Author: Christopher Ingraham
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How white racism destroys black wealth
There are a lot of reasons that home prices tend to be lower in black neighborhoods than in white ones. Decades of racist policies put in place by governments and private companies — segregation, redlining, deed restrictions, exclusionary zoning, the deliberate hollowing out of urban cores — have had the net effect of eroding the…
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Why many bird seed mixes are filled with stuff birds won’t eat
My backyard bird feeder was running low a few weeks ago. It wasn’t empty, though. At the bottom remained a large pile of one type of seed the local birds evidently passed over in search of tastier morsels. The seed in question was round and reddish brown, about half the diameter of a pea, with…
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Want to trick yourself into more exercise? Yeah, good luck with that
A “nudge” is a policy intervention that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives,” says Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago economist. Nudges typically are used to get people to do things that are good for them or for society, things they…
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CDC: Fentanyl drove drug overdose deaths to record high in 2017
Drug overdose deaths surpassed 72,000 in 2017, according to provisional estimates recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That represents an increase of more than 6,000 deaths, or 9.5 percent, over the estimate for the previous 12-month period. That staggering sum works out to about 200 drug overdose deaths every single day,…
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There are more guns than people in the US, according to a new study of global firearm ownership
Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over. Those numbers come from…
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Fueled by drug crisis, U.S. life expectancy declines for a second straight year
American life expectancy at birth declined for the second consecutive year in 2016, fueled by a staggering 21 percent rise in the death rate from drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday. The United States has not seen two years of declining life expectancy since 1962 and 1963, when influenza caused an…
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Marijuana users have more sex, researchers find
Regular marijuana users have about 20 percent more sex than abstainers, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford University. The study analyzed data on 28,000 female and 23,000 male participants in the National Survey of Family Growth, a nationally representative CDC survey of Americans age 15 to 49. It found that women who…
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Legal marijuana is saving lives in Colorado, study finds
Marijuana legalization in Colorado led to a “reversal” of opiate overdose deaths in that state, according to new research published in the American Journal of Public Health. “After Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis sale and use, opioid-related deaths decreased more than 6% in the following 2 years,” write authors Melvin D. Livingston, Tracey E. Barnett, Chris Delcher and…
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Young children are still shooting people on a weekly basis this year
On Wednesday two 3-year-old boys were shot by another toddler who found and inadvertently fired a gun at the home of their babysitter in Dearborn, Mich., according to the Detroit Free Press. The boys, one of whom was shot in the face and the other in the shoulder, are in stable condition at a hospital. The…
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Letting teens sleep in would save the country roughly $9 billion a year
The United States would realize roughly $9 billion a year in economic gains by instituting a simple, nationwide policy change: starting public school classes no earlier than 8:30 a.m. That’s according to an exhaustive new study by the Rand Corporation, the first of its kind to model the nationwide costs and benefits of later school…