Motivational Accounts of the Vicious Cycle of Social Status: An Integrative Framework Using the United States as a Case Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Laurin ◽  
Holly R. Engstrom ◽  
Adam Alic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The United States ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Vicious Cycle ◽  
Expectancy Value ◽  
Integrative Framework ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
Classic Theory

Social mobility is limited in most industrialized countries, and especially in the United States: Children born to relatively poor parents are less likely to prosper than other children. This observation has multiple explanations; in the current article, we focus on emerging motivational perspectives, synthesizing them into a novel integrative framework grounded in a classic theory of motivation: expectancy-value theory. Together, these findings indicate that individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) may be less motivated to achieve status relative to individuals with higher SES—not because of their own personal failings, but as a result of their material, social and cultural contexts. We then consider the significant theoretical advantages of this integrative framework, most notably that it enables us to consider how the disparate perspectives linking motivation to SES are linked and may at times compound or offset each other. In turn, this enables us to make sophisticated predictions concerning the conditions that will enable individuals with low SES to escape the vicious cycle of low motivation. Moreover, our account helps bridge the gap between explanations that locate the cause for low social mobility within individuals and those that locate it in the broader system. We end by addressing implications for the psychological understanding of low status and implications for social policy.

The U.S. Health Delivery System: Inefficient and Unfair to Children

1997 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 319-337
Author(s):  
Loretta M. Kopelman ◽  
Michael G. Palumbo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Health Care Resources ◽  
Health Delivery ◽  
Hip Replacements ◽  
The Many ◽  
Older Citizens

What proportion of health care resources should go to programs likely to benefit older citizens, such as treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and hip replacements, and what share should be given to programs likely to benefit the young, such as prenatal and neonatal care? What portion should go to rare but severe diseases that plague the few, or to common, easily correctable illnesses that afflict the many? What percentage of funds should go to research, rehabilitation or to intensive care? Many nations have made such hard choices about how to use their limited funds for health care by explicitly setting priorities based on their social commitments. In the United States, however, allocation of health care resources has largely been left to personal choice and market forces. Although the United States spends around 14% of its gross national product (GNP) on health care, the United States and South Africa are the only two industrialized countries that fail to provide citizens with universal access.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemi Fuentes-George
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Agricultural Development ◽  
Close Association ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Environmental Injustice ◽  
Environmental Advocacy

Although the terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” emerged due to race-based mobilization in the United States, justice is a constant feature of environmental struggles around the world. Pursuing social justice in environmental advocacy can be difficult, but case studies of activism in places including New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States show that it is possible. Environmental injustice emerges when populations that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized disproportionately bear the costs of environmental consumption, and they are often systematically excluded from the benefits of this consumption. Although different political systems vary in how they structure marginalization, this close association of social injustice with environmental injustice characterizes cases like fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South alike. While skeptics have argued that promoting environmentalism is counterproductive to social justice, because environmental regulations often constrain economic growth, combining the two can lead to more sustainable environmental practices.

Brain Drain Controversy and African Scholars

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-30
Author(s):  
Man Singh Das
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Resources ◽  
Brain Drain ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Asian Student ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World

The phenomenon popularly known as brain drain has attracted growing concern in the United States and abroad (Tulsa Daily World, 1967; Committee on Manpower... 1967; Asian Student, 1968a: 3; 1968b: 1; 1969: 3; Institute of Applied Manpower . . . 1968; U. S. Congress, 1968; Gardiner, 1968: 194-202; Bechhofer, 1969: 1-71; Committee on the International Migration . . . 1970). The notion has been expressed that the poor countries of the world are being deprived of their talent and robbed of their human resources by the exchange of scholars and students which goes on between nations (U.S. Congress, 1968: 16-25; Mondale, 1967a: 24-6; 1967b: 67-9). Implicit is the idea that many students from these less developed countries go to the more highly developed and industrialized countries for study and decide not to return to their homeland.

Immigrant Religion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Alba ◽  
Nancy Foner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
Socioeconomic Profile ◽  
Western European ◽  
Social Divide ◽  
Immigrant Religion

This chapter describes how immigrant religion generally has become a more significant social divide, a greater challenge to integration, and a more common source of conflict with mainstream institutions and practices in Western Europe than in the United States. There are three main reasons for this. Of paramount importance are basic demographic facts. The religious backgrounds of immigrants in Western Europe and the United States are different, mostly Christian in the United States as compared to Western Europe, where a large proportion is Muslim. Muslims of immigrant origin in Western Europe also have a lower socioeconomic profile than those in the United States. Moreover, Western European native majorities have more trouble recognizing claims based on religion because they are more secular than religiously involved Americans.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. M. Luhrmann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Ethnic Density ◽  
Cultural Interpretation ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of

The introduction lays out what we know about the social context of schizophrenia from the epidemiological literature: that risk of schizophrenia is particularly high for immigrants from predominantly dark-skinned countries to Europe; that risk increases with lower socioeconomic status at birth and even at parent’s birth; that risk increases with urban dwelling and seems to increase the longer time is spent in cities; that risk increases as ethnic density in the neighborhood declines. The chapter presents a history of the way schizophrenia has been understood in the United States, and the diagnostic complexities of serious psychotic disorder. It then discusses what ethnographers have observed so far about the social conditions which may shape the experience of psychosis: the local cultural interpretation of mental illness; the role and presence of the family; the structure of work; and the basic social environment. This becomes the ground for our case studies.

scholarly journals Evaluation of NASA’s MERRA Precipitation Product in Reproducing the Observed Trend and Distribution of Extreme Precipitation Events in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 693-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamed Ashouri ◽  
Soroosh Sorooshian ◽  
Kuo-Lin Hsu ◽  
Michael G. Bosilovich ◽  
Jaechoul Lee ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Extreme Precipitation ◽  
Gulf Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
Extreme Value ◽  
Precipitation Extremes ◽  
Precipitation Product ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events ◽  
Precipitation Events

Abstract This study evaluates the performance of NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) precipitation product in reproducing the trend and distribution of extreme precipitation events. Utilizing the extreme value theory, time-invariant and time-variant extreme value distributions are developed to model the trends and changes in the patterns of extreme precipitation events over the contiguous United States during 1979–2010. The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) U.S. Unified gridded observation data are used as the observational dataset. The CPC analysis shows that the eastern and western parts of the United States are experiencing positive and negative trends in annual maxima, respectively. The continental-scale patterns of change found in MERRA seem to reasonably mirror the observed patterns of change found in CPC. This is not previously expected, given the difficulty in constraining precipitation in reanalysis products. MERRA tends to overestimate the frequency at which the 99th percentile of precipitation is exceeded because this threshold tends to be lower in MERRA, making it easier to be exceeded. This feature is dominant during the summer months. MERRA tends to reproduce spatial patterns of the scale and location parameters of the generalized extreme value and generalized Pareto distributions. However, MERRA underestimates these parameters, particularly over the Gulf Coast states, leading to lower magnitudes in extreme precipitation events. Two issues in MERRA are identified: 1) MERRA shows a spurious negative trend in Nebraska and Kansas, which is most likely related to the changes in the satellite observing system over time that has apparently affected the water cycle in the central United States, and 2) the patterns of positive trend over the Gulf Coast states and along the East Coast seem to be correlated with the tropical cyclones in these regions. The analysis of the trends in the seasonal precipitation extremes indicates that the hurricane and winter seasons are contributing the most to these trend patterns in the southeastern United States. In addition, the increasing annual trend simulated by MERRA in the Gulf Coast region is due to an incorrect trend in winter precipitation extremes.

scholarly journals Part of the Solution

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (01) ◽  
pp. 46-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Thilmany
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Rapid Prototyping ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Emergency Housing ◽  
Low Cost Housing ◽  
New Buildings

This article presents numerous examples of rapid prototyping applications in the United States and explains its benefits. Constructing housing via rapid prototyping methods is expected to save time and money and bring affordable and environmentally friendly housing to people in need. Using an additive-manufacturing technique for constructing new buildings could provide emergency housing for victims of disasters. The technique could also be used for affordable housing for those in the United States or in third-world countries, or for creating new housing styles that bring curved, organic designs rather than straight surfaces to the homes. In industrialized countries, automating the manufacturing of products such as shoes or cars can cut costs about 25% as compared to manual construction methods. Makers of rapid prototyping technology are using CT scans to create exact-fit implants for craniofacial and maxillofacial operations. The rapid prototyping process is also being matched with humanitarian efforts in another project, this one situated in war-torn Iraq. Analysts suggest that custom medical devices and low-cost housing—affordable for everyone and quick to manufacture accurately—will help grow rapid prototyping into a robust industry.

scholarly journals Double Whammy for Older Smokers: Marginalized by Tobacco Control and Valued by the Tobacco Industry

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (8) ◽  
pp. 1137-1151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine K. Cataldo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Health Disparity ◽  
Tobacco Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Tobacco Policy ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Lower Socioeconomic ◽  
Tobacco Addiction

In the last 20 years, the United States has made stunning progress reducing the rate of adult smoking. However, the smallest reduction is among older adults. Compared to younger smokers, older smokers are more likely to be lower socioeconomic status (SES), have several tobacco related comorbidities, and are less likely to be treated for tobacco addiction yet, in tobacco policy, they are not considered a marginalized group. The tobacco industry’s interest in older smokers contrasts with the lack of interest shown by tobacco control. A double whammy is a set of two bad events or situations that have an effect at the same time. The purposes of this article are to use the health disparity paradigm to (a) discuss the “double whammy” of marginalization by tobacco control and valuation by the tobacco industry on the health of older smokers and (b) provide strategies to promote health equity for older smokers.

Between Nationality and Class

1997 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Aronowitz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Open Society ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Democratic Norms

In this article, Stanley Aronowitz argues that "American" ideology contains two elements. First, the United States is believed to confer equality of opportunity on each citizen. Second, unlike other advanced industrial nations, the United States is considered an "open society" that allows and promotes social mobility. In this paradigm, racial minorities and women have the same chances to escape the ranks of the working poor as White men. Aronowitz uses a class-based analysis nested within ethnicity to expose the fallacy of this ideology. Since higher education is most often pointed to as a source of social mobility, Aronowitz focuses his argument on the meritocratic norms that are replacing democratic norms within higher education, and on the devolution of educational opportunity for the poor, working class, and racial minorities.

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