On Thursday, March 3, Jennifer Lee (University of California, Irvine) and Min Zhou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and University of California, Los Angeles), authors of the 2015 RSF book The Asian American Achievement Paradox, will give a talk at Yale University on the research from their book.

In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Lee and Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants—which pundits have long attributed to unique cultural values. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the adult children of Chinese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees and survey data, Lee and Zhou bridge sociology and social psychology to correct this myth and explain how immigration laws, institutions, and culture interact to foster high achievement among certain Asian American groups.

The authors’ upcoming talk is sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University and will begin at 4pm on Thursday, March 3.

The latest issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science contains an article by former Visiting Scholar Michael Hout (University of California, Berkeley), based on research partly funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. During his time at the Foundation, Hout studied trends in social mobility in the U.S. since the 1970s, looking in particular at the decline in upward social mobility and the rise of downward social mobility.

In his new report for the Annals, Hout examines the effects of the Great Recession, and of growing income inequality in general, on the psychological well-being of Americans. The abstract states:

Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.

The Russell Sage Foundation has recently approved the following Presidential Authority awards in three program areas—Future of Work; Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration; and Social Inequality—as well as a conference for an upcoming issue of the RSF journal. The Foundation is also co-funding two new projects on the Affordable Care Act with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

RSF Journal Conference:

The Underground Gun Market
Philip J. Cook (Duke University) and Harold A. Pollack (University of Chicago)

For an upcoming issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, economist Philip J. Cook and public policy expert Harold A. Pollack will organize a symposium featuring nine invited articles based on the findings of the Multi-City Gun Project, a multi-disciplinary group of experts studying the sources of guns to criminal offenders.