This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

For years Lee Ann Fujii of the University of Toronto has focused in depth on a subject that most people would prefer to avoid: graphic displays of violence. A 2013-2014 Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, Fujii’s current research examines violent incidents in three disparate geographical regions in order to form a theory of why people participate in killings and atrocities within their own communities.

The three episodes that Fujii examines are a 1992 massacre of Muslim men in Bosnia, the mob lynching of a black man named George Armwood in Maryland in 1933, and the killing of a prominent Tutsi family during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Though these occurrences span both time and geography, Fujii’s research shows how each instance constitutes what she calls a performative violent display—an act of violence intended to communicate a message to various audiences. How do violent displays differ from ordinary violence? Fujii argues that violent displays shift and transform social reality, opening a space for participants to act in ways they normally would not and fostering opportunities for participants to enact and define new identities. Violent displays, she argues, leave a mark.

On Wednesday, December 4, President Obama gave a speech on economic opportunity that addressed the stalling of economic mobility in the U.S. Calling the steadily widening gap between rich and poor “the defining challenge of our time,” Obama invoked the reforms of his predecessors, including programs implemented by Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, as models for action to address the problem. Among other solutions, he proposed raising the minimum wage, closing corporate tax loopholes, and the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act as methods of alleviating hardship and raising Americans out of economic distress.

Obama also stressed the importance of early life opportunities for children, stating, “By the time she turns three years old, a child born into a low-income home hears 30 million fewer words than a child from a well-off family, which means by the time she starts school she’s already behind, and that deficit can compound itself over time.” These remarks echo the research on educational inequality presented in the recent RSF book Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances edited by Greg J. Duncan of Northwestern University and Richard Murnane of Harvard University. The most ambitious study of educational inequality to date, the book analyzes how social and economic conditions surrounding schools affect school performance and children’s educational achievement, and finds—as Obama asserted—that rising inequality may now be compromising schools’ functioning, and with it the promise of equal opportunity in America. For example, as the graph below shows, research by contributor Sean Reardon shows that the gap between rich and poor children’s math and reading achievement scores is much larger than it was fifty years ago, and now surpasses the disparity between black and white students.

With each passing Thanksgiving, retailers inaugurate the holiday season with increasingly larger displays and deals. The past few years have seen the introduction of “Cyber Monday” as an extension of Black Friday, as well as longer lines and more advertisements in the lead-up to the notorious weekend of steep discounts. This year, several major retailers including Walmart and Best Buy opted not to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to begin their sales, and instead kicked off Black Friday on Thanksgiving afternoon.

As we head full-force into the holidays, a new report by Ricardo Perez-Truglia, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, provides some timely and valuable insight into conspicuous consumption in the U.S. A Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Department of Economics, Perez-Truglia argues that people use conspicuous consumption of market goods (such as clothing and jewelry) to signal their wealth and thereby increase the probability of obtaining non-market goods (such as admiration). The report abstract states:

Perez-Truglia is the first to exploit this relationship to measure the market value of those non-market goods by using a revealed-preference approach. He estimates a signaling model using nationally representative data on consumption in the U.S. He then uses this model to obtain welfare implications and perform a counterfactual analysis. His estimates suggest that for each dollar spent on clothing and cars, the average household obtains approximately 35 cents in net benefits from non-market goods.

January 8, 2014, marks the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of “unconditional War on Poverty.” Yet 15 percent of Americans live in poverty today, and no presidential administration or Congress since the Johnson era has made fighting poverty a top priority.

Exactly fifty years after President Johnson’s declaration, you are invited to join us for a forum that will offer diverse perspectives on the effects of anti-poverty policies in the United States in areas such as educational attainment, employment, earnings and living standards, and health over the past five decades and in the years to come. The event, sponsored by the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, will focus on research highlighted in a new book, Legacies of the War on Poverty (Russell Sage Foundation, September 2013). The panel will feature a discussion among the book’s editors and commentators from across the political spectrum who will address policy interventions that grew out of the War on Poverty and take a fresh look at strategies to fight poverty and promote opportunity.

This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which highlights some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.

What might heighten your emotional responses to these pictures?

Try willpower depletion. In his ongoing research, Roy Baumeister, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University and a current RSF Visiting Scholar, demonstrates the ways in which human willpower operates like a muscle, including showing fatigue after exertion. When willpower is depleted, subjects exhibit a number of interesting behaviors, including amplified emotional responses to both negative and positive images.

Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza have published an article—“A Broken Public? Americans’ Responses to the Great Recession”—in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review. The paper, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation’s Great Recession Initiative, examines why support for income transfer policies among the American public declined between 2008 and 2010. Here is the abstract:

Did Americans respond to the recent Great Recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity, an expectation of state-of-the-art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion? Or did the recession erode support for government activism, in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect? We find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010, yet both fixed-effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy-attitude formation. What accounts for these surprising developments? We consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes. Analyzing the General Social Surveys panel, our results suggest political partisanship has been central. Gallup and Evaluations of Government and Society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government overreach, in which federal programs adopted during the recession and the Obama presidency propelled voters away from government. We note implications for theoretical models of opinion formation, as well as directions for partisanship scholarship and interdisciplinary research on the Great Recession.

The Association of Public Policy and Analysis Management (APPAM) recently announced RSF Visiting Scholar Jane Waldfogel as its new president-elect. A professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, Waldfogel’s current research focuses on work-family policies, improving the measurement of poverty, and understanding social mobility across countries.  In her role on the leadership council of APPAM, she will oversee their 2014 Fall Research Conference.

Waldfogel is currently spending the 2013-2014 academic year in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation as part of a working group with Bruce Bradbury, Miles Corak, and Elizabeth Washbrook. The team will write a book on the transmission of inequality across generations, comparing the development of children in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. to analyze differences in school achievement among children of different socioeconomic status in these four countries. They will also examine whether achievement gaps between rich and poor children are related to differences between countries in public policies, private resources, and educational institutions.