For the last year, I've delved deeply into research on parenting and adolescent mental health, drawing on my work and formal study--nearly 20 years ago--in clinical psychology, which I did before studying economics.
ifstudies.org/blog/parenting… I'm very grateful that my colleagues at @Gallup for allowing me to develop and field this internally-funded survey of 6,643 parents and 1,580 teens. Today, I published what I consider to be the most important findings with @FamStudies.

As is widely known & discussed, U.S. male labor force participation rates have gradually fallen since 1960 (by ~0.14ppt per year) from 97% to 88.6%.

This has been called a "crisis" by Eberstadt and others & has been attributed to trade, technology, culture, & video games. . . A few points to consider.

1) Recent commentators ignore older data. US male lfp declined sharply during some of the countries most prosperous & innovate times (1920-1970)

There's a terrific paper out today in AER on the effects of inter-racial contact.

Students at the U of Cape Town are randomly assigned roommates, leading to multiracial room assignments. How does this exposure affect attitudes, behavior, & GPA?

pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10… White students assigned to a Black roommate significantly 1) increased friendship & social interactions with Black students 2) expressed greater comfort dating Black students 3) showed greater cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game 4) showed less implicit bias

@BrendanNyhan @deaneckles I've had papers using srvy data rejected at journals like PNAS b/c the scientists/econ reviewers did not believe srvy data correspond to obj reality. I would have loved to cite this paper @BrendanNyhan @deaneckles I made the point that surveys predict voting behavior and similar points to no avail.

Anyway, the test here was narrow: subj wellbeing. It is not obvious that:
"how awesome is your life" 10-super 0-not at all

yields valid, reliable, data that predicts what people care about

Econ lit says income inequality is driven by long-term upward trends in technology, trade, union decline, multi-national/super-star firm effects.

These things didn't change, but inequality stopped rising from 2012-present.

Perhaps, the "drivers" are actually confounds.

https://twitter.com/natewilmers/status/1577024107538894854

I made that argument in my book in 2019 without noting the flattening trend in income inequality growth.

Many of the "drivers" have the wrong sign when looked at empirically across countries or even just outside the USA.

How does family background drive college preparedness, attendance, and completion?

Blandin and Herrington develop a data-rich model to answer this in a new paper out in AEJ: Macro. They group children into 3 family types:
1) single-parents families with no college degree (1L)
2) Dual-parent families with no degree (2L)
3) Dual-parent families with at least 1 parent holding a degree (2H)

Children in #3 have much higher completion rates & gap is growing.

Very interesting data from this new report. I do, however, take issue with the analysis & interpretation of key points 1/

https://twitter.com/MollyKinder/status/1517234512958218240

The report shows profit went up by $33 bil (using various tables) in aggregate for the companies profiled, while worker compensation went up $27 bil we are told. That suggests most profits went to workers, a very different story than 2% of $1.5 tril

I have a few comments I'd like to make on the Mutz article: "Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote"
pnas.org/content/early/… 1) Her thesis is that threat of lost domination is the principle reason why so many white voters became nationalist between 2012 & 2016; She explains that media accounts of a minority white country, China’s rising power, and Obama were the principle causes