What are the ‘necessities of life’?

Posted on November 11, 2013 by tess

Talk to any politician – of whatever party – and they will tell you their polling suggests that being tough on welfare recipients is popular with the public. So what do we consider to be ‘poverty’? What do we think is a minimum standard of living?

Recent research from PSE UK, Poverty and Social Exclusion (Attitudes to necessities: are minimum standards becoming less generous?) suggests that we set the bar relatively high when it comes to what we see as a minimum acceptable standard of living, though there is some evidence that attitudes are hardening and we are becoming less generous as living standards generally are squeezed. The study provides a fascinating insight into what, as a society, we see as the necessities of life.

The starting point for the study is that what is ‘poverty’ shifts over time. As far back as 1968 Peter Townsend wrote, ‘Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary … in the societies in which they belong.’ Townsend’s normative approach was modified in the 1980s when Mack and Lansley developed the concept of ‘socially perceived necessities’. Their approach introduces the notion that only those things perceived by 50% or more of the population to be necessities should be included in a deprivation index (eg a car is the norm – 74% of us have one – but only 56% of people think a car is a necessity). And a notion of relative poverty, shifting over time, seems to be accepted by most of us.

So, what are we currently agreed is ‘a necessity’, and how much consensus is there? What is a minimum standard of living in Britain today?

There is a lot of agreement, across gender, social class, ethnicity, geographical location and occupation about what is – and what is not – a necessity in this day and age, and the most heavily supported items relate to what traditionally have been seen as basic needs – shelter, food and clothing.

For adults, the top three items are:

Heating to warm living areas of the home (96% of us agree that this is a necessity)
Damp-free home 94%
Two meals a day 91%

And for children, the top four are:

Warm winter coat 97%
Fresh fruit and vegetables once a day 96%
New, properly fitting shoes 93%
Three meals a day 93%

There is also very strong support for a range of other items relating to social participation for both adults and children:

For adults, activities relating to social obligations rank highly:

Visit friends or family in hospital or other institutions 90%
Celebrations on special occasions 80%
Attend weddings, funerals and other such occasions 79%

For children, a wide range of activities rank highly:

Child celebration on special occasions 91%
Child hobby or leisure activity 88%
Toddler groups or nursery or play group at least once a week for pre-school aged children 87%
Children’s clubs or activities such as drama or football training 74%
Many of the child items gaining high levels of support related to developmental or educational opportunities:
Garden or outdoor space to play safely 92%
Books at home suitable for their age 92%
Suitable place at home to study or do homework 89%
Indoor games suitable for their age group 81%

For adults there is also strong support for a wide range of consumer goods and for the financial resources to maintain them:

Replace or repair electrical goods 86%
Washing machine 82%
Telephone 77%
Household contents insurance 70%·

But there is some evidence that the harsher economic climate is having an impact. In all previous surveys, a ‘holiday away from home not staying with relatives’ has been seen as a necessity for both adults and children, yet it is no longer seen as a necessity for adults; and being able to spend a small amount of money on yourself has dropped from 61% in 1999 to 42% in 2012, when the survey was conducted.

For children, 70% of us think access to a computer and internet is necessary for homework, but only 8% of the public thinks an mp3 player or i-pod is a necessity and only 6% designer or brand name trainers.

Another shift is the continuing hardening of attitudes amongst younger people, it looks as if younger people are rather less generous than older people (a trend first noticed in an earlier survey in 1999, and the gap has widened in this survey).

There is a lot more fascinating data in this survey – check it out!

On yer bike? Probably……

Posted on October 28, 2013 by tess

The medicalisation of disease means that lots of time and money is spent on researching the effectiveness of pharmaceutical options, but very little attention is directed at researching non medical interventions such as exercise and healthy eating.

When LSE’s Huseyin Naci and his colleague, Professor John Ioannidis from the Stanford University School of Medicine, were comparing the mortality benefits associated with drug and exercise interventions in coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure and pre-diabetes, they found that exercise appears to be as effective as phamacalogical interventions.

However, before we stop taking our pills, emptying our medicine cabinets, and hitting the gym – they advise us to look at their study more closely.

“Our study is not without limitations”, writes Huseyin Naci in the LSE Health and Social Care blog. “Most importantly, there is a significant asymmetry in the existing body of scientific evidence on the mortality benefits of drug and exercise interventions for common diseases, demonstrating the paucity of data on the effectiveness of exercise interventions in scientific studies. It is possible that such an asymmetry influenced our findings…Our findings reflect the bias against testing exercise interventions and highlight the changing landscape of medical research, which appears to increasingly favour pharmaceutical interventions over lifestyle modification strategies”.

Naci and Ionnaides suggest that we have medicalised common conditions, and the current medical literature points clinicians in the direction of pharmaceutical options. “The current state of medical research gives the false impression to patients, clinicians, and other decision makers that pharmacological interventions are superior to non-pharmacological alternatives, and hence hinders evidence-based decision-making in clinical practice”.

So it looks as if exercise is as good or better than pills for some conditions, and there is certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that is the case, but there will need to be a lot more research before we can say for sure.

For the full article, see Naci H, Ioannidis JPA (2013) Comparative effectiveness of exercise and drug interventions on mortality outcomes: A meta-epidemiological study, British Medical Journal, 347, f5577.

References

Naci H, Cylus J, Vandoros S, Sato A, Perampaladas K (2012) Raising the bar for market authorisation of new drugs, British Medical Journal, 345, e4261.

Sorenson C, Naci H, Cylus J, Mossialos E (2011) Evidence of comparative efficacy should have a formal role in European drug approvals, British Medical Journal, 343, d4849.

Huseyin Naci is a doctoral candidate in Pharmaceutical Policy and Economics within LSE Health, and Thomas O. Pyle Fellow in Population Medicine at Harvard University. h.naci@lse.ac.uk

Education for all?

Posted on October 23, 2013 by tess

‘The language of equality is being lost to public discourse,’ according to a new report from ROTA a social policy organisation focused on issues that affect Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities

The report, which is being published as a discussion document, has come out of ROTA’s Shaping the Future seminar series which considered some of the main challenges facing London’s minority ethnic children and young people and their families. It is shocking to discover how many of the findings in this report echo those in the Swan Report (Education for All) of 1985 – stereotyping in many schools is limiting educational opportunities, and African-Caribbean pupils are almost four times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the school population as a whole. Indeed, in some local areas where the seminars were held, this disproportion was even more severe. Little wonder that a number of Black-led organisations (such as Generating Genius, in the photo) have been set up in an an attempt to redress the balance.

Included in the findings were

Stop and Search, the most visible manifestation of discriminatory practices within the criminal justice system, persistently and disproportionately affects Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people
African-Caribbean boys are at risk of more acute racism, often linked to unfairness and a lack of transparency in behaviour management systems in schools and in the criminal justice system.
Early, negative labelling of Black and minority students has a damaging effect upon educational progress, but social stereotyping and cultural assumptions about Black pupils can be embedded in schools.
Because of stereotypical associations with ‘gangs’ or ‘danger’ Black male students often feel criminalised and treated with suspicion, leading to ‘overvisibility’ and unwarranted accusations that may lead to exclusion.

ROTA is keen to receive feedback on the report.

The photograph was taken at an award ceremony organised by Generating Genius, an organisation based at University College London that works alongside a wide range of partner schools and universities, with hundreds of high-achieving children and young people from challenging backgrounds where there has been no tradition of entry to higher education.

Press freedom in South Africa

Posted on October 7, 2013 by tess

Nic Dawes [@NicDawes] (until last month editor of South Africa’s Mail and Guardian newspaper) has a formidable reputation as an investigative journalist and campaigner for press freedom. His last 2 years at the Mail and Guardian have been marked by tough struggles between leading South African journalists and the South African government,

As he prepared for a new challenge at the Hindustan Times in India, he talked to Rachael Jolley, Editor of Index on Censorship magazine about the importance of social media, which he said ‘outsources part of the editing function to the wider community’, the moves by the ANC to put in place a Media Appeal Tribunal with political appointees, a secrecy bill that would have made it almost impossible for the public or the media to uncover evidence about corruption or to protect whistleblowers, and the way the Marikana Mine massacre eventually hit the headlines, though the Mail and Guardian had covered the appalling conditions at the mine a year earlier.

Despite his concerns, he says that the threats to press freedom in South Africa must be seen in an international context of growing use and abuse of secrecy legislation including in those established democracies like the US, and UK and Canada – this is emphatically not just a South Africal problem.

A full article by Rachael Jolley drawn from the interview, Mandela’s legacy too easily dismissed is to be found in the current edition of Index on Censorship

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Rational Parliament launched

Posted on September 26, 2013 by tess

Are you sick of the overheated, braying politics of Westminster, where there is a lot of heat, but not much light?

What’s the alternative? Try this:

A rational parliament would be ruled by free thinking and would respect the balance between personal values and scientific research. It would value independent reasoning above organised thinking, such as uncritical political party allegiance. It would debate current live topics. It would be open to reform. It should be configured in a horseshoe and at least two individuals who have conducted publicly funded academic research on the topic would have to be in attendance. Every member would have the same right to speak, and no one should make a personal attack on a fellow member of the speaker.

In its debates, claims of research findings should be supported with references to academic literature and provided on request. Members proposing a motion should take no more than five minutes to do so and any member who receive payment related to the views they take on a topic must declare such payments.

Well, Pod Academy’s very own Adam Smith (producer of many of our science podcasts) has launched such a Rational Parliament, and it held its first debate earlier this month – on genetically modified foods (the attached podcast gives you a flavour of the opening presentations). The first sitting was characterised by live tweeting about the debate (with all #GMatRP tweets projected onto a huge screen at the front of the hall), and by the services of a ‘rhetoric officer’, Johnny Unger, a linguist from Lancaster University, who pointed out the rhetorical devices people were using to persuade others. In the end the following motion was passed:

This House agrees that GM food has a contribution to make in meeting global food demand.

Future topics are likely to include badgers and bovine TB, alcohol minimum pricing, wind farms, climate change and education – all highly controversial topics which would benefit from the Rational Parliament’s ‘let’s look at the evidence and the ethics’ approach.

If you are interested in attending the next RatParl, either as an MRP (member of the rational parliament) or an observer in the gallery, just sign up at the ratparl website, and follow them on twitter at @ratparl .

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Flexible working: An answer to the changing economy AND work/life balance?

Posted on September 14, 2013 by tess

Federica di Lascio writes: NATCEN [the National Centre for Social Research, UK] recently held a panel focusing on the relationship between flexible working and work-life balance. It was chaired by Dalia Ben-Galim, Associate Director of IPPR.

Starting from some recent research (Workplace Employment Relation Study, 2011), and comparing them with older ones (The Time of our Lives; 2003, 2008), the panelists agreed that there is actually a strong business case for flexible working, even though it is still considered simply a staff benefit.

The speakers underlined the reality of the new workplace – looking at global competition (with businesses facing increasing demands for flexibility and efficiency), the changing labour market, the changing size and structure of businesses, and also the changing needs of staff, such as looking after older relatives as we become an aging society.

According to research, the majority of UK managers would consider the possibility of introducing flexible working arrangements (part-time, compressed hours, working at home, etc.), but the risk they fear – a decrease in productivity – looms lager than the advantages. Indeed there are now more employers who believe it is solely up to the employee to balance home and work than there were in 2004

Nevertheless, especially for women – who still bear the greatest responsibility for caring for children and elderly relatives – flexible working would enable them to combine a professional career, productivity and social care.

But as panelists noted, a major problem is the lack of welfare security for flexible workers. This tends to mean that flexible options that result in reduced hours are less popular than those that enable employees to craft a way of working that fits their lives (such as being able to work from home)

Ideally, priorities should reflect the aspirations and needs of everyone – from the bottom to the top, and should be built on the recognition of the changing business environment. There should be help made available to businesses, and information campaigns. Flexible working can be good for the economy, and for the wellbeing of workers. It is especially possible within small businesses, where the scale enables a more personal approach, providing potentially greater flexibility in considering workers as people and not mere numbers.

The challenge is to help employers understand the real advantages of flexible work, enabling their employees to craft a way of working that combines career and private needs – and overcoming employers’ fears of ‘certain loss’. And there is another challenge, too, the challenge at the State level to make law favourable, especially in guaranteeing welfare security to flexible workers. You can find more information from the seminar and about NatCen here. And here a short podcast with extracts from the seminar by clicking this link: Is there a business case for flexible working_edit3

The panel

Speakers at the seminar were Jenny Chanfreau (Senior Researcher at NatCen), Fiona Cannon (Director of Inclusion and Diversity at Lloyds Banking Group), Michael Mealing (Chair at Employment Policy Unit, Federation of Small Businesses) and Sarah Veale (Head at Equality and Employment Rights Department, TUC).

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Education in Vietnam and India – huge differences in achievement

Posted on September 10, 2013 by tess

Despite having broadly the same GDP per capita, levels of educational achievement in Vietnam and India are poles apart.

New research from the Young Lives research programme at the Department of International Development at Oxford University has discovered that, although there is massive importance accorded to education for children in developing countries in the Millennium Development Goals, much education provision around the world remains worryingly poor.

In India, for example, 47% of ten year-olds are unable to add even two-digit numbers and 68% of grade three children in government schools can’t read a task designed for first-year pupils. And the top 10% of school students in India are at the age-appropriate level and the bottom 10% appear to learn nothing in school at all.

But Vietnam provides a notable counter example, and shows what is possible – about 19 out of every 20 ten year-olds can add four-digit numbers, 85% can subtract fractions and 81% are able to find X in a simple equation.

Given that education is probably the single-most vital element, in the modern world, in terms of how we strengthen our economies, how we build sustainable economies and economies that can grow and sustain their populations, the mismatch between much of the current education that’s on offer and what we actually need for our future societies is a really grave problem. It’s a grave problem for children and their families, but it’s also a problem for society at large.

Amanda Barnes has interviewed Professor Jo Boyden, director of the Young Lives research programme for Pod Academy. In the podcast they look at the differences in attainment between pupils in Vietnam and India, explore some of the reasons and look at what might be done to improve the quality of education – listen to the podcast here.

Sexuality After Genetics: the new science of gender

Posted on September 6, 2013 by tess

Conflict rages between those who believe that gender is socially constructed and those who argue that it is biologically determined. But now geneticists propose that we can change our sexual characteristics through lifestyle choices. Is this misguided hype, or the promise of a brave new world?

This debate from the Institute of Arts and Ideas (a charitable organisation committed to changing the current cultural landscape through the pursuit of big ideas, boundary-pushing thinkers and challenging debate) attempts to answer that question. Featuring Darwinist philosopher, Helena Cronin, the New Humanist’s Caspar Melville and Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, Tim Spector, the video challenges preconceived notions of whether sex is biologically binary and whether we can actually alter our gene function through behaviour.

Helen Cronin pointed out that baby girls prefer faces and baby boys choose a mechanical mobile. Why? According to Helen it’s all down to 800 million years of evolution, “If you reproduce sexually (rather than through cloning) you have to divide your reproductive investment between competing for mates and caring for offspring. In all sexually reproductive species, males do more competing and females do more caring.”

Tim Spector said he used to believe that, and still goes along with a lot of it, but his study of identical twins has changed his mind because “they are discordant for their sexual preference.”

It’s a fascinating debate – take a look at the video below, and follow the Institute of Art and Ideas for more fascinating videos at @IAI_TV

http://iai.tv/video/sexuality-after-genetics

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Author Archives: tess

On yer bike? Probably……

Rational Parliament launched

Flexible working: An answer to the changing economy AND work/life balance?

Sexuality After Genetics: the new science of gender