With medical expenditures now totaling 15 percent of the national economy, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation, yet it lags behind other industrialized nations on many standard health indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality. James S. House, Robert F. Schoeni, George Kaplan, and Harold Pollack believe that this discrepancy between health spending and health outcomes may be partially explained by the health effects of non-health spending and policy.
With inequality on the rise over the past three decades, many have pointed to America's higher education system as a pathway to intergenerational improvement for the children of the poor and working class. But with high tuition rates and admissions policies often favoring the children of alumni, there is reason to doubt whether college-going is a realistic vehicle for the poor to achieve social progress.
Increasingly, legal scholars and empirical social scientists have collaborated to examine social issues and possible legal responses. However, little cooperative work thus far has been done on inequality. As a result, many social scientists have an overly simplistic view of the law’s ability to be put in place, interpreted effectively, and used to combat inequality. At the same time, legal scholars have a poor grasp on the empirical research done on inequality.
The combination of “work-first” legislation and a booming economy in the 1990s propelled many poor individuals into employment and off of welfare. But for all too many poor families, marginal gains in income were washed out by new costs for transportation, child care, health insurance, and housing. With support from the Foundation, Carolyn Heidrich, John Karl Scholz, and Thomas Kaplan will organize a multidisciplinary conference in September, 2007 to develop more effective policies for enhancing self-sufficiency and financial independence among the working poor.
Over the past two decades, an average of two million people immigrated each year to the United States and Europe. Their native countries receive billions of dollars and euros annually in remittances, in some cases accounting for up to thirty percent of these countries’ GDP. In North America and in Europe immigration is generally thought to ameliorate labor force shortages and provide demographic and economic vitality and expand the consumer and tax bases, even as it raises challenges.
A variety of changes have taken place in health care policy over the past three decades, but it is not clear whether the net effects of these changes have acted to moderate or magnify economic inequalities. Economist Claudia Schur and sociologists Marc Berk and Jacob Feldman will address this question by constructing a careful inventory of relevant health policy changes over the past thirty years. They will then estimate the distribution of costs and benefits to different population groups from major health related expenditures.
High income individuals are healthier and live longer than those at the bottom of the income distribution. Recent research reveals a similar connection between a family’s income and the health of its children. But does low household income cause poor child health outcomes, or are low income and poor child health both caused by some other factor? Is redistributing income to poor families an effective way to improve children’s health?
The correlation between socio-economic status (SES) and health has been demonstrated for virtually all health indicators, including mortality, incidence of disease, cardiovascular risk factors, and a variety of biomarkers. But what explains this powerful link? With support from the Foundation, economists Barbara Wolfe and William Evans and biomedical researcher Teresa Seeman will assemble a multidisciplinary working group to address the pathways that forge connections between SES and health.
In the past several decades, levels of income inequality in the United States have soared. Despite unprecedented disparities of wealth, government spending on social programs has nonetheless remained remarkably low. At the same time, private charitable contributions have surged. As a result, the United States is now exceptional in two strikingly different ways: it is the developed nation with the greatest share of private contributions but also the highest level of income inequality.
According to recent estimates, slightly less than a quarter of all American families have received inheritances or financially significant gifts from living relatives or friends. These transfers are unequally distributed: one study found that only 10 percent of families with net worth below $25,000 received any inheritances or gifts, compared with 45 percent of families with net worth above $1 million. Even more striking, the size of transfers received by the wealthy families was more than 25 times as large as the transfers received by the poorest families.