There’s a fairly brief post, accompanied by a fact-filled slide show, by Alexander Eichler running over at HuffPo that gets my vote as an exceptionally important must-read, perhaps for the entire year, entitled: “Growing Number Of Americans Can't Afford Food, Study Finds.”
Say what you wish, but I truly get a sense this election cycle that our nation’s political dialogue--not just in the MSM, but throughout the blogosphere, and even here at DKos--is more removed from realities on Main Street than it’s ever been.
Here’s a somber and inconvenient truth which is very well-supported with annotations throughout Eichler’s piece: “…The economic recovery, in theory now more than two years old, has done little to keep millions of Americans out of poverty and deprivation. Incomes for many haven't kept pace with the cost of living, and for a large swath of the country, things today are as bad as ever, or worse…”
The HuffPo headline’s about “food,” but it’s a fact-based post about the comprehensive extent of growing poverty and income inequality throughout our country, today.
Growing Number Of Americans Can't Afford Food, Study Finds
Alexander Eichler
Huffington Post
First Posted: 02/28/2012 6:56 pm Updated: 02/29/2012 12:55 pm
Here in the United States, growing numbers of people can't afford that most basic of necessities: food.
More Americans said they struggled to buy food in 2011 than in any year since the financial crisis, according to a recent report from the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit research group. About 18.6 percent of people -- almost one out of every five -- told Gallup pollsters that they couldn't always afford to feed everyone in their family in 2011.
One might assume that number got smaller wrapped up with the national unemployment rate falling for several consecutive months. In actuality, the reverse proved true: the number of people who said they couldn't afford food just kept rising and rising…
…
…About 45 percent of people in the U.S. have reported not being able to cover their basic living expenses, including food, shelter and transportation, according to the group Wider Opportunities for Women.
The official poverty rate is about 15 percent, but over two-fifths of Americans have so little saved that one financial emergency is all it would take to put them in poverty, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development…
Let me “translate” one of the statistics, mentioned above, into hard numbers:
Over 140,000,000 Americans “…have reported not being able to cover their basic living expenses, including food, shelter and transportation…”
As I’ve stated it numerous times in this community, as far as our economy’s concerned, the very mention of the word, “recovery,” is an affront to almost half of this country’s population. To them, it’s still a full-blown Depression.
(We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.)
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h/t to Barry Ritholtz
How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality
Tali Sharot, Christoph W Korn & Raymond J Dolan
Nature Neuroscience
14, 1475–1479 (2011)
doi:10.1038/nn.2949
Published online 09 October 2011
Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.
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