How Science Fiction Tackles Social Issues

Now science fiction movies are mostly just shoot-‘em-ups, but back in the day sci-fi was a medium to explore social issues. SF allowed us to examine the core elements of controversial issues without all the emotional baggage that went along with them. It’s easy to dismiss the genre when you have grown-up fans walking around in costumes and silver make-up, but SF employs disarming tools to tease core arguments from their tired rhetoric. Here pundits, smoke screens, and slogans are stripped...

 Children With Self-Control Do Better in Life

A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly. “You see these cookies?” Mischel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want, but if you wait, you can eat both. I have to go away for five minutes. If I return and you have not eaten anything, I will let you have bothcookies. If you eat on...

 Food Stamps Improves Quality of Life for Children

Seizing on yet another natural experiment, Almond examined the impact of the introduction of the food-stamp program in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The program was rolled out on a state-by-state basis, allowing Almond to compare birth outcomes for poor women who received food assistance during pregnancy to those who did not. His results, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, found that women who were enrolled in the program three months before they gave birth delivered babie...