Times in November on how groups play a key role in healthy outcomes.

One “Fixes: For Weight Loss, a Recipe of Teamwork and Trust” (11/15/11) focuses on how patients are much more successful in trying to lose weight when they are in groups.

Another “Fixes: At a Big Church, a Small Group Health Solution”
discusses how Saddleback Church (also featured in Bob Putnam and Lew Feldstein’s Better Together) uses small-groups to encourage more healthy lifestyles of their members.

Tip o’ the hat to Lew Feldstein for these articles.

Social capital can alleviate youthful stressors that predict poor adult health

Flickr/meganskelly

Just finished a very interesting New Yorker article entitled “The Poverty Clinic” by Paul Tough that focuses on Nadine Burke who runs a San Francisco-based low-income health clinic and her conviction, supported by various studies, that youth trauma scars young people’s health for life.

They cite the ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study of 1998 that showed that adults’ retrospective childhood ACE memories were a strong predictor of all kinds of negative adult health outcomes and this exhibited a dose-response linearity — i.e., exposure to more categories of childhood adversity meant both greater likelihood of negative adolescent outcomes (depression, suicide, binge drinking, etc.) and greater likelihood of poor adult health outcomes.

These ACEs measure youth stress in four areas: 1) physical; 2) sexual; 3) psychological; 4) substance abuse; 5) mental illness; and 6) criminal activity.  Actual list of items appended to this post.

While it is possible that these retrospective memories are flawed (i.e., sick adults are more likely to recall childhood stresses), a basically prospective New Zealand Dunedin study is finding the same thing for early trauma.  And Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller Univ.) and Frances Champagne (Columbia Univ.) have shown that “repeated, full-scale activation of this stress system, especially in early childhood…actually alerts the chemistry of DNA in the brain, through a process called methylation….This process disables these genes [methyl groups], preventing the brain from properly regulating its response to stress.”  Even a decade or more after the stress, these teenagers find it harder to sit still, exhibit higher rates of aggression, show weaker brain function, and can’t as adequately distinguish between real and imaginary threats.

While some doctors are looking at whether drugs (psychopharmacology) could have an impact, social capital can often overcome these stressors.

“Other researchers have produced evidence that they can mend children’s overtaxed stress-response systems by changing the behavior of their parents or caregivers.  A study in Oregon drew this conclusion after assessing a program that encouraged foster parents to be more responsive to the emotional cues of the children in their care.  Another study, in Delaware, tracked a program that promoted secure emotional attachment between children and their foster parents.  In each study, researchers measured, at various points in the day, the children’s level of cortisol, the main stress hormone, and then compared these cortisol patterns with those of a control group of foster kids whose parents weren’t in the program.  In both studies, the children whose foster parents received the intervention subsequently showed cortisol patterns that echoed those of children brought up in stable homes.

“In terms of helping older children and adolescents who have experienced early trauma, the research is less solid.  There is evidence that certain psychological regimens, especially cognitive-behavioral therapy, can reduce anxiety and depression in patients who are suffering from the stress of early trauma.  But, beyond that, little is known…”

Kaiser Permanente started asking about these stressors on intake questionnaires, since the were markers of health problems in the same way as say high cholesterol was.  The article points out that eliminating the negative effects of four ACEs would lower the risk of heart attacks as much as lowering cholesterol below the warning threshold.

With regard to work we are currently doing on a growing social class gap among adolescent youth, it is possible that methylation and ACEs might help explain lingering and persistent growing social class gaps that we see among high schoolers over the last several decades.

Read “The Poverty Clinic” (New Yorker, March 21, 2011)

See earlier post “Doctors Prescribing Social Capital“

See early article on Childhood stressors and adult health: Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, Williamson DF, Spitz AM, Edwards V, Koss MP, et al JS. The relationship of adult health status to childhood abuse and household dysfunction. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 1998;14:245-258.

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Specifically ACE questionnaire asks whether:  parent or other adult in household (HH) often or very often swore at you, insulted you or put you down; often or very often acted in way that made you afraid that you would be physically hurt;  often or very often pushed, grabbed, shoved, or slapped you; often or very often hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured; person five+ years older than you ever touched or fondled you in a sexual way; had you touch their body in a sexual way; attempted oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you; actually had oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you; whether you lived with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic; lived with anyone who used street drugs; whether anyone in HH was depressed or mentally ill; whether HH member attempted suicide; whether your mother was treated violently ; whether your mother or stepmother was sometimes, often, or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her; whether mother/stepmother was sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard; whether mother/stepmother was ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes; whether mother/stepmother was ever threatened with, or hurt by, a knife or gun; whether HH member ever went to prison.