The lifespans of white Americans without high school diplomas are contracting, reversing the long-time trend of children living longer than their parents, according to a study by researchers including S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago and ISR researchers Toni Antonucci and James Jackson. White women without a diploma experienced the steepest decline, losing five years of life between 1990 and 2008. The new life span estimate: 73.5 years, compared with almost 84 years for white women with a college degree or more. According to a Sept. 20 article in The New York Times, researchers said reasons for the life expectancy drop could include prescription drug overdoses among the young, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, more obesity, and a lack of health insurance. Jackson said white women with little education may also engage in riskier behavior now than women of prior generations.

Pacific Islanders living in California are much more likely to smoke and be obese than other Californians, according to a study headed by ISR researcher Sela Panapasa. The study, featured in the Sept. 24 Los Angeles Times, found that about 46 percent of adult Pacific Islanders were smokers, compared to about 13 percent of other California adults, and that 23 percent of Pacific Islander adolescents had tried smoking cigarettes, compared to 3.5 percent of California teens. In addition, among Pacific Islanders, more than 80 percent of adults and more than half of teenagers were overweight or obese. Researchers conducted interviews among Tongans in the Bay Area and Samoans in Southern California. “By identifying the problem areas facing specific Pacific Islander communities, we can finally begin to chart a course to develop interventions that will help to reduce these health disparities and build healthy communities,” Panapasa said.

Rep. Paul Ryan is the first member of Generation X—those born between 1961 and 1981—to appear on a major party ticket, inspiring analysts to parse his stances for evidence of generational influences. For example, the 42-year-old Ryan is known to have a fondness for locally brewed beer and grunge music, according to an August 14 CNN article. But his conservative approach to fiscal policy, including his proposal for a partially privatized Medicare program, also speaks to the Gen X worry that social insurance programs will run out before members of their generation can benefit from them. Even Ryan’s lack of concern for the environment fits. CNN cited a recent ISR study showing that only 5 percent of Gen Xers said they are “alarmed” by climate change and only 18 percent “concerned.” “Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,” according to “The Generation X Report” author Jon Miller.

Low-income residents of Detroit and other major cities are being left behind as the economy slowly recovers, and the next generation of poor urban dwellers may face another cycle of poverty unless national leaders do more to provide new opportunities, according to an August 29 opinion piece in the Huffington Post. ISR researchers Sarah Burgard, Sheldon Danziger and Kristin Seefeldt warned that elements of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s proposed budget—such as cutting spending on food stamps and other programs to aid the poor, and reducing financial aid for lower income students—would further endanger the needy. “Fighting poverty in Detroit and across the country requires not just protecting existing programs that work, but also doing more to promote opportunities for the children and adults whose voices are not heard on the convention floors,” the researchers wrote.

A novel approach to lowering the national debt would encourage older American workers to stay on the job longer by eliminating social security payroll taxes, thus boosting their paychecks by about 10 percent. According to an August 28 report on CBS Detroit, ISR researchers Dan Silverman and John Laitner have found that if workers didn’t have to pay social security taxes from the age of 55 on, they would work 1.5 years longer on average, pay more income taxes, and help reduce the federal deficit. But for Social Security to break even, workers would have to pay about 1 percent higher payroll taxes a year until age 55. “People are living longer, healthier lives, and so far have opted to take most of that extra time as additional retirement rather than work,” Laitner said. “We are proposing a way of responding to this situation through targeted taxrate changes that would reward older workers for staying on the job and also benefit the economy as a whole.” Both researchers are affiliated with the U-M Retirement Research Center.

Internet surfers who linger on sites featuring violence and gore pay a price for looking at this kind of offensive subject matter, according to a May 31 article in the Toronto Sun. The Sun, writing about a recent “snuff” video associated with a high profile murder in Montreal, interviewed RCGD Director Rowell Huesmann about the impact of watching such films, which typically attract thousands of views. The more exposure people have to disturbing images, Huesmann said, the less they will respond with normal emotions of empathy. “There is no debate about the fact that being exposed to repeated images of blood and gore desensitizes us,” Huesmann told the Sun. Even fake scenes of violence can affect viewers, he said, and long and repeated exposure can dull observers to depictions of pain and suffering for years. “Desensitization is a fundamental property of the human nervous system,” Huesmann said.

Proposed cuts to Michigan’s state-run juvenile detention facilities bode ill for the system’s worst offenders, according to ISR researcher Rosemary Sarri. Sarri was quoted in a May 30 Michigan Radio piece describing a budget that would reduce funding to Michigan’s three publicly run facilities; the state’s 49 private facilities, however, would get a 7.5 percent increase. Private centers can turn away the most difficult youthful offenders, Sarri said, thus saddling public facilities with the hardest cases. “The overwhelming majority of youth that are currently in the [public] Green Oaks facility came from private institutions that had them transferred to the state because they could no longer deal with those clientele,” Sarri told Michigan Radio. If the public centers don’t have the funds to deal with this tough population, they’re more likely to send juveniles to adult prisons, which “are not a good place to grow into adulthood,” Sarri said.