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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

by ChristaU73 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kevin Williamson doesn’t like the new budget deal. That’s no surprise: the reason Boehner is trying to pass this while he’s a lame duck is that he knows no one will like it. But that doesn’t matter to him anymore, so he’s willing to shrug and just get it done.

So what is Williamson’s specific gripe? That the deal basically does away with sequestration:

Democrats hated sequestration. Republicans hated sequestration.

Why?

Sequestration worked.

Sequestration is the reason why in recent years we’ve reduced federal spending substantially in GDP terms, from about 25 percent to about 20 percent. It is the main reason that we have reduced the federal deficit in GDP terms. Democrat-supporting welfare entrepreneurs hated it, and Republican-supporting military contractors hated it. Ordinary Americans did not have much in the way of strong views on the matter, which often is the case when a policy actually does what it is supposed to. Effective government rarely is dramatic government.

No argument with the first sentence. Sequestration was specifically designed to be so unlikable that neither party would ever support it. The fact that it took effect anyway is a testament to the dysfunction of the federal government, not to the budget-capping wonders of sequestration.

But let’s review that last paragraph. Is sequestration really the “main” reason we’ve reduced federal spending from 25 percent of GDP to 20 percent? Hmmm:

Spending hit 24.4 percent of GDP during the recession year of 2009. It was already down to 21.9 percent of GDP by 2012 and hit 21 percent in 2015.
Sequestration started in 2013, so at most it could be responsible for 0.9 out of 3.4 points of that reduced spending.
Was it? It theoretically reduced spending by $200 billion or so.
That’s about 1 percent of GDP.
In reality, CBO estimates that adjustments—primarily to fund overseas wars—ate into half of that. This means that sequestration lowered actual spending by about 0.5 percent of GDP.
The rest of the decline from 21.9 percent to 21 percent comes from the fact that GDP recovered.
So: of the spending reduction Williamson cites, about 0.5 percentage points was due to sequestration.

Now, I suppose that any kind of spending cut is a good cut to a conservative. But sequestration is responsible for only about a seventh of the spending reduction since 2009. The rest is due to (a) the end of stimulus spending, (b) reduced safety net spending as the recession eased, (c) the 2011 budget deal, and (d) the recovery of GDP growth, which automatically reduces spending as a percent of GDP.

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Everyone Hated Sequestration, But Its Effect Was Never All That Huge

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These Nail Polish Brands Contain a Chemical That Could Mess With Your Hormones

by LukeSackett Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Want some toxins with that mani-pedi?

A new study by researchers at Duke University and the Environmental Working Group found that a common nail polish chemical and suspected endocrine disruptor called TPHP is leaching into the bodies of polish-wearers.

TPHP, also known as TPP, is commonly used as a fire retardant in furniture and a hardener in plastic goods. According to the authors, research suggests that the chemical causes changes in hormone regulation, metabolism, and reproductive systems.

The study, published today in Environmental International, found that women who painted their nails with polishes containing TPHP saw a sevenfold increase of a TPHP metabolite (a substance formed when the body metabolizes TPHP) just 10 to 14 hours after painting their nails.

“It is very troubling that nail polish being marketed to women and teenage girls contains a suspected endocrine disruptor,” said Johanna Congleton, a co-author of the study, in a press release. “It is even more troubling to learn that their bodies absorb this chemical relatively quickly after they apply a coat of polish.”

TPHP is a common addition to nail polishes; an analysis of EWG’s Skin Deep database found that about half of all nail polishes—or 1,500 polishes in the database—contain the chemical, including popular brands like OPI, Sallie Hansen, and Revlon. (Below are a few big-name brands; here‘s the complete database.)

Environmental Working Group

To figure out if the chemical was being absorbed from fumes or directly from the nails, some women in the study wore gloves and applied polish to synthetic nails, while others applied polish directly to their own nails. The TPHP metabolite levels of the former group didn’t change significantly while the latter group saw a sevenfold increase, suggesting that fumes weren’t the main vehicle for the chemical. Nails are impermeable to most molecules, so the researchers theorize that the chemical leached through the cuticles, or that another ingredient in the polish made the nails more permeable.

It’s still unknown if the levels of TPHP coming from nail polish are harmful to the body, as most of the studies on the effects of TPHP have been conducted on animals.

It’s also unknown if there’s a less toxic chemical that could replace TPHP in nail polishes. The chemical acts as a plasticizer, making the polish flexible but durable. It may have replaced a chemical called DBP, which fell out of popularity when it was found to be a hormone disruptor. If companies move away from TPHP, as they did with DBP, the challenge is making sure the replacement isn’t just as toxic as the original. “I’m assuming that if you need a plasticizer, there are other options available,” said Congleton in an interview. “But I would want to be able to identify what those are and make sure the right questions have been asked.”

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These Nail Polish Brands Contain a Chemical That Could Mess With Your Hormones

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Sorry, Foodies: We’re About to Ruin Kale

by AnnieQ01jltz Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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How hipster is kale? For $28, Urban Outfitters will sell you a kale t-shirt. To prep for a big blizzard in early 2015, residents of a trendy Brooklyn section cleaned out the kale bins of their neighborhood Whole Foods. And what would the juicing craze be without it?

But today’s kale-fixated juice-heads may doing themselves a disservice.

That’s a possibility raised by an article in Craftsmanship magazine by Todd Oppenheimer. The piece doesn’t establish a definitive link between heavy kale consumption and any health problem, but it does raise the question of whether too much of even a highly nutritious food like kale can have unhappy side effects.

The article focuses on an alt-medicine researcher and molecular biologist named Ernie Hubbard, who began to notice an odd trend among some of his clinic’s clients in California’s Marin County, a place known for its organic farms, health-food stores, and yoga studios. Extremely health-conscious people were coming into to complain of “persistent but elusive problems”: “Chronic fatigue. Skin and hair issues. Arrhythmias and other neurological disorders. Foggy thinking. Gluten sensitivity and other digestive troubles. Sometimes even the possibility of Lyme Disease.”

Hubbard began to find detectable levels of a toxic heavy metal called thallium in patients’ blood samples—at higher-than-normal leves—as well as in kale leaves from the region. Meanwhile, “over and over,” he found that patients complaining of symptoms associated with low-level thallium poisoning—fatigue, brain fog, etc.—would also be heavy eaters of kale and related vegetables, like cabbage.

And he found, in the form of this 2006 peer-reviewed paper by Czech researchers, evidence that kale is really good at taking up thallium from soil. The paper concluded that kale’s ability to accumulate soil-borne thallium is “very high and can be a serious danger for food chains.” And here’s a peer-reviewed 2013 paper from Chinese researchers finding similar results with green cabbage; a 2015 Chinese study finding green cabbage is so good at extracting thallium from soil that it can be used for “phytoremediation”—i.e., purifying soil of a toxin—and a 2001 one from a New Zealand team finding formidible thallium-scrounging powers in three other members of the brassica family: watercress, radishes, and turnips.

Now, just because kale and other brassicas can effectively take up thallium from soil doesn’t mean that they always contain thallium. The metal has to find its way into soil first. It exists at low levels in the Earth’s crust, and the main way it gets concentrated at high enough levels to cause worry is through “nearby cement plants, oil drilling, smelting, and, most of all, in the ash that results from coal burning,” Oppenheimer reports. The researcher he profiled, Hubbard, has so far not succeeded in nailing down the source of the thallium that he found in his kale samples.

And there’s also the question of quantity. One of Hubbard’s patients with heightened thallium levels in her urine and mild symptoms of thallium poisoning ate so much cabbage over the years that she called herself the “cabbage queen.” When she “cut way back” on her favorite vegetable, she tells Oppenheimer, her thallium levels dropped, and her symptoms improved.

Where does all of this evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, leave us—beyond the need of much more research on US-grown kale? There’s nothing here that makes me want to stop eating brassicas, probably my favorite vegetable genus and one undeniably loaded with many valuable nutrients.

But it does make me wary of downing brassicas daily at great quantities over extended periods, the way some people may be doing as part of the juice craze. This recipe for “mean green juice,” for example, calls for six to eight kale leaves in a single serving—much more than most of us would consume in a side dish of sautéed kale. In all great things—wine, butter, ice cream, even kale—moderation makes sense.

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Sorry, Foodies: We’re About to Ruin Kale

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Sorry, polar bears. It’s worse than we thought

by LilianaCSSW Posted on July 2, 2015

Sorry, polar bears. It’s worse than we thought

By on 2 Jul 2015commentsShare

Yeah, yeah, climate change is about people not polar bears, but it’s also a little bit about polar bears. They’re big, fluffy, charismatic mammals whose way of life relies on dwindling Arctic sea ice, after all.

But it turns out the big bears are in more trouble than we thought, according to a new study by the USGS. By 2025, a third of the world’s polar bears will be in imminent danger from climate change. You guessed it — welcome back to Spoiler Alerts: Where climate change gets personal, by killing all your favorite things one at a time.

I don’t know how you feel about Arctic predators, but they are certainly a few of my favorite things. From the Associated Press:

The scientific models attempted to predict the effects on polar bear populations under two scenarios: one in which greenhouse gas emissions stabilized, and the other in which they continued unabated.

Under either scenario, the bears in the Alaska, Russia and Norway group — with an estimated population of about 8,500 — would start to be affected in either 2025 or 2030, said lead author Todd Atwood, an Alaska-based USGS research wildlife biologist.

He said the main reason is this part of the Arctic has suffered some of the most dramatic declines in summer sea ice.

What’s so special about ice, anyway? Oh, only everything:

Polar bears feed primarily on seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth. When the sea ice retreats in the summer, polar bears are forced to land. A study earlier this year found the land-based food would not help a polar bear adapt to the loss of sea ice. The Office of Naval Research said the past eight years have had the eight lowest amounts of summer sea ice on record.

“Polar bears are in big trouble,” said Rebecca Noblin, Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “There are other steps we can take to slow the decline of polar bears, but in the long run, the only way to save polar bears in the Arctic is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Hey. That sounds kinda familiar.

Source:
Study: Polar Bears Could Feel Global Warming’s Sting by 2025

, New York Times.

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Sorry, polar bears. It’s worse than we thought

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Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

by AmosBuiezwtwn Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias says that becoming a new father has changed his mind about genetic engineering:

The main thing is that I now have an instinctive, gut-level understanding of what it is I want for my kid as a parent. And the main thing is that my parental aspirations are very asymmetrical. You want the kid to grow up to be basically happy and healthy. Anything beyond that in terms of genuinely noteworthy achievements would be nice, but honestly not that much nicer than “basically happy and healthy.” By contrast, falling significantly short of “basically happy and healthy” would be really bad.

….Long story short, while I used to think of genetic engineering as primarily about making future generations “better” on average, with my dad-glasses on I think it would be largely about making them more mediocre. You would curtail the left end of the distribution curve, but also the right end. Fewer tortured geniuses and alienated, awkward loners who push the boundaries of society and technology.

The image of the tortured genius is rife in Western literature, but in real life it’s basically a myth. Are there tortured geniuses among us? Sure. Vincent van Gogh was famously tortured. Kurt Cobain. Georg Cantor.

But the boring truth is that geniuses, on average, are about the same as everyone else aside from being geniuses. Einstein was perfectly well adjusted. Ditto for Shakespeare, Edison, Picasso, Maxwell, Newton, etc. They all had their own quirks and foibles, and were maybe a bit more driven than average, but fell well within the usual norms for healthy and happy. Historical studies of geniuses have all confirmed this. Being unhappy just doesn’t have any effect on being a genius.

So no worries on that score, though there are plenty of other things to worry about in the brave new world of human genetic engineering—including the fact that not all parents share Matt’s value system in the first place.

Besides, my guess is that trying to engineer geniuses is a dead end anyway. Artificial intelligence will get there first. By the the time we’ve finally figured out how to reliably produce the next baby Einstein, the machines will just be tittering at us behind our backs.

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Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

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Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago

by MelisaEPGY Posted on January 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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And now from the future to the past: specifically, the period from 1921 to 1936. Let’s talk about homicide.

James Feigenbaum and Christopher Muller recently published an intriguing paper that looks at the correlation between the introduction of lead pipes in American cities at the turn of the 20th century and the increase in the murder rate 20 years later. Southern cities, it turns out, mostly opted out of lead piping (mainly because they lacked nearby lead smelters and refineries), so F&M present separate results for northern and Midwest cities where the vast bulk of lead pipe construction took place.

Their basic results are on the right. Cities with at least some lead piping had murder rates that were, on average, 8.6 percent higher than cities with galvanized iron or wrought iron pipes. Other causes of death were mostly unrelated. Only the murder rates changed1.

Now, there are several things to say about this. On the positive side, this study avoids some of the confounding factors of other studies. Lead paint and gasoline lead, for example, tend to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods, which means that correlations with crime might be due to hyper-local socio-geographic factors rather than lead itself. But F&M’s study avoids this problem: lead piping generally served entire cities, so it affects everyone equally, not just the poor. And since the likelihood of using lead pipes was mostly a factor of how close a city was to a lead refinery (thus making lead pipes cheaper), there’s no special reason to think that cities which used lead pipes were sociologically any different from those that used iron pipes.

On the negative side, it’s risky to look solely at homicide numbers. This is because the absolute number of murders is small, especially on a city-by-city basis, and that means there’s a lot of noise in the numbers. This is especially true when you’re limited to a period of time as short as 15 years. There’s also the fact that this was an era when lead paint was widely used, and that’s very hard to tease out from the use of lead in pipes. Finally, there’s the usual problem of any study like this: what do you control for? The use of lead pipes is plausibly unrelated to anything else related to crime, but it’s impossible to know for sure. The authors do control for black population, foreign-born population, occupations, home ownership, and gender breakdown, and that reduces their effect size from 11.4 percent to 8.6 percent. Might some other control reduce it even further?

Plus there’s the anomaly of Southern cities. Very few of them used lead pipes, but some did, and their murder rates were essentially no different from any other Southern cities. Why? It’s possible that this is because their use of lead pipes was small (F&M have data on lead pipe use by city, but not on how much lead piping was used in each city). But it’s still odd.

Finally, there’s a fascinating aspect to this study: when you study lead and crime, you need to concentrate on young children, since they’re the ones primarily harmed by lead exposure. So you want to correlate lead exposure to crime rates 20 years later. As near as I can tell, F&M do this, but only by accident: their lead pipe data comes from 1897 but the earliest reliable homicide data starts in 1921. So the proper time lag is there, but as near as I can tell, it’s not really deliberate. They do mention the time lag briefly in their discussion of a confirming bit of evidence toward the end of the paper, but nowhere in the main body.

In any case, this is yet another small but persuasive bit of evidence for the link between lead exposure in children and increased rates of violent crime when those children grow up. Despite the study’s few weaknesses, it really is plausible that lead piping is exogenous to any other factor related to crime rates, and this makes F&M’s discovery pretty credible as a causal factor for the difference in murder rates between lead-pipe and iron-pipe cities, not just a spurious correlation. Interesting stuff.

1Actually, not quite. They tested for cirrhosis, suicide, heart disease, pneumonia, tuberculosis, auto accidents, influenza, diabetes, childbirth, syphilis, whooping cough, measles, typhoid, scarlet fever, train accidents, and malaria. All were uncorrelated except for cirrhosis and train accidents. The latter two are unexplained, though lead exposure actually is related to cirrhosis, and it’s possible that reductions in impulse control might lead to more train accidents. Still, a bit odd.

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Lead and Crime: Some New Evidence From a Century Ago

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

by Herbert7219 Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate negotiators from nearly 200 countries are on their way home from Lima, Peru, after a series of last-minute compromises produced an agreement that, for the first time, calls on all countries to develop plans to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

As the two weeks of global warming talks drew to a close, familiar fault lines emerged between wealthy countries—which are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change—and developing countries, which will be disproportionately impacted by it. In the end, both sides made sacrifices. Developing nations failed to convince the United States other economic powerhouses to commit cash to fund climate adaptation efforts around the world. And the US lost a battle over a one-word change that made guidelines for countries’ climate commitments optional instead of mandatory. As a result, the agreement came out weaker than climate hawks had hoped for, because countries get plenty of wiggle room to potentially scale back their promises.

“I would say that whereas at the end of last week, the draft agreement was close to unambiguously positive, over the weekend it did get watered down,” said Harvard environmental economist Robert Stavins. (You can read his more detailed analysis here).

So what happens now? The Lima agreement is essentially a playbook for diplomacy in the run-up to next December’s major global warming talks in Paris, where countries will meet in an attempt to finalize the world’s first universal climate accord. Before that can happen, there’s still a whole lot of negotiating left on the table, at both the domestic and international levels.

First, every country is now supposed to come up with its plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like the joint plan announced last month by the US and China. Guidelines for what those plans must include are pretty loose, but in most cases they’ll lay out an emissions reduction target, a timeline for reaching it, and a series of domestic policy measures to achieve it. The Lima agreement requires that the plans be more aggressive than a “business-as-usual” scenario.

The plans can also (but aren’t required to) include commitments for low-carbon economic development, pledges of financial assistance for developing countries, or really whatever else a country feels like sticking in there. Those plans are due to the UN climate committee no later than October 1.

Once every country has submitted its contribution, the UN will conduct an analysis of how far they go, collectively, toward slowing climate change. This will be like a report card grading the actual impact the Paris agreement is likely to have. Expect that by November.

At the same time, negotiators will be tinkering away on nearly 40 pages of draft text that will serve as an introduction to the patchwork of national contributions (see the “Annex” here). There are smaller meetings early in 2015—first in Bonn, Germany, and then in Geneva, Switzerland—where this will be the main task at hand. That document will be presented in May, then tweaked and (fingers crossed) finally approved in Paris.

Stay tuned over the next several months for commitments from key players like India, Russia, and Australia.

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

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Obama’s Iraq Policy Has Been Pretty Masterly

by ChelseyPegues Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m not a diehard supporter of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Some of his actions I just plain disagree with: the surge in Afghanistan, the enormous increase in drone use, his almost inhuman patience in putting up with Bibi Netanyahu’s nearly open contempt for him. Then there are other actions of his that were arguably justifiable but have worked out less well than he hoped. However, they mostly represent very, very tough problems. And foreign policy is hard—especially now. Almost nobody gets even a small fraction of what they want out of it.

That said, the relentless criticism of Obama’s approach toward ISIS strikes me as unusually shortsighted. As near as I can tell, he’s handled it almost perfectly so far. If we had offered air support to destroy ISIS six months or a year ago, it probably would have made things worse. Iraq flatly wasn’t able to provide the ground troops to complement an air campaign, and America would have shared in the inevitable fiasco. We also would have been explicitly bound to Nouri al-Maliki and his policies, which were the very ones responsible for the rise of ISIS in the first place. The outcome of all this would have been the worst of all possible worlds for American interests.

Instead, Obama allowed Maliki to fail on his own, and then used the leverage of promised American air assistance to engineer his ouster. Needless to say, this hardly guarantees eventual success against ISIS, but is there really any question that it was a necessary precondition for success? I don’t think so. Maliki never would have left unless he was forced out, and it was plain that his brutally sectarian governing style was fueling the insurgency, not halting it. He had to leave.

The alternative to Obama’s strategy wasn’t more aggressive action. That would have been disastrous. Nor would it have made a difference if Obama had left a few troops in Iraq back in 2009. Nor would stronger intervention in Syria have made a difference. It might even have made things worse. The truth is simpler. There’s no single reason for the rise of ISIS, but there is a single primary reason: Nouri al-Maliki. Obama saw that clearly and kept his eye on what was important, working patiently and cold-bloodedly toward engineering Maliki’s departure. It was hardly a perfect plan, and messiness was always inevitable. Nonetheless, it was the best plan available. Because of it, there’s now at least a chance of defeating ISIS.

UPDATE: Does “masterly” go too far? Maybe so. But I was trying to attract attention to my main point: the ISIS threat couldn’t even be addressed until Iraq’s political dysfunction was addressed first. Unlike a lot of people, Obama recognized that and stuck to a toughminded approach that focused on getting rid of Maliki instead of getting distracted by endless calls for a stronger intervention before Maliki was gone. It wasn’t easy, but it was the smart thing to do.

Can the new government fight ISIS more effectively? There’s no way of knowing yet. But at least they’ve been given a chance.

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Obama’s Iraq Policy Has Been Pretty Masterly

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Help Us Solve the Rotisserie Chicken Mystery

by SalvatoYkv Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle alerts me today to a story from a local TV station that answers a question I’ve vaguely wondered about for a while: Why is it cheaper to buy a cooked and seasoned rotisserie chicken than a raw chicken? Cat Vesko provides the straight dope:

Right now, an uncooked chicken at Ralphs runs you $9.87, but a rotisserie chicken is $6.99; at Gelson’s, you’ll pay $8.99 for a cooked chicken or $12.67 for the raw version; and at that beloved emporium of insanity Whole Foods, a rotisserie chicken is $8.99, while a whole chicken from the butcher counter is $12.79 … per pound.

….In most cases, preparing meals from scratch is significantly cheaper than buying them pre-made. What makes rotisserie chickens the exception? The answer lies in the curious economics of the full-service supermarket….Much like hunters who strive to use every part of the animal, grocery stores attempt to sell every modicum of fresh food they stock. Produce past its prime is chopped up for the salad bar; meat that’s overdue for sale is cooked up and sold hot. Some mega-grocers like Costco have dedicated rotisserie chicken programs, but employees report that standard supermarkets routinely pop unsold chickens from the butcher into the ol’ rotisserie oven.

This is a curiously roundabout explanation, but it boils down to this: whole chickens that are about to reach their sell-by date—and be thrown out—are instead taken to the deli to be cooked up. The grocery store doesn’t make as much money as it would selling the chicken fresh, but it makes more money than it would by throwing it out.

I guess this makes sense. Except for one thing: the number of rotisserie chickens in your average supermarket is huge. As near as I can tell, the number being roasted in any single hour is greater than the total number of raw whole chickens in the entire poultry section. In other words, there’s just no way that supermarkets toss out (or come close to tossing out) enough whole raw chickens to account for the vast pile of rotisserie chickens on offer. An awful lot of these chickens must have been purchased explicitly for the rotisserie. At least, that’s what my informal eyeball estimate tells me.

What’s more, the availability of all those cheap rotisserie chickens is a conspicuous incentive to stop buying whole raw chickens in the first place, and supermarkets obviously know this. This is one of the reasons most supermarkets stock so few whole chickens these days.1 So selling rotisserie chickens cheaply is just cutting their own throats. Why would they do that and lose money on the chicken?

So there must be something else going on. I’m not sure what, but I suspect there’s more to the story than just using up chickens that are approaching their sell-by date. Do I have any readers who work in supermarkets and can enlighten us?

1Not the only reason, or even the main reason, of course. The main reason is that most of us just don’t want to bother cooking a whole chicken these days.

UPDATE: The most popular guess in comments is that rotisserie chickens are a loss leader. Sure, you lose a dollar or two on each one, but you make up for it with the cole slaw and 2-liter sodas and so forth that everyone buys to go with them.

This is the most obvious explanation, and I’m totally willing to buy it. I just want to know if it’s true. Not a guess, but a confirmation from someone who actually knows if this is what’s going on. Anyone?

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Help Us Solve the Rotisserie Chicken Mystery

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Most Americans Think Racial Discrimination Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore

by CarlotaShirk Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday Pew released its latest “typology report,” which breaks down Americans into seven different groups. I’m a little skeptical of these kinds of clustering exercises, but I suppose they have their place. And one result in particular has gotten a lot of play: the finding that more than 80 percent of conservatives believe that blacks who can’t get ahead are responsible for their own condition.

But I think that misstates the real finding of Pew’s survey: everyone thinks blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition. With the single exception of solid liberals, majorities in every other group believe this by a 2:1 margin or more. That’s the takeaway here.

The other takeaway is that the news was a little different on the other questions Pew asked about race. The country is split about evenly on whether further racial progress is necessary, and large majorities in nearly every group continue to support affirmative action on college campuses. A sizeable majority of Americans may not believe that discrimination is the main reason blacks can’t get ahead, but apparently they still believe it’s enough of a problem to justify continuing efforts to help out.

Overall, though, this is not good news. It’s obvious that most Americans don’t really think discrimination is a continuing problem, and even their support for affirmative action is only on college campuses, where it doesn’t really affect them. If that question were about affirmative action in their own workplaces, I suspect support would plummet.

I don’t have any keen insights to offer about this. But like it or not, it’s the base on which we all have to work. Further racial progress is going to be very slow and very hard unless and until these attitudes soften up.

Continued:  

Most Americans Think Racial Discrimination Doesn’t Matter Much Anymore

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