Small Minority Accounts for Bulk of Gun Ownership

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University. S...

 Debt Makes College a Risky Investment

Our findings, especially those that examine household decision-making, emphasize that while the return to higher education is high, it is not a safe investment for many households. The deterrent effect of risk survives the ability of agents to feasibly debt finance college with student loans. The main force here is that debt makes higher education riskier for student borrowers, suggesting that alternatives that are mindful of risk may be more effective. In turn, the focus of the policy experi...

 The Gas Lamp Brought Networked Collective Life

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1995) argues that one of the most important transformations of networked urban life came with the rise of the gas lamp. The introduction of gas ended the autonomy of oil lamps and candles whereby each household effectively supplied its own energy needs. Gas represented the industrialization of light, transforming households into nodes of a centralized power source, linking the domestic and intimate to larger structures of capital and the state. In this way, Schivelbusch...

 Increases in Wealth in the Last 30 Years have been in the...

There have been trillions of dollars of wealth created in recent decades, but most of it went to a relatively small share of the population. In fact, economist Ed Wolff found that over 100% of all the wealth increase in America between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the top 20% of households. The other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth over nearly 30 years. In turn, the top 5% accounted for over 80% of the net increase in wealth and the top 1% for over 40%. With almost a fr...

 Recommendations for Exposing Children to Television

1. Keep the TV off before the child turns 2. I know this is tough to hear for parents who need a break. If you can’t turn it off—if you haven’t created those social networks that can allow you a rest—at least limit your child’s exposure to TV. We live in the real world, after all, and an irritated, overextended parent can be just as harmful to a child’s development as an annoying purple dinosaur. 2. After age 2, help your children choose the shows (and other screen-based expos...