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Link Biscuits: 2 February 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 14:02
  • David Cutler and Others, Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradiants: "The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking has declined more for the better educated, but not enough to explain the trend. Obesity has risen at similar rates across education groups, and control of blood pressure and cholesterol has increased fairly uniformly as well. Rather, our results show that the mortality returns to risk factors, and conditional on risk factors, the return to education, have grown over time."
  • Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Traveling with the Dog: Greyhound and American Journeys: ".... bus travel remains a visible and viable working-class space. It is not ghettoized; it is public. In no sense off limits, it is in plain view. The Greyhound dog leaping across the skyline is a working-class flag. Praise the common man. If I keep going in this vein, I will end by suggesting that the resolution of all our political problems rests in a new itinerary for senators and congresspeople: let them ride the buses. But I risk giving the company too much credit. Greyhound hasn’t been a friend to its employees. The company has been the focus of two famous union strikes—in 1983 and in the early 1990s, both characterized by intense levels of acrimony, bitterness, and physical violence. During the upheaval of the 1990s, Greyhound called in nonunion bus drivers; in Redding, California, a picketing striker was killed by a bus driven by a strikebreaker. Greyhound eventually prevailed and effectively broke the bus drivers’ union. The striker’s death isn’t commemorated in any Greyhound station, as far as I know, giving the story the tragic air of the battles waged against the Wobblies in the early twentieth century. Ask the defeated strikers if the dog belongs on a working-class flag. Still, though the company is no self-conscious respecter of worker rights, the terminals remain community parks of the working class, with management, employees, and patrons trapped in a slightly abusive relationship."
  • Joyce Foundation, New Tools in the Advocacy Toolkit: Microtargeting, Netroots Mobilization and e-advocacy: "Historically, policy advocates have effectively pressed their causes using compelling research, good ideas, and the right relationships. However, in the past few years, sophisticated issue advocates have increasingly begun to identify and mobilize supporters through a whole new suite of new media-anchored strategies and tactics, including microtargeting, social networking, and e-advocacy."