August 26, 2024
Letters and Science Magazine
By Alex Russell
Dominic Arreola started taking classes in Chinese in community
college. He quickly gained a passion for the language and the
culture, and by the time he transferred CSU Long Beach he was
steeped in the history and tensions between China and the United
States. He worried more and more about the potential for
war.
ROCKY Hill, Conn.—Some of the country’s savviest economic trend
predictors spend all day answering call-center phones.
Operators at 211 emergency helplines raised alarm bells about
a baby formula shortage ahead of the headlines about
empty shelves. And they knew that families were defaulting on
their mortgages before the subprime collapse in
2008.
Just as the Republicans’ default solution to any domestic problem
is “lower taxes,” Democrats insist on “more education, especially
college education.” But this obsession with education is
misplaced, and in some cases actually harmful to the project of
building “a more perfect union.” A better tactic for Democrats
would be to raise wages through government policies, especially
those aimed at workers without college educations.
In 2022, Yolo County Health and Human Services Agency(HHSA)
launched the Yolo County Basic Income (YOBI)project and engaged
the UC Davis Center for Regional Change to evaluate the project
via the collection of survey data from YOBI participants. The
YOBI project was designed to address the county’s poverty, which
is ~25%higher than the California rate reported in the 2021
Census.
US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are to
meet on Wednesday in the San Francisco Bay area. The encounter
will be only their second face-to-face meeting during the Biden
presidency. Trade, technology, the Israel-Gaza war and Taiwan are
among the issues likely to be on the agenda. Relations between
the two countries deteriorated earlier this year.
March 10, 2023
UC Davis College of Letters and Science
By Kathleen Holder
Marianne Page can count numerous accomplishments during her
career as an economics professor in the College of Letters and
Science at UC Davis, but none like an honor recently bestowed by
a Napa Valley winemaker.
December 2, 2022
The Davis Enterprise By Chancellor Gary May
Homelessness is one of the most defining and troubling challenges
of our times. According to a report by CalMatters, a
nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization, about 173,800
unhoused people are living in California. That’s an increase of
more than 22,000 since 2019.
December 2, 2022 – Three CPIR research affiliates have been featured in a new article in the ‘Ask the Expert’ series published by the UC Davis Office of Research.
A historic learning loss was reported this week, showing the
impacts of virtual learning during the pandemic. Nearly 500,000
fourth and eighth graders took tests nationwide and while no
single state saw an increase in test scores, Black and Latino
students were hit the hardest.
California’s 2022 Smarter Balanced assessment from tests taken in
the Spring of 2022 showed a decline in English Language Arts
and Math score testing.
Results for Northern California school districts showed dips from
2.91% to 8.18%.
UC Davis Health Advancing Health Equity, Diversity and
Inclusion Blog
August 17, 2022
At the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research,
we conduct, support, promote and disseminate cutting-edge
academic research related to what we regard as two of the most
pressing and urgent issues facing the United States today:
poverty and inequality.
The 2020 Census revealed that 28.4% of the people from Yolo
County have an income below 150% of the poverty level. The
poverty rate in Yolo County is at 20.9%, according to a 2022
press release. Experts and researchers from UC Davis have weighed
in on the rising crisis of poverty in Yolo County, emphasizing
the need for county action.
The Rural Sociological Society will honor Professor Lisa
Pruitt on Sunday, Aug. 1 with its Excellence in Research
award.
The awards ceremony will take place virtually as part of the
society’s 83rd Annual Meeting. Pruitt also will participate
in conference panels.
The society’s Awards and Endowment Committee has lauded Pruitt’s
contributions to rural research and scholarship as “truly
unique,” noting that Pruitt has “brought important attention to
rural legal issues.”
UC Davis College of Letters & Sciences
June 17, 2020
Camelia Hostinar, an assistant professor of psychology, will
receive an American Psychological Association early career award
for her research investigating how poverty influences children’s
development.
The APA’s developmental psychology Division 7 recently
selected Hostinar for a 2022 Boyd McCandless
Award, which recognizes young scientists who make exceptional
contributions to the field during the first eight years of
their academic career.
As debate continues over how to complete the Affordable
Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, it’s important to remember the
crucial role Medicaid plays in births in our country. Medicaid
covers 4 in 10 births, and there’s a renewed push
to expand Medicaid coverage for new moms. There’s also
growing research showing that for kids, the benefits of Medicaid
coverage persist well into adulthood, in the form of better
health and higher earnings.
A profound change has been proposed by the Biden
administration for U.S. immigration law. Following up
on candidate Joe Biden’s promise of immigration reform
legislation, the U.S. Citizenship Act would eliminate the term
“alien” from the U.S. immigration laws.
The country’s bedrock immigration law, the Immigration and
Nationality Act, would be amended to say that “[t]he term
‘noncitizen’ means any person not a citizen or national of the
United States.”
It’s no secret that rural and urban people have grown apart
culturally and economically in recent years. A quick
glance at the media – especially social media – confirms an
ideological gap has also widened.
City folks have long been detached from rural
conditions. Even in the 1700s, urbanites labeled rural
people as backward or different. And lately, urban views of
rural people have deteriorated.
In a stinging blow to the Trump administration, Thursday’s
Supreme Court decision found the administration’s attempt to
terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program,
known as DACA, was “arbitrary and capricious.”
Maricruz Ladino spends long nights in a freezing lettuce cooler,
inspecting and packaging pre-washed salad mixes. She usually
starts her shift around 4 p.m., after the pickers are done in the
fields, working until at least 2 or 3 in the morning.
With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating in March,Congress
scrambled to design a more than $2 trillion economic package that
would prop up private companies, keep the financial system
liquid, and, at the same time, provide financial help to
individuals whose income was evaporating as the result of states
issuing stay-at-home orders and temporarily shuttering
nonessential businesses.
How you survive the coronavirus crisis may depend on your ZIP
code. Even before the Bay Area shuttered schools and parks,
businesses and restaurants, the region was known for its vast
economic divides.
SACRAMENTO — Continuing his commitment to strengthen,
innovate and grow California’s economy, Governor Gavin Newsom
today announced the creation of his Council of Economic Advisors.
The Council will advise the Governor and Director of the
California Department of Finance Keely Martin Bosler on
wide-ranging economic issues and deepen relationships between the
Administration and academic researchers to keep California moving
toward an economy that is inclusive, resilient, and sustainable.
During economic downturns the social safety net can play a
critical role for families as well as for the economy more
broadly. Social programs can protect vulnerable families by
making it easier for them to continue to meet basic needs. The
social safety net can also act as a fiscal stimulus — increasing
government spending when other spending is in retreat — and, in
so doing, prevent further job loss. However, over the past couple
of decades there has been an important shift in U.S.
A new rule to restrict legal immigration, published by the Trump
administration this month, is sowing confusion and anxiety even
among immigrants not directly affected by it, as fear spreads
faster than facts, immigration and health policy experts say.
The rule would allow the federal government to more easily deny
permanent residency status, popularly known as green cards, or
entry visas to applicants who use — or are deemed likely to use —
federally funded food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid.
Caitlin Patler, an assistant professor of sociology, whose
research focuses on migration, inequality and
“crimmigration,” recently received the Pacific Sociological
Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Sociological
Perspectives Award.
The award recognized “To Reveal or Conceal: How Diverse
Undocumented Youth Navigate Legal Status Disclosure,” the paper
she published in the association’s journal last year.
Growing up in impoverished urban neighborhoods more than doubles
your chances over the average person of developing a
psychosis-spectrum disorder by the time you reach middle
adulthood, according to a new UC Davis and Concordia University
study of nearly 4,000 families who were monitored over 30
years.
In his first 100 days as California’s new governor, what
programs should Newsom prioritize to create a kind of New
Deal against economic inequality? We asked three experts in
the fields of inequality and poverty for their ideas.
CPR Faculty Affiliate Cassandra Hart’s work on
teacher-student race and academic outcomes featured in the New
York Times. From the article:
“When black children had a black teacher between third and fifth
grades, boys were significantly less likely to later drop out of
high school, and both boys and girls were more likely to attend
college….The effect was strongest for children from low-income
families.”
Losing a parent is one of the most profound stressors a child can
experience; it threatens the child’s safety and causes a
heightened state of “fight or flight.” This type of stressor
rapidly increases the child’s heart rate and blood pressure.
Stress hormones like epinephrine and cortisol flood the system.
Fear and panic take over. Decades of science suggest
that these separations are traumatic and likely to cause lifelong
mental and physical health problems.
CPR Faculty Affiliate in Sociology Chris Smith was interviewed on
Capital Public Radio about her research on police violence. She
joined Insight host Beth Ruyak to talk about her research to
build the PACOTE database, which stands for Police and Civilian
Outcomes of Threatening Encounters, which aims to help determine
why some threatening encounters end fatally when others do not.
Caitlin Patler, a CPR Faculty Affiliate in Sociology has been
selected as a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow for
2018. The fellowships provide funding and professional
development to early-career researchers whose projects address
critical issues in the history, theory, or practice of formal or
informal education, at the national and international levels.
The Academy believes the fellowships enhance the future of
education research by developing new talent in the many
disciplines represented by the scholars selected.
Faculty Affiliate Marianne Bitler has been appointed Chair of a
National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Panel to
improve consumer data on food and nutrition policy research
for the Economic Research Service, USDA.
There’s plenty of financial advice available for people with a
little extra money to spend — put more money in your 401(k),
create a rainy-day fund, start planning for your child’s college
education. But where do you go for tips if you’re struggling to
make ends meet?
Ann Huff Stevens of the UC Davis Center for Poverty
Research points out that advice often given to the poor
tends to miss the mark and doesn’t address some of the
root causes that push people into poverty and keep them there.
No group is as linked to poverty in the American mind as single
mothers. For decades, politicians, journalists and scholars have
scrutinized the reasons poor couples fail to use contraception,
have children out of wedlock and do not marry.
The reality, however, is that single motherhood is not the reason
we have unusually high poverty in the United States, compared
with other rich democracies.
In March, researchers at the University of California published a
pioneering study that links the “legitimizing effect” of the DACA
program with participants’ improved psychological well-being in
California. The state has, by far, the largest population of
beneficiaries, 223,000 people out of nearly 800,000 DACA
recipients nationwide.
New research suggests programs aimed at helping low-income U.S.
children, such as Head Start early childhood education and
Medicaid health coverage, may have benefits not only for
participating children but for their children as well.
In a stark reminder of the damage done by the Great Recession and
of the modest recovery that followed, the median American
household only last year finally earned more than it did in 1999
and in effect boosting more people out of poverty.
Five days earlier, his mother had spent the last of her
disability check on bologna, cheese, bread and Pepsi. Two days
earlier, he had gone outside and looked at the train tracks that
wind between the coal mines and said, “I don’t know how I’m going
to get out of this.” One day earlier, the family dog had
collapsed from an unnamed illness, and, without money for a
veterinarian, he had watched her die on the porch. And now it was
Monday morning, and Tyler McGlothlin, 19, had a plan.
Both proposed versions of the Republican health care bill—the
American Health Care Act (AHCA) and the Better Care
Reconciliation Act (BCRA)–create an option for states to receive
Medicaid funds in the form of a block grant (in the BCRA, the
Medicaid Flexibility Program). The lessons from welfare reform
can provide valuable insights into the potential impact of
Medicaid block grants: namely, states may have a considerable
incentive to pursue block grants, because they pose an attractive
opportunity to cut state spending and allocate Medicaid dollars
for other uses should the state desire that outcome.
At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street
in the small Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception
Church keeps a handwritten record of major ceremonies. Over the
last decade, according to these sacramental registries, the
church has held twice as many funerals as baptisms.
Research on depression in adolescents in recent years has focused
on how the physical brain and social experiences interact. A new
University of California, Davis, study, however, shows that
adolescents with large hippocampal volume were more, or less,
susceptible to feelings of depression depending on how unsafe —
or conversely — protected they felt in their home and community
environments.
STOKE-ON-TRENT in northern England is home to the world’s
second-oldest professional football club, Stoke City FC. Founded
in 1863, it enjoyed its heyday in the mid-1970s, when the club
came close to winning the top division. The playing style was
described by its manager, Tony Waddington, as “the working man’s
ballet”. These days the flair is often provided by players from
far afield. More than half the first-team squad comes from
outside Britain, mostly from other parts of Europe. But that is
about as far as Europhilia in Stoke goes. In June’s referendum on
Britain’s European Union membership, the city voted strongly for
Brexit.
With roots in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania, years as first
lady of Arkansas and a 2000 Senate campaign that featured a
“listening tour” of small-town New York, it’s not surprising that
Hillary Clinton’s campaign website has a full page devoted to
helping the rural poor, including a jobs and economic development
plan.
Last year marked the greatest improvement in the typical
American family’s finances on record, according to a
new annual report from the Census Bureau, especially for the
working poor.
