In 1872 the U.S. economy was growing as the young nation industrialized and expanded westward. Then in the autumn, a sudden shock paralyzed social and economic life. It was an energy crisis of sorts, but not a shortage of fossil fuels. Rather, the cause was a virus that spread among horses and mules from Canada to Central America.

For centuries horses had provided essential energy to build and operate cities. Now the equine flu made clear just how important that partnership was. When infected horses stopped working, nothing worked without them. The pandemic triggered a social and economic paralysis comparable to what would happen today if gas pumps ran dry or the electric grid went down.

In an era when many looked forward to replacing the horse with the promising new technologies of steam and electricity, the horse flu reminded Americans of their debt to these animals. As I show in my new book, “A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement,” this reckoning fueled a nascent but fragile reform movement: the crusade to end animal cruelty.

A world suddenly ‘unhorsed’

The equine influenza first appeared in late September in horses pastured outside of Toronto. Within days most animals in the city’s crowded stables caught the virus. The U.S. government tried to ban Canadian horses, but acted too late. Within a month border towns were infected, and the “Canadian horse disease” became a North American epidemic. By December the virus reached the U.S. Gulf Coast, and in early 1873 outbreaks occurred in West Coast cities.

The flu’s symptoms were unmistakable. Horses developed a rasping cough and fever; ears drooping, they staggered and sometimes dropped from exhaustion. By one estimate, it killed 2% of an estimated 8 million horses in North America. Many more animals suffered symptoms that took weeks to clear.

At this time the germ theory of disease was still controversial, and scientists were 20 years away from identifying viruses. Horse owners had few good options for staving off infection. They disinfected their stables, improved the animals’ feed and covered them in new blankets. One wag wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the nation’s many abused and overworked horses were bound to die of shock from this sudden outpouring of kindness. At a time when veterinary care was still primitive, others promoted more dubious remedies: gin and ginger, tinctures of arsenic and even a bit of faith healing.

Throughout the 19th century America’s crowded cities suffered frequent epidemics of deadly diseases such as cholera, dysentery and yellow fever. Many people feared that the horse flu would jump to humans. While that never happened, removing millions of horses from the economy posed a different threat: It cut off cities from crucial supplies of food and fuel just as winter was approaching.

Horses were too sick to bring coal out of mines, drag crops to market or carry raw materials to industrial centers. Fears of a “coal famine” sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Produce rotted at the docks. Trains refused to stop at some cities where depots overflowed with undelivered goods. The economy plunged into a steep recession.

Every aspect of life was disrupted. Saloons ran dry without beer deliveries, and postmen relied on “wheelbarrow express” to carry the mail. Forced to travel on foot, fewer people attended weddings and funerals. Desperate companies hired human crews to pull their wagons to market.

Worst of all, firemen could no longer rely on horses to pull their heavy pump wagons. On Nov. 9, 1872, a catastrophic blaze gutted much of downtown Boston when firefighters were slow to reach the scene on foot. As one editor put it, the virus revealed to all that horses were not just private property, but “wheels in our great social machine, the stoppage of which means widespread injury to all classes and conditions of persons.”

Henry Bergh’s kindness crusade

Of course, the flu injured horses most of all – especially when desperate or callous owners forced them to work through their illness, which quite often killed the animals. As coughing, feverish horses staggered through the streets, it was evident that these tireless servants lived short, brutal lives. E.L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, called their treatment “a disgrace to civilization … worthy of the dark ages.”

Henry Bergh had been making this argument since 1866, when he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – the nation’s first organization devoted to this cause. Bergh had spent most of his adult life pursuing a failed career as a playwright, supported by a large inheritance. He found his true calling at age 53.

Motivated less by the love of animals than by a hatred of human cruelty, he used his wealth, connections and literary talents to lobby New York’s Legislature to pass the nation’s first modern anti-cruelty statute. Granted police powers by this law, Bergh and his fellow badge-wearing agents roamed the streets of New York City to defend animals from avoidable suffering.

Many observers scoffed at the suggestion that animals should enjoy legal protection, but Bergh and his allies insisted that every creature had the right not to be abused. Thousands of women and men across the country followed Bergh’s lead, passing similar laws and founding branches of the SPCA. This crusade provoked wide public debate about what humans owed to their fellow species.

As the equine flu raged, Bergh planted himself at major intersections in New York City, stopping wagons and horse-drawn trolleys to inspect the animals pulling them for signs of the disease. Tall and aristocratic, Bergh dressed impeccably, often sporting a top hat and silver cane, his long face framed by a drooping mustache. Asserting that working sick horses was dangerous and cruel, he ordered many teams back to their stables and sometimes sent their drivers to court.

Traffic piled up as grumbling passengers were forced to walk. Transit companies threatened to sue Bergh. Critics ridiculed him as a misguided animal lover who cared more about horses than humans, but many more people applauded his work. Amid the ravages of the horse flu, Bergh’s cause matched the moment.

The rights of horses

At its darkest hour the epidemic left many Americans wondering whether the world they knew would ever recover, or if the ancient bond between horses and humans might be forever sundered by a mysterious illness. But as the disease ran its course, cities silenced by the epidemic gradually recovered. Markets reopened, freight depots whittled away delivery backlogs and horses returned to work.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Still, the impact of this shocking episode lingered, forcing many Americans to consider radical new arguments about the problem of animal cruelty. Ultimately the invention of electric trolleys and the internal combustion engine resolved the moral challenges of horse-powered cities.

Meanwhile, Bergh’s movement reminded Americans that horses were not unfeeling machines but partners in building and running the modern city – vulnerable creatures capable of suffering and deserving of the law’s protection.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How people measure stuff might seem pretty bland as topics go, but behind America's insistence to keep drinking coffee in ounces and pumping gas in gallons lies a story with a weighty dose of patriotism, political stability and a historical distrust of the French. 

"The paradox is that the way we choose to measure things is banal and boring, but it's also super important because it structures the way we live and interact with each other," said Ken Alder, a professor of history at Northwestern University in Illinois, who wrote "The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (Free Press, 2003). "You can't make comparisons or have an economy without setting standards, and people have bitterly fought for standards because it's really a fight about how the economy works."

In the 1790s, the French Academy of Sciences was asked by the government in Paris to come up with a new and logical system of measurement. The academy decided that the new system should be based on something they could physically quantify in nature, so it could stand the test of time. Thus, they decided a meter should be one 10 millionth of a quadrant of the Earth's circumference — that is, the line running from the North Pole to the equator — a ruling that led to the beginnings of the metric system.

Related: Would I weigh less at the equator?

The metric system is arguably an easier way to go about standardizing measurements than the system the United States uses. Everything in the metric system divides into decimals (there are 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 1,000 grams in a kilogram, and so on); most of the rest of the world uses it; and it also just makes sense — for example, water freezes at zero degrees Celsius (as opposed to the random 32 degrees Fahrenheit) and it boils at 100 C (instead of 212 F). 

So why hasn't the U.S. budged an inch? Why do Americans continue to use units of yards, miles and pints? The U.S. customary system has morphed and evolved from a hodgepodge of several systems dating back to medieval England. In 1790, George Washington noted the need for some uniformity in currency and measurements. Money was successfully decimalized, but that's as far as it got. In truth, the U.S. did try to make the switch a couple times, but it never quite managed to follow through; the British system was too ingrained in American industry as well as the national psyche.

It even took several efforts by various groups in France before the metric system came to be. It wasn't until the chaos following the 1789 French Revolution that it became possible. "Before then, measures didn't just differ from country to country, but from town to town," Alder told Live Science. In fact, it's thought that prior to the metric system, there were over 250,000 different units of measure in France. Standardizing measures was important to people who traveled. "Local systems screw[ed] over the traders and merchants, whereas the metric system allowed them to know what they were getting. But the locals resisted because they liked what they knew," Alder said.

It's worth pointing out that the old measurements worked well for the French locals because these metrics were tied to physical counting systems. For example, a field's size might be measured by the 'journée' (meaning 'day' in French), which denoted the number of days it took to harvest its crop. Other times, land was measured in 'boisseaux' (or 'bushels'), to quantify how much grain-seed was needed to sow the land. "The old systems did make sense, they weren't just totally crazy," Alder said.

But when the revolution came and Louis XVI succumbed to the guillotine, those who replaced him were part of the Enlightenment movement, during a period known as the Age of Reason, and these new leaders reasoned that Louis' head should be weighed in kilos. "It was the time for rationalization," Alder said. "The United States was supposed to be the second country to adopt the new way of measuring things, as the sister republic."

In 1793, the U.S. Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, even sent for a French scientist named Joseph Dombey, who set sail for the New World with a small copper cylinder, which was destined to be America's new standard weight — a kilogram. But Dombey's ship was beset by bad weather; an Atlantic wind pushed Dombey's vessel off course and into the custody of ransom-desiring British pirates. Sadly, he died a prisoner and the kilogram never made it to Jefferson.  

Related: Why did pirates wear earrings?

But pesky tempests are not the only reason the metric system never caught on stateside; it's also a question of identity, and not all Americans were as Francophillic as Jefferson, Alder said. "I understand when people resent it as a remote force of globalization that produces uniformity, and it's perfectly rational to want local control," he said. "It can also be about taking a position against something that's hyperrational and French." 

Even in France it wasn't particularly welcomed. "It literally took 100 years to implement," Alder noted. The controversy hasn't ended there. Nowadays, scientists quibble about the fluctuations of the original kilogram and meter, Live Science previously reported. 

Another factor working against the metric system in the United States is the country's relative political stability; ever since it gained its independence, elections happened instead of coups and revolutions. That didn't do the metric system any favors, Alder said, because to completely overhaul a country's system of measurement requires quite a bit of turmoil for disrupters to take advantage of. "We came close with the Civil War," he said. "But the conflict wasn't sufficiently subversive to make that change."

The United Kingdom for example, only started its journey toward the metric system in the 1970s, after the reality of its geopolitics changed radically; the U.K. not only lost its empire but also began preferentially trading with its continental neighbors over its former colonies, Alder explained. That said, the British have only half-heartedly adopted the new system — road signs are still in miles and pubs still serve beer in pints. (Of note, dry and liquid measurements for pints in the U.K. are not the same as they are in the U.S., according to Encyclopedia Britannica.) Nevertheless, the Jimmy Carter administration tried to follow the Brits around the same time. "[The government] actually tried to put road signs up in kilometers, but people went crazy and it was abandoned," Alder said. 

The U.S. Congress even passed a law in 1975 to make the switch, but unlike the United Kingdom, the transition was deemed to be voluntary instead of mandatory and there was no deadline. 

So, for those who long for the U.S. to see sense and ditch ounces for grams — be careful what you wish for, Alder said, because more often than not, the transition is accompanied by more drastic political change.

Originally published on Live Science.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans have embraced the idea of "flattening the curve," or slowing the spread of the virus over a number of months so that fewer people become infected and need health care at any given time. 

A key assumption of this strategy is that around the same number of people will eventually be infected with COVID-19, but just over a longer time period. Many models predict this period, which would require intermittent lockdowns, could last well over 18 months.

But one veteran public health scholar says we can take a different path to more swiftly and forcefully bring an end to COVID-19.

"The aim is not to flatten the curve," Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Palo Alto, California, and past president of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, wrote in an editorial published Wednesday (April 1) in the New England Journal of Medicine. "The goal is to crush the curve."

Fineberg argues we can defeat COVID-19 in just 10 weeks if we take a "concerted and determined" approach. 

"I think we're thinking too defensively about what we should and could do against the coronavirus," Fineberg told Live Science. "If it is a war, and I believe that's a proper metaphor, then we should fight it like a war. That means we should fight to win to vanquish the foe, not to let it persist and hassle us for an indefinite period."

Six steps to victory  

In the editorial, Fineberg outlines six steps the country should take to accomplish this goal.

First, President Donald Trump should appoint a commander in charge of the coronavirus response. This person is not a "coordinator," but rather someone who has the authority "to mobilize every civilian and military asset needed to win the war," Fineberg wrote. Each governor should also appoint a commander with similar authority at the state level.

"If we don't have a unified command structure with that person in charge who can help guide and make the strategic choices, then I think we can't execute successfully," Fineberg said.

Second, America needs to carry out millions of diagnostic tests in the next two weeks. Such a strategy was successfully used in South Korea to contain COVID-19. These tests are needed to "trace the scope of the outbreak" and make informed decisions about managing patients, he said. "Testing is our form of intelligence" in the military sense, Fineberg told Live Science.

Third, all health care workers should have access to ample supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE), Fineberg said. "We wouldn't send soldiers into battle without ballistic vests; health workers on the front lines of this war deserve no less."

Next, the population should be divided into five groups, Fineberg said. These include those infected with COVID-19; those presumed to be infected based on symptoms but who initially test negative; those exposed to someone with COVID-19; those who are not known to have been exposed to or infected with COVID-19; and those who recover from COVID-19. 

People in the first two groups can be hospitalized — if they are very sick — or placed in "infirmaries" (such as a converted convention centers) if they have mild to moderate disease, he said. People who have been exposed to COVID-19, but don't yet show symptoms, may be quarantined in hotels for two weeks. 

Finally, those who have recovered from COVID-19, and are, in theory, immune, may be able to go back to work. This category, which would require the use of antibody-based tests to identify, "would be a game-changer in restarting parts of the economy more quickly and safely," Fineberg said. Researchers in Germany have already started a large study to find out how many people in the country are immune to COVID-19, which could allow officials to issue "immunity passes" to allow people to return to work, The Guardian reported.

Fifth, intense efforts should be made to "mobilize the public" in the fight against coronavirus. "Everyone has a part to play and virtually everyone is willing," Fineberg wrote. For example, the U.S. postal service and other delivery companies could deliver surgical masks and hand sanitizer to every American household, Fineberg said. If everyone wears a mask, people who are infected but don't yet show symptoms would be less likely to spread the disease, he added.

And sixth, researchers should continue fundamental, "real-time" research into COVID-19 to examine questions such as who is at higher risk of death from the disease and whether those who haven't yet caught the virus could safely return to work under certain conditions. 

It will also be critical to learn from our experiences in real time — for example, when we start to open up parts of the economy in different parts of the country — and adjust responses accordingly.

"Different communities will be at different stages of success and readiness," Fineberg said. We can see how well and safely certain strategies are working and then "crank it up more widely throughout the country."

Major challenges 

Fineberg acknowledged that "all these things, everything I'm describing is hard to do and has many pitfalls in execution." But the alternative to not trying is the "catastrophe that's unfolding before us."

Dr. Courtney Gidengil, a senior physician policy researcher at RAND Corp. and a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Boston, said the editorial is an "interesting article and framework" for what needs to be done to address COVID-19. "These are really thoughtful and important steps that should already be under consideration."

"In a perfect world if we could undertake these steps aggressively and immediately that would give us the best chance" of crushing the curve, Gidengil said.

But the big question is how feasible it is to get these things to happen quickly enough to make a difference. "The more quickly these steps are implemented" the closer we'll be to achieving the goal, she said.

Another major challenge is the risk of having the virus come back into the country from another part of the world. "In terms of truly containing it, we really need high levels of immunity" against the virus, Gidengil said. Immunity could come through a vaccine (which is likely at least a year away) or through recovered patients. "Because we live in such a globalized world, it's just very difficult to guarantee the virus won't be imported again."

David Hutton, an associate professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, agreed that "to really 'defeat' this in the long term and get back to 'business as usual' … we will need a highly effective treatment or a vaccine." Until the virus is totally controlled on a global scale "constant vigilance" is needed, he said.

Hutton does think it's possible to re-open the economy by June, as China is beginning to do. But he noted that strict measures are still in place there, including temperature checkpoints and surveillance applications on people's phones. Such measures could be more challenging in the United States, where people may be less willing to share private information, he said.

Another important issue is that, even if we get the number of infections down so that containment is possible, we will need an "army of efficient, effective public health workers" to perform contact tracing, Hutton said. This involves tracking down contacts of patients, testing and isolating them, "to stop this virus from spreading like wildfire again," he said. 

However, as Live Science previously reported, one company is working on building a voluntary app that can use location data to automatically notify other users if someone near them tests positive. If widely adopted, it could potentially cut down the work for such public health workers.

•  The 9 deadliest viruses on Earth  
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Originally published on Live Science. 

After three years of improvement, the well-being of Americans ticked downward in 2017, according to a new poll, though some demographics were spared.

The overall well-being of U.S. adults dropped to a score of 61.5 on a scale of 100, down 0.6 points from 62.1 in 2016, according to the latest Gallup-Sharecare survey, which was published yesterday (Nov. 8).

The score, called the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, ranges from zero to 100, with zero representing the lowest possible well-being and 100 representing the highest.

To calculate the Well-Being Index, the researchers looked at five metrics: whether a person felt a sense of purpose in daily life, whether they enjoyed supportive relationships, their level of financial security, whether they felt safe and happy in their community and whether they were in good physical health, according to Gallup. [Find Out Where Your Country Ranks on the Happiness Index (Infographic)]

Though the overall findings show a decrease in well-being, the effects weren't felt across all demographics. For example, the survey found that both men and Republicans fared just as well in 2017 as they did in 2016. But women's well-being dropped by 1.1 points from 2016 to 2017, and Democrats' well-being decreased by 0.9 points in the same time period. Black and Hispanic people had larger declines in well-being than other groups, at 1.3 and 1.0 points, respectively.

Only one group surveyed reported having a better Well-Being Index score in 2017, the researchers found: people making over $120,000 per year. For individuals in this group, the score increased by 0.3, but the researchers noted that the increase may fall within the margin of error for the survey, meaning the difference between 2016 and 2017 was too small to definitively say that there was a real change. Similarly, the very small drop in well-being for white people in the United States also may have fallen within the margin of error.

Compared with 2016, Americans said they worry more on a daily basis, according to the results. Of all the people who responded, the number of people who said that, at least some days each week, they have little interest or pleasure in doing things went up by 7.4 percentage points, from 33.7 percent in 2016 to 41.1 percent in 2017. Overall, the survey revealed that a smaller percentage of people felt that their community leaders fostered a feeling of enthusiasm about the future, and a smaller percentage of people in 2017 said they enjoyed their daily lives, compared with the percentage in 2016.

The survey results are based on telephone interviews with more than 135,000 U.S. adults from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., conducted from Jan. 2 to Sept. 30 of this year.  

Originally published on Live Science.

Rome wasn't born big. Back before it blossomed into an empire that sprawled across 2.2 million square miles (5.7 million square kilometers), twice the size of modern-day Argentina, Rome was an up-and-coming force threatened by a formidable city-state: Carthage.

Historians have long thought that Rome's wealth blossomed after Carthage— best known for the general Hannibal Barca's ill-advised decision to have his army traverse the Alps with almost 40 war elephants— was defeated by Rome in the Second Punic War (218 B.C. to 201 B.C.). Now, a new study of ancient coins provides evidence that this was, in fact, a critical turning point for Rome.

The wealth Rome received from booty and war reparations paid by Carthage helped fund Rome's budding empire. In addition, as part of the peace treaty, Carthage passed control over the Iberian Peninsula to Rome, which gave the Romans access to Spanish silver mines, according to a statement.

Katrin Westner, a postdoctoral researcher in archeometry (a branch of archaeology that focuses on dating ancient specimens) at Goethe University in Germany, and her team found that most of the Roman coins analyzed date to a period beginning during the Second Punic War. Those coins, the team discovered, were made of silver that probably came from Spanish mines, not from Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily. [Photos: Gladiators of the Roman Empire]

"It was kind of this 'hooray!' moment in the lab," Fleur Kemmers, a professor of ancient numismatics (the study of currency) at Goethe University, told Live Science,

The researchers analyzed the lead isotopes, the signature that marks different types of lead, of samples using mass spectrometry, from 69 coins from the period between 310B.C. to 101 B.C. This helped the scientists determine during which geological period the silver had been mined. (Since lead is either present in the ore from which silver is extracted or added as part of the extraction process, it is a useful indicator of the source of silver.)

The team then matched the time periods of the coins to the geological time periods when various ore deposits were formed in the western Mediterranean, including in Spain, France, North Africa, Italy and Asia Minor, which encompasses part of present-day Turkey and Armenia. The researchers found that of the 69 Roman coins they examined, 52 were most likely made from metal that came from Spain. These same 52 coins were also found to date between 209 B.C. and 101 B.C., which is significant because in 209 B.C. Rome conquered a Carthaginian stronghold in Spain—a turning point in the Second Punic War.   

While the silver in the coins before then came from mining districts in southern Italy and Sicily, which was not under Roman control, the period following the Second Punic War marked a new era for the Roman economy, the researchers said. Bolstered by war reparations and booty obtained by plundering cities, and then later by the ore from mines in conquered lands, Spanish silver contributed to Rome's transformation into a leading superpower, according to a statement.

"[Rome's wealth after 209 B.C.] really helped to promote this kind of thinking that wars actually are a financial investment that can pay off afterwards, if you win it," Westner told Live Science.

This study is part of a wider project to analyze 164 coins from across the western Mediterranean spanning the period between 550 B.C. to 101 B.C., in order to obtain more evidence of how political power can be traced through the metal supply.

Original article on Live Science.

NEW YORK — Bill Nye, the acclaimed "Science Guy," wants to know: "Are you planning to march?"

The March for Science is Saturday (April 22) and Nye invites everybody — scientists and science advocates alike — to march in support of scientific research, which may see deep cuts if the Trump administration's 2018 proposed budget is passed.

Science leads to innovation, and "the economy depends on innovation," Nye told a packed audience on April 18 in New York City, who had come to see a preview of his new Netflix show, "Bill Nye Saves the World," which debuts Friday (April 21). [Best Supporting Role: 8 Celebs Who Promote Science]

"You cannot compete on the global stage unless you are innovating," Nye said. "Innovation comes from basic research. So by cutting basic research, you are actually shooting yourself in the proverbial foot, which is undesirable, by the way."

Nye, who is an honorary co-chairman for the March for Science, may have a point about the economy. The amount of published research in the physical and chemical sciences predicted economic growth in middle-income countries such as Ukraine, Latvia and Belarus, according to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS ONE. The link is one of correlation rather than causation, but scientific productivity is still a better predictor of prosperity than other growth markers, including competitiveness and globalization, the researchers found. 

However, it's hard to gauge how much science helps the economy, editor Colin Macilwain wrote in the journal Nature in 2010. Research is important, but it's difficult to create a reliable model that delivers research's "corresponding economic outputs" in a way that can be quantified, Macilwain wrote.

Even so, Nye added that science generally improves the lives of people worldwide.

"Think of the amazing quality of life we have as a result of the technologies that are derived from science," Nye said. "Like being able to drink clean water from an object made of solid rock that's transparent. That's all from science."

Nye said he hopes the March for Science will send a strong message to Congress and the White House, which have stalled on addressing climate change and even floated ideas of bogus science, including that vaccines might cause autism (they don't) and that carbon dioxide isn't a main contributor to global warming (it is).

"We want to remind our lawmakers that science is part of politics," Nye told Live Science. "Science has historically [been part of politics] and should inform policy."

Even the U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, refers to the progress of science, stating that Congress should "promote the progress of science and useful arts," he said.

Nye, an engineer by training, said he hopes the new Netflix series will inspire people — especially voters — to learn more about science and exercise their critical-thinking abilities, he said.

"We want it to be a lifelong habit: evaluating evidence and critical thinking," Nye said. "We want that to be something you continually do every day in every aspect of your life."

Original article on Live Science.

Food waste is piling up in America, and although the vast majority of Americans feel bad about throwing out food, most of us also think it would be hard to reduce the amount of food we throw away, a new survey finds.

The survey of 500 people in the U.S. found that 77 percent of respondents said they felt guilty about throwing away food. But 51 percent said they thought it would be difficult to reduce their food waste.

Americans toss out around 80 billion lbs. of foods each year, according to the study.

In addition to being a waste of resources, throwing away food has a negative impact on the environment, according to the study, published today (July 21) in the journal PLOS ONE. Indeed, food waste is the largest source of solid waste in the U.S., accounting for 35.2 million tons of solid waste, the researchers wrote. [6 Ways to Feed 11 Billion People]

It is also the most significant source of greenhouse gases from solid waste, they wrote.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that most of the people in the survey — 87 percent — thought that they wasted less food than others. People think that "it's somebody else that's creating food waste," Brian Roe, a co-author of the study and a professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at The Ohio State University, said in a statement.

The researchers conducted their survey because, despite the problems surrounding food waste, little has been done to understand why Americans throw out so much food, they said.

"Generally, we found that people consider three things regarding food waste," Danyi Qi, a doctoral student in agricultural economics at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, said in a statement.

One thing that people think about are the perceived practical benefits of throwing out food, such as reducing their risk of a foodborne illness, Qi said.

The researchers found, for example, that 70 percent of the respondents said that they believethrowing away food after it passes its package date helps reduce the risk of getting sick. Another perceived practical benefit is for freshness and quality: Nearly 60 percent of the respondents said that "some food waste is necessary" to keep meals fresh and flavorful.

But people also have feelings of guilt about throwing away food, Qi said. For instance, 58 percent said they understood that throwing away food was bad for the environment and 42 percent said that they thought it was a major source of wasted money, the researchers found.

Finally, when people throw out food, they think about their behavior in relation to how they manage their household, Qi said. For example, 24 percent said they don't have the time to worry about food waste. However, 53 percent of the respondents said they realized that when they bought food in bulk they ended up throwing away more of it.

The researchers offered insights into how Americans can reduce their food waste.

A majority of people in the survey said that they throw away food after it passes the "sell-by" or "use-by" date on the package. Removing these dates could significantly reduce food waste, the researchers said.

"Only in rare circumstances is that date about food safety, but people are confused about the array of dates on food packages," Roe said.  In other words, the package date on foods does not mean that the food will become unsafe to eat after that date.

The researchers noted that awareness about food waste has actually gone up in the past year. Awareness is about 10 percent higher than it was in a previous study, Roe said. But it's still very low, he added.

Increasing awareness "wouldn't be a silver bullet" to reduce food waste, Roe said. But it could sway some people to change their behaviors, he said. Giving people a way to measure the food waste in their household could therefore lead to improvement, the researchers said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Rob Leslie is chief executive officer of Sedicii, which provides technology for eliminating transmission and storage of private identity data during authentication or identity verification, and reducing identity theft, impersonation and fraud. Leslie is an electronics engineer with more 25 years of experience in information technology and business. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015. Leslie contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

You may have heard the phrase, "If the product is free, then you are the product." It was coined at a time in the not-too-distant past when social networks were in their infancy and we were all mesmerized by the fantastic services we could consume to keep in touch and interact with each other — all for free!

Little did we realize at the time what that bargain actually meant. The vast majority of us had no idea social networks would be monitoring and recording all our interactions  as they learn everything possible about us as people, our habits, our likes and dislikes, and in some cases, our innermost, private secrets. This information, containing the essence of who each of us is, has been used to target us with advertising and other services, making the companies collecting this information global giants that earn billions of dollars in revenue every year. Personal information is extremely valuable.

So how much are you really worth?

The problem we have as consumers is that most of us have been unwitting pawns in a giant information game. We want the services for free, but have little concept of the value of the information we give back in return. In fact, the European Commission estimates that the value of personal data in the European Union will hit more than $1 trillion by 2020. [Dutch Student Sells His Data for €350 but at What Price Privacy? (Op-Ed )]

Looking at the profits of the giant Internet companies begs the question: "Is there a case to be made that the trade is not fair and that we are being taken advantage of because we don't know what the value of our identity and other information really is?"

It is hard to put a value on a single person's data — but some have already started to try. The U.S. based company, Datacoup, promises to pay users $8 a month to part with their data on everything from credit cards to social media usage. 

On one level, such an approach gives consumers a degree of return on data many of us are handing over for free anyway, but on another level consumers are sharing important data with a third party to use for commercial purposes knowing that it will almost certainly be sold to other parties in some form. 

Logic dictates that in the world of personal data, all men, or women, are not created equal; any retailer will want to target those with the greatest spending power. In the same way in the business world, if a vendor or service provider can reach the person within an organization with purchasing responsibility they are more likely to achieve a sale. The greatest testament to the value of data is the effort that some will go to in order to acquire it. 

The situation as it existed would likely have continued for a long time, as the global public either didn't care or was unaware of what was happening — or were powerless to do anything about it — had it not been for a principled young man by the name of Edward Snowden . Almost singlehandedly, Snowden has managed to shine a light on the practices of some governments and big business, and has explained what it means for all of us as it relates to our privacy  and our personal data. 

This has opened a lot of people's eyes to what has been happening, such as the U.S. government accessing citizens' Google and Yahoo accounts. As a result of this changing environment, in a survey by the Pew Research Center in 2014, 91 percent of American adults said that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies.

A right to digital privacy

In 2016, it is expected that the European Union will enact a new Data Privacy Directive, encompassing the so-called "Right to be Forgotten." For the first time, a law will explicitly state that identity and other personal data belong to the individual. This will give all European citizens the right to control how their identity — and maybe more important, their personal data — is consumed. It is the beginning of a radical change in the balance of power in the relationship that consumers have with the companies that provide us services over the Internet. For the first time the consumer will have a voice.

In addition to the consumer being given a voice, this new directive will be backed by stiff penalties for those companies who fail to comply with it. If an organization fails to comply, they may have to pay a price as high as 2 to 5 percent of their global revenue. Because of this, I expect that the nature of the relationship will change and it will put each consumer at the center of his or her personal data universe. It will empower the consumer to make choices as to who, how, when and where identity is consumed, and critically, how a company rewards consent when information is used. In the U.S., Google and other industry players along with data-privacy campaigners have recently been lobbying Congress over data privacy laws, which, at nearly 30 years old, are woefully out of date — and this pressure is only set to increase. 

Judging by how much money is made today from people's identity and personal data, this will be a big opportunity for consumers.

Read more from the Technology Pioneers on their Live Science landing page. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

The ancient Egyptian catacomb honoring Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death and funerals, once held 8 million mummified dogs, according to a new study, which is the first to thoroughly investigate the underground tomb. Researchers also found a fossilized marine vertebrate on the ceiling of the catacomb, as well as other mummified animals, such as cats and mongoose. It's likely that animal cults helped fuel the ancient economy, the researchers said. (Photo Credit: Copyright Antiquity Trust) [Read the full story on the dog catacomb]

Egyptian map

A map showing the location of the burial grounds at Saqqara in the ancient capital of Memphis.

Burial plots

A map of North Saqqara showing where the ancient Egyptians built the animal catacombs. Notice the ibis, baboon and hawk catacombs in the northern part of the map. The dog catacomb is near the temple in the eastern part of the map. (Drawing by J. Hodges) 

Canine catacomb

A new survey of the dog catacomb overlaid on top of a 1897 map drawn by French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan (seen in gray). The small catacomb on the right is inaccessible due to shifting sands and a 1992 earthquake that hit the region. (New layout by S. Mills, S. Williams and H. Nouwens)

Underground work

A photo showing the main axial aisle of the underground canine catacomb. Ancient Egyptians built the catacomb for the animal cult of Anubis, the god of death and funerals. (Photo credit: P.T. Nicholson)

Woof

The ancient remains of a complete canine mummy in an undisturbed section of the catacomb. (Photo credit: P.T. Nicholson)

Broken box

The remains of a wooden coffin in the catacomb that still has parts of the mummy within it. (Photo credit: P.T. Nicholson)

Adult doggy

The head and neck of an adult dog from the catacomb. (Photo credit: P.T. Nicholson)

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. 

In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds.

The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said.

Many of the mummies have since disintegrated or been disrupted by grave robbers and industrialists, who likely used the mummies for fertilizer. Even so, archaeologists have found enough evidence to suggest that the Anubis animal cult was a large part of the ancient Egyptian economy. [See Photos of the Dog Mummies in Ancient Egyptian Catacomb]

Ancient Egyptians built the temple and catacomb in honor of Anubis in Saqqara, a burial ground in the country's ancient capital of Memphis. Archaeologists have also found catacombs with the mummified remains of such other animals as the ibis (long-legged birds), hawk, baboon and bull, suggesting the ancient Egyptians also worshipped other animal gods.

"When you go to Saqqara now, you see an area of attractive desert with the pyramids sticking up and one or two of the prominent monuments" associated with animal cults, said the study's lead researcher, Paul Nicholson, a professor of archaeology at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.

But during the Late Period (747 to 332 B.C.), if one were to visit Saqqara, they would have seen temples, merchants selling statues of bronze deities, priests conducting ceremonies, people offering to interpret dreams and tour guides jostling for business, Nicholson said. Not far off, animal breeders likely raised dogs and other creatures that would later be mummified in honor of the gods.

"It would have been a busy place," Nicholson told Live Science. "A permanent community of people living there supported by the animal cults."

'Monstrous deities'

People have known about Egypt's penchant for mummifying animals for more than a thousand years. In about A.D. 130, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote, "Who has not heard, Volusius, of the monstrous deities those crazy Egyptians worship? One lot adores crocodiles, another worships the snake-gorged ibis … you’ll find whole cities devoted to cats, or to river-fish or dogs."

In 1897, French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan published a paper on the necropolis at Memphis, but spent little time detailing the canine catacombs. Other researchers have taken cursory looks at the dog catacombs, but the new study is the first to analyze it in depth, the researchers said.

In fact, de Morgan drew a map showing two dog catacombs, but drifting sand and an earthquake in 1992 have made the smaller of the two inaccessible. So Nicholson and his colleagues spent countless hours examining the larger catacomb, studying its rock walls and mummified contents.

"It's a very long series of dark tunnels," Nicholson said. "There is no natural light once you've gone into the forepart of the catacomb, and beyond that everything has to be lit with flashlights. It's really quite a spectacular thing."

The catacombs were likely built in the fourth century B.C., and were made out of stone from the Lower Eocene (about 56 million to 48 million years ago). So, it was a nice surprise when researchers discovered a fossil in the catacomb's ceiling. The fossil belonged to a long-extinct marine vertebrate, likely a relative of modern-day manatees and dugongs, Nicholson said. [See Images of Ancient Monsters of the Sea]

"The ancient [Egyptian] quarry men may have been aware of it, or they may have gone straight through it, it's hard to know," said Nicholson, who is still researching the fossil with several of his colleagues.

The researchers explored every possible nook of the catacomb, which measures 568 feet (173 meters) down the center passageway, with a maximum width of 459 feet (140 m) from the branch corridors. In addition to canine mummies, they found the mummies of jackals, foxes, falcons, cats and mongoose, although about 92 percent of the remains belonged to dogs, they found. 

It's unclear why these other animals were buried in the dog catacomb, "but it is likely that all 'doglike' creatures were interchangeable, and that mythological reasons probably underlie the choice of cats and raptors," the researchers wrote in the study, published in the June issue of the journal Antiquity.

Pilgrims visiting Saqqara likely viewed the display of the mummies as expressions of gratitude that the gods would appreciate, Nicholson said. Many of the dogs were only hours or days old when they were mummified. Some older dogs had more elaborate burials, and may have lived at the temple, but the younger pups were likely "bred — farmed if you will — for the cult," Nicholson said.

It's likely that these young pups were separated from their mothers and died from dehydration or starvation. "They probably weren't killed by physical action; we don't have evidence of broken necks that you get with cat burials," Nicholson said.

Animal cults remained popular from about 747 B.C. to 30 B.C., but they declined during the Roman occupation. The cults likely gained support because they were uniquely Egyptian, and may have been a symbol of national identity when the country was invaded by the people of other nations, such as the Libyans and Persians, the researchers wrote in the study.

"They set up a pilgrimage temple for almost any deity you can fancy," said Aidan Dodson, a senior research fellow in archaeology at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who wasn't involved with the study.

He agreed that the temples and catacombs likely spurred trade and commerce.

"There's probably a vast amount of trade coming in, not only for producing the animal mummies, but people wanting food, lodging and drinks," Dodson said. "It's probably an ancestor of a mass tourism industry."

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Ever since Sarah Bronson had her first scientific interaction with a lizard that she caught herself, she has possessed an enduring interest in the scientific process. Now, as an associate professor of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience at Georgia State University and director of the Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies Laboratory, Brosnan does research with nonhuman primates as well as with human children and adults at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University and the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research of the UT/MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

Brosnan’s interests lie in the complexities of social behavior and cognition. More specifically, she studies primates and their social interactions, in particular decision-making involving cooperation, inequity, and bartering, primarily using economic games. If you have ever seen the famous video in which a capuchin monkey strenuously objects to receiving unequal pay (a cucumber as opposed to a grape), you are familiar with this line of inquiry. You can watch Brosnan conducting the experiment here.

By studying primates, Brosnan works to understand the evolution of cooperative and economic decision-making so as to better understand how and why humans make the decisions that they do. Using an experimental economics approach allows for a standardized methodology that she can use to compare different non-human species as well as humans, which allows for more profound insight in to the evolution of decision-making behavior. In the video accompanying this article, Brosnan talks about her work.

Name: Sarah Brosnan Age: 38 Institution: Georgia State University Field of Study: Psychology, Ethology, Evolution of decision making, Cognitive Science

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

You can do a lot with $9.7 trillion: buy all the real estate in Manhattan 12 times over, purchase 22 carbon copies of Apple, or an absurd quantity of apples.

It’s also the amount of money that tropical cyclones could cost the global economy over the next century, especially if climate projections of fewer but more intense cyclones are accurate. In comparison to those losses, the cost of action to reduce emissions and beef up coastal preparedness is relatively cheap say researchers.

Humanity and cyclones are no strangers to each other. Roughly 35 percent of the world’s 7 billion people are in the path of cyclones and coastal populations are expected to swell in the coming century. To understand the future damage that cyclones could inflict on ever-growing coastal cities, two researchers looked at 60 years of cyclone and economic data in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study.

They found that cyclones — known as hurricanes or typhoons depending on the ocean basin in which they form — left lasting impacts on the economies of the countries they hit. In the case of major events, such as 1-in-100 year storm like Hurricane Ivan in 2004, the impacts were worse and longer-lasting than a full-blown financial crisis. If that sounds shocking to you, you’re not the only one who felt that way.

ExWeather Disasters Have Cost the Globe $2.4 Trillion  Adapting to Sea Level Rise Could Save Trillions by 2100  5 Graphics That Show U.S. Climate Change Costs

“We didn’t believe what we saw at first,” said Amir Jina, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s authors.

Part of the surprise for Jina was the robustness of the results and how they fly in the face of one commonly held thought in economics that disasters can actually give a boost to a country’s economy in the long run.

The losses are essentially hidden in plain sight, spread over long periods of time rather than one big hit. Countries hit by cyclones continue to grow. But the study showed that they are knocked onto a different, slightly lower growth track, like a car switching from a highway’s fast lane to the slow (or at least slightly less fast) lane.

Looking at “lost growth” gives a compelling snapshot of what our world could look like if we lived on a cyclone-free planet. Japan and the Philippines top the list of countries with the most exposure to cyclones. They also happen to have some of the most sluggish growth rates in Asia, but in a world without cyclones, their growth rates would have been on par with China, which has had some of the most torrid growth rates in Asia. The numbers also underscore how cyclones are just one among many factors — from policy to natural disasters to technology advancements — that can affect economic growth.

Even large, wealthy countries like the U.S. aren’t immune to the effects of cyclones on growth. The U.S. lost roughly an average of 1 percentage point of growth annually to cyclones from 1970-2008. That’s essentially $150 billion in lost growth over that period.

Behind the results sit a staggering amount of data crunched.The researchers looked at more than 6,700 storms and nearly 200,000 data points that charted maximum wind speeds of cyclones across the planet.

Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane researcher at MIT, said the study presented a “reasonable model” of accounting for wind speeds at different locations around the world, though he questioned how they arrived at the specific number of cyclones since data before 1980 — the advent of the satellite era — is less reliable. He suggested around 5,300 cyclones would be a more accurate number to work with.

“We knew there was debate about the data but there's literally nothing better (in a positive way – it’s an amazing dataset),” Jina said.

The slightly different storm accounting has minimal impact on the results showing the economic toll, though.

“Everytime you come up with something in your head, that maybe ‘hmm, this could be a problem,’ a page later they’ve tested it,” said Peter Howard, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity.

While the analysis provides a powerful look at the past, it also provides a jumping off point to look at the future. Cyclones are projected to become less frequent but more intense due to climate change, though estimates are still being refined. The northwestern Pacific and North Atlantic basins, in particular, are likely to see that pattern more fully emerge.

Factoring in those changes, Jina and Hsiang estimate that the cost of cyclones to future generations could total $9.7 trillion by 2090. Countries in the northwest Pacific basin stand to lose the most, with 8 of the 10 biggest losers in that region including Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan as the most exposed countries. The U.S. ranks fifth, with cyclone activity causing a nearly $900 billion hit on the country’s GDP through 2090.

Those costs are currently missing from researchers’ best estimates of the cost of the world continuing to emit greenhouse gases, known as the social cost of carbon. To compute that cost, researchers consider what changes to the climate will mean for society.

“Its effects of increasing social conflict, health impacts, and sea level rise (which) might cause loss of coastal infrastructure,” said Howard, who authored a major report on the social cost of carbon earlier this year.

The U.S. government currently estimates that a ton of carbon emitted today has a social cost of $37, a number that rises each year as the world gets richer and more infrastructure and people are at risk of the detrimental impacts of climate change. Those costs could, in theory, help set up a policy to reduce carbon emissions, such as a cap-and-trade system. Many, including Howard, have argued that the $37 figure is far too low, and the new study only adds to the argument that inaction on climate change could be an expensive proposition.

In comparison, the cost to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been estimated at $2 trillion — no small coin but certainly a better deal than the price tag this study, and others like it, put on society taking little or no action.

“We’re discovering a new climate change cost nobody has considered, but this isn’t some kind of new, catastrophic risk,” Jina said. “This is something we already know about.”

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Follow the author on Twitter @blkahn or @ClimateCentral. We're also on Facebook & other social networks. Original article on Climate Central.

Political favoritism can quite literally be seen from space, according to a new study that finds the home regions of leaders become brighter at night after the person comes to power.

The findings apply mostly to countries with weak political institutions and limited public education. One prominent example was Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the reign of Mobuto Sese Seko. Mobuto, who was president between 1971 and 1997, was born near the small town of Gbadolite. While he was in power, the town flourished.

"Mobuto built a huge palace complex costing millions of dollars, luxury guesthouses, an airport capable of handling Concords, and had the country's best supply of water, electricity and medical services," study researcher Paul Raschky, an economist at Monash University in Australia, said in a statement. Years of satellite data reveal Gbadolite as initially dark at night, brightening under Mobuto and quickly fading again after the authoritarian ruler's exile and death.

Electricity and the economy

At night, when rural areas go dark, urban development remains bright and sparkly, lit by electric lights. These bright spots are handy indicators of wealth and development. In fact, multiple researchers have used light intensity at night as a proxy for a country's economic power. ['Black Marble:' Images of Earth at Night]

One recent image of North and South Korea shows how striking the night light difference can be. In a photograph snapped from the International Space Station (ISS), South Korea and China look bright as day. Isolated and poverty-stricken North Korea is a dark gash between the two. Only a small glow from the country's capital of Pyongyang is visible.

Raschky and his colleague, University of St. Gallen economist Roland Hodler, used data on light intensity from U.S. Air Force weather satellites and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to track nighttime light intensity changes worldwide between 1992 and 2009. They had data from 126 countries, broken into 38,427 provinces, states or subregions.

Political patronage

The results revealed regions that birthed leaders saw a boost in light after the election or power takeover, a sign of economic favor.

"Our results suggest that being the leader's birthplace increases nighttime light intensity and regional GDP by around 4 and 1 percent, respectively," Raschky said. 

The effect was basically nonexistent in regions with well-developed political systems and educated populations. Light intensity showed little change related to leadership in Europe, the Americas, or Australia and its surrounding islands, the researchers reported in March in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. But the effect was strong in Africa and Asia.

Beyond Zaire, another major example was Sri Lanka. Mahinda Rajapaksa, president of the country since 2005, was born in the rural Hambantota district. That area's largest city is home to only 11,000 people, but since Rajapaksa's election, Hambantota has become home to a 35,000-seat cricket stadium and an international airport, with plans for an enormous port.

In the countries with the weakest political institutions, being the hometown of a leader sent nighttime lights soaring by 30 percent, reflecting an estimated 9 percent increase in GDP. When sorting countries by education, those with the least-educated populations saw a leadership effect of 11 percent more light in a leader's home region, and a boost of approximately 3 percent in that region's GDP.

Autocracy clearly drives the trend, the researchers wrote, probably because dictators have few constraints on how they spend money or direct resources.

"Sound political institutions and education are socially desirable and help keep political leaders accountable," Raschky said.

Unfortunately for the regions lucky enough to be favored under a rising leader's star, the effect does not last. Shortly after a leader leaves power, the researchers found, the region's gains ease off, and the changes are not sustained.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Can't get a date on the East Coast? You might want to hop on the next flight to Kansas. A new study finds that, in some rural Great Plains communities, young men outnumber young women by a ratio of 4-to-1.

The study found that, in certain areas of Kansas and Nebraska, the number of young men (ages 22 to 27) is severely disproportionate to the number of young women. Examining census data for these states from 2000 and 2010, Robert Shepard, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln doctoral candidate who conducted the study, found that more than half of 1,627 rural towns, villages and precincts with 800 or fewer people experienced an increased ratio of young men to young women over the past 10 years.

The gender gap was dependent on age. In these sparsely populated places, the proportion of men to women increased, on average, by about 40 percent as people went from their teens to their 20s. The imbalance ranged from a young male population increase of just 7 percent in the most equal communities. Others, particularly the smallest communities analyzed, saw a more than 200 percent increase in the proportion of men to women in just one decade. [6 Gender Myths, Busted]

"The whole point of this study was to look at it quantitatively, to see if the numbers bear out this story of younger people leaving and not coming back," said Shepard, whose findings were published in the April edition of the journal Great Plains Research. "My study was important in helping to substantiate that this is a problem associated with gender."

Migrating youth

For his study, Shepard used 2000 census data to calculate the ratio of boys to girls ages 12 to 17 in more than 2,200 towns and cities in Nebraska and Kansas. He compared that figure to the ratio of men to women ages 22 to 27 in the 2010 census.

What Shepard found was that women ages 22 to 27 are more likely to eschew the country for the city than young men of their age group. While the proportion of young women may be decreasing in rural areas, in Great Plains' cities like Omaha and Kansas City, Kansas, the proportion of women is increasing. These cities showed nearly equal ratios of males to females, and in several other cities, including Topeka, Kansas, and Scottsbluff, Nebraska, women outnumbered men in their age group.

But why are the women of the Great Plains more attracted to city living? Shepard said it likely has to do with education. According to Shepard, college-educated women may have formed new bonds with people while receiving their education, making them hesitant to go back to rural areas. It's also possible that the rural job market is unfavorable to women.

"Where some of the men can come back, because there are a lot of traditionally male jobs like agriculture and industry to return to, many rural communities don't often provide the same opportunity to women," Shepard said. "As long as that imbalance is there, it's going to limit the development or growth of that age group."

Future of the Plains

While Shepard said that more research is needed to investigate why women are leaving rural areas, he cited previous studies exploring women's attitudes toward the rural Great Plains, in which women reported limited job opportunities, as well as a patriarchal culture in some rural communities, as reasons for migrating to more urban areas.

Getting to the bottom of why women are flocking away from rural areas is important, Shepard said, for the economic and social development of these areas.

"The big implication here is that, if these ratios don't trend back toward equilibrium, there is some concern about the long-term population stability of those areas," Shepard said.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo on Twitter @techEpalermo, Facebook or Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies. This article was adapted from one that first appeared in U.S. News & World Report. Nesbit contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Is the United States an oligarchy? Perhaps, two political scientists say, in a provocative new study making the rounds in political circles. The study has been submitted for publication, and if the researchers are right, it explains why certain issues with considerable popular appeal never seem to get traction at the national level in Washington, D.C.

The researchers' thesis? That the wealthiest, most powerful elites in American society control more than just the levers of finance — they control the terms of public debates, what people care about, and ultimately, what gets acted on at the national level in the U.S. Congress and the White House. [Popular Opinion on Climate Change Traced to Political Elites]

The wealthiest Americans care passionately about things like financial debt and budgets. What do most Americans put at the top of their list of concerns, according to polls from Gallup, Pew and others — Federal debt and budgets — not access to health care, or job training, or clean water, or gun control, or climate disruptions, or access to higher education, or efforts to alleviate poverty.

The two political scientists, Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, organized a team of researchers to study 1,779 survey questions between 1981 and 2002 on major public policy issues and broke them down by income levels and how organized interest groups saw their policy preferences enacted.

The conclusion? The wealthy move national policy, and average Americans are effectively powerless.

"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and [freedom of] association. [But] despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts," Gilens and Page wrote in a study that will be published this fall in the journal Perspectives in Politics.

Essentially, the issues that the wealthiest care about are discussed nationally and enacted much more frequently than issues they don't care about, the researchers found.

What's more, if the wealthy and powerful don't like something, they stop it. If they do like it, then something happens nearly half the time.

"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time," they wrote.

While this may not be surprising to people — after all, most people already believe that Washington caters to the rich and powerful — it does have profound implications about the way in which issues with generally popular support (like gun control efforts or climate change mitigation) are dealt with at the national level if powerful forces of status quo are determined to stymie political action.

"We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened," the researchers concluded.

In fact, even in areas where a vast majority of Americans do care passionately about something, but it cuts against the interests of the wealthy and elite in America, the general public loses at the national level.

"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites … or with organized interests, they generally lose," Gilens and Page wrote. "Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

Which is why the current U.S. Supreme Court's recent defense of unlimited spending by the wealthiest Americans in the political system has so many people unnerved. Such rulings will only make it even more difficult for popular issues that aren't in favor with elites to gain any traction.

It's also why the national media's endless fascination with "winners and losers" in national public polls may be a bit pointless and even harmful to an understanding of how things happen in the national political system.

If, as the Gilens and Page study indicates, the wealthiest and the elite set both the terms of the public debates and national political action, then it may not even matter all that much about the "winners and losers" in public polling.

The only thing that matters is what the wealthiest Americans and vested business interests think — because that's what will be debated and enacted. Which is, for those paying attention, the definition of an oligarchy, and not a democracy.

Nesbit's most recent Op-Ed was "God and the Gay Christian." This Op-Ed was adapted from "Oligarchy Nation," which first appeared in Nesbit's column At the Edge in U.S. News & World Report. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Having children forced Professor Donna Ginther to better focus on her work and to budget time wisely. It also gave the University of Kansas economics researcher first-hand experience with being a mother in a rigorous, mostly male, academic environment. Because she had a vested interest, Ginther began to study the gender makeup of U.S. research scientists to better understand the barriers women face in training for and staying in research careers.

All things being equal, hiring and pay of Ph.D. scientists should be regulated by free market forces, according to Ginther. Equally productive workers should be hired and paid the same regardless of, say, gender or race. But employment surveys of academic researchers have long revealed a paucity of women and racial minorities among their ranks, particularly at senior levels, indicating something else is at play.

In search of an explanation for these trends, Ginther found herself sorting through disparate sets of data that seemed impossible to link or combine to reveal the big picture. In 2004, a month after her first child was born, she began a campaign to standardize information on these issues so that it could be shared and explored, and to match U.S. patent and publication records to doctoral employment data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Survey of Doctorate Recipients. These data have given researchers better tools to address important research and policy questions about participation in the science and technology enterprise.

"Data are king," she says. "When we're not able to efficiently share scientific data, it impedes our understanding of the determinants of economic growth, technological advancement and all kinds of societal benefits."

For its part, NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics has been working to create the linked database, despite several confidentiality and proprietary challenges. The updated database will allow Ginther to shine a brighter light on what roles gender, race and ethnicity play in academic career advancement, and give social scientists a more fine-grained picture of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship.

Ginther's career path has been anything but direct. Her interests have taken her all over the country (sometimes on the back of a motorcycle), from Atlanta to Seattle and the Midwest. After receiving her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ginther held academic positions at Southern Methodist University and the University of Washington. She is currently director of the Center for Science Technology and Economic Policy at KU, where she chairs the Faculty Compensation Committee, and has created and implemented policies for faculty engaged in family caregiving responsibilities.

Name: Donna K. Ginther Institution: University of Kansas, Lawrence Field of Study: Labor economics, workforce demographics

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

Kate Dillon Levin is with the Corporate Engagement Team at Code REDD and Jeff Hayward is director of the Climate Program at Rainforest Alliance. This article is adapted from an article for the Skoll World Forum. The authors contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The lowland Mayan forests of northern Guatemala teem with wildlife — toucans, macaws, howler monkeys, and even the fabled jaguar. This is a forest reborn, as nearly 2,000 years ago it was completely deforested by the ancient Mayan civilization. Nature and time have allowed a second chance for the forest to heal.

But today, the Mayan forest is once again threatened — this time by economic activities such as cattle ranching and agriculture. If destroyed again, it is not likely to come back.

There is hope, however, in forests designated for community use. In these areas, the deforestation rate is 20 times slower than in areas not under the care of local people. These communities practice sustainable harvesting and generate millions of dollars of revenue annually through the sale of certified timber and xate (an ornamental palm frond), benefiting close to 5,000 local people.

The threat of deforestation looms

Such communities in Guatemala deserve credit for pursuing sustainable forestry when the economic incentives for unsustainable land use around them remain strong. Although forests should be more valuable than at any time in human history, today they are worth more when cleared for cattle, oil palm, soy or pulp production. And this pressure is only increasing with population growth and global demand for agricultural commodities.

But a new paradigm of growth is emerging through a mechanism known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). By valuing the carbon stored in forests, REDD+ is changing the economic incentives around land use in developing forest countries. Sales of verified REDD+ carbon credits effectively give these countries and communities the credit they deserve for choosing a sustainable pathway to development.

Envisioned as an integrated climate and development solution, hopes were high that global carbon markets would yield sustainable financing for REDD+ conservation and sustainable forest management. Progress on an international agreement edges forward, however, and regulated markets have been slow to materialize. As a result, today REDD+ is at a crossroads as the potential supply of REDD+ credits on the voluntary carbon market significantly outpaces demand.

Yet, it is important to note that REDD+ is working for the planet and for businesses. Today, REDD+ projects protect 14 million hectares of threatened forests across the globe (an area the size of Bangladesh) and reduce emissions by 22 million tonnes (metric tons) of CO₂ annually. The world's leading companies recognize that investing in efforts to stop deforestation in exchange for verified emissions reductions is a compelling way to optimize their corporate impact. Microsoft, Kering, Natura, Disney, and Barclays are among those taking voluntary action — addressing the greenhouse gas emissions they cannot avoid by purchasing REDD+ credits.

REDD+ financing for sustainable supply

REDD+ is working, but it needs more support in order to achieve a meaningful impact. The world continues to lose its forests at an alarming rate — approximately an area the size of Manhattan every day. Tropical forests are vital to human health and well-being; they determine the quality, quantity and regularity of global water supplies, gobble up carbon dioxide, house vital biodiversity hotspots and provide shelter for half a billion people. And not least, they are a source of inspiration and beauty.

Multinational corporations sourcing commodities play a significant role in driving forest loss, so they will be pivotal to the solution. Global business must take on a new, coordinated imperative to lessen its forest footprint. Corporations large and small are making significant, public pledges to reduce deforestation in supply chains. Companies within the Consumer Goods Forum, whose total annual sales exceed $3 trillion, have pledged to remove deforestation from their supply chains by 2020.

These kinds of commitments are important, but may not go far enough to meet the scale of need and can be reinforced by REDD+ financing. While a solid framework for sustainable land use is essential for long-term conservation, payments for long-term conservation via REDD+ is essential for supporting sustainable land management. Back in the lowland Mayan forests of Guatemala, the communities defending their forests against strong economic pressures plan to use income from REDD+ to strengthen the viability of their sustainable forest enterprises.

Given recent revelations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.N. Environment Program Emissions Gap Report — which warn that current actions to cut emissions are insufficient and unlikely to prevent catastrophic climate change — society must use every available effort to curb emissions. Deforestation, as part of the problem, must also be part of the solution, and that solution will require a change in economic incentives. We believe forest conservation — and thus sustainable supply management — will require REDD+.

This article originally appeared as "Giving credit where credit is due: Using REDD+ finance to enhance Sustainable Forest Management" on the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, a premier international platform for accelerating entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social issues. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.

Bob Litterman is a retired partner and former head of risk management at Goldman Sachs. He is now chairman of the risk committee at Kepos Capital LP, a New York-based hedge fund. He contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Time compression is a simple concept fundamental to risk management. It refers to the fact that we can solve almost any problem given enough time — the problem only becomes troublesome when events unfold too quickly, leaving insufficient time to react and manage the consequences.

I first heard the term when my friend and former colleague, Jacob Rosengarten, spoke at a recent conference for hedge-fund investors, describing what went wrong during the financial crisis.

The concept can be applied broadly — in national security, for example, the concept applies to a country that must defend against an enemy missile launch or a cyberattack in minutes or seconds. Risk-management responses must come in a timely and accurate manner, for in such situations, there are rarely second chances.

History contains a number of risk-management lessons in which outcomes have gone awry due to the unanticipated emergence of time compression. Returning to the financial-meltdown example, it cascaded into market after market like falling dominoes, resulting in severe selling pressures, market losses, unexpected defaults and government bailouts of key companies. Things happened so rapidly that it was hard to keep score, all at great cost to society.

The consequences of time compression also describe the risk-management challenges created by climate change. Is it possible to avoid a global catastrophe caused by climate change coupled with time compression?

The answer almost certainly is yes. With foresight and planning, the planet can avoid the consequences of catastrophic time compression. It is important, however, that society not become overconfident about predicting or understanding all the implications of climate change.

Containing the unexpected risks associated with time compression requires immediate and urgent defensive action: It is time to price carbon-dioxide emissions.

This is an action that governments around the world can take simply by changing a few lines in the tax code, making industries that emit large quantities of carbon dioxide pay a price for doing so. The only interesting question that remains is how much to charge relative to a risk that is still unknown.

Let's examine the risk. Much like the financial crisis, we might expect a slow-moving increase in global temperatures resulting from climate change, as well as its related impacts, such as sea-level rise and ocean acidification. Yet the sheer complexity of the physical systems at work could lull the world into underestimating the risk, and increasing the chances of calamitous global damage.

Climate change, when tied to time compression, makes corrective actions more costly and less certain of efficacy. An invisible change in the tax system would create appropriate incentives for every economic agent in the world to change their behaviors. It would prompt businesses to develop alternative technologies that are safer for the environment, encourage consumers to make the right energy choices and coax investors to build capital stock suitable for the future.

Today, unfortunately, those invisible tax codes instead create incentives to increase carbon emissions.

Economists expect the emissions price required to successfully avoid catastrophic impacts from time compression to be relatively low if society were to act now. But there are two potential problems with such an expectation: First, it could be wrong, and second, until society prices carbon emissions fittingly, the risk itself is growing exponentially — as it has during the past half century.

Society must arrive at the correct response in the context of risk management.

The only effective brake on additional catastrophic risk is to price future uncertainties created by carbon emissions. The expected damages wrought by climate change are enough to justify pricing emissions today, but the latent risk produced by time compression and unexpected catastrophe requires an additional risk premium.

In economic terms, this means any carbon emissions pricing must take into account both the expected loss and the wide confidence interval (indicating the need to continue collecting data), as well as the cost to the planet of underestimating either. In reality, the appropriate price of carbon emissions will probably never be known. Like all pricing, it will adjust and fluctuate with changing circumstances and as more data become available.

Some may argue that it is premature to adopt such a risk-averse posture on carbon-emissions pricing. After all, if we don't know how climate change will unfold, is the cost of this conservatism really worth it in terms of what we will forgo today?

In fact, conservatism in pricing climate change is good public policy. The cost of being wrong — that is, not being conservative enough — potentially is unaffordable, not just for the plant and animal species that live on the planet, but also for humans. What if conflicts erupt as a result of changes prompted by climate change, such as access to freshwater?

People buy insurance on their homes, even though they can't predict when a natural disaster will strike — or if one will occur at all. But we all agree that the cost of such a disaster is unacceptably high should it happen. So we protect ourselves.

If people do this for their homes, why not do it for future generations and the planet ?

This is not the time to slowly ease onto the brake over multiple decades, as many policymakers have suggested. This is the time to brake hard. Such action, hopefully, over time, will prompt the price of carbon emissions to drop, along with the risk.

Society should not regard the act of filling the Earth's atmosphere with greenhouse gases lightly. Just as in the financial crisis, when the meltdown in value of the huge investments in risky mortgages unpredictably rippled into other markets, this global chemistry experiment also may spill over into uncontrollable environmental disasters, all compounded by time compression.

Whether the price of emissions today should be low or high compared with future prices depends on whether society considers the risk of potential, and as yet unknown, environmental disasters. If society does not consider that risk, then the price should be lower today. This approach assumes that future generations will be just fine, and that they will spend whatever it takes to offset the consequences of climate change.

Be forewarned, however: Starting with a low price does not take into account the possibility that today's actions will lead to unexpected impacts, which create time compression and additional consequences impossible to reverse.

Make no mistake — this already is happening. Arctic ice is slowly disappearing. What we don't know, however, is the long-term consequences of this. Will such changes lead to a world less hospitable to human life, and if so, how bad will it be? No one really knows.

The danger of time compression caused by climate change is real — thus, society must immediately price the risk.

World governments must address these risks urgently. They must work in a concerted manner — consistent with their responsibilities to protect their populations and futures — to price carbon emissions sufficient for creating a meaningful margin of safety. Pricing should be high enough for society to feel confident enough that it can control the risk and develop viable alternative technologies.

Hopefully, there is plenty of capacity for the atmosphere to safely absorb the emissions that will come over the next several decades while cheaper alternative energy sources take over. Of course, there are no guarantees, just as with homeowners insurance. The question is, how much risk is society willing to assume on behalf of future generations?

Yes, there are serious challenges to implementing a carbon-pricing policy. It must be fair to developing nations, and take into account that some countries, hoping for a free ride, will not want to participate. This will require true statesmanship by world leaders to resolve. But complexity should not be an excuse for inaction.

After all, we may have less time than we think.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or Kepos Capital LP. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.

(ISNS) -- What do you call a coastal town that keeps spending millions of dollars on bringing sand to rebuild its eroded beaches?

According to scientists at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, "sucker" is the appropriate term. And towns up and down the nearby coast which spend nothing can be called "free-riders."

The two terms, which come from sociology and economics, not geology, describe what happens in a computer model the scientists developed when one town spends money on renourishing its beaches by bringing in sand and helps nearby towns that don't. 

Because the model shows that the new sand improves the beach -- and property values -- the sucker town keeps bringing in more sand while the free-riders get improved beaches without spending a dime, which creates a fiscal feedback loop.

"Towns along the coast are free-riding on the suckers who are supplying them with nourishing sand," said Zach Williams a physical oceanographer at UNC-Wilmington. "As erosion increases, it becomes locally optimal to nourish more. Property values need to be stabilized."

Williams and colleagues, including scientists at Duke and Ohio State Universities, published the results of their model in the current issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface.

The model does not use actual data from coastal towns, mostly because the data do not exist, Williams said. They modeled what they knew about the North Carolina coast extended it to East Coast sand beaches.

Because the effects shown in the model stretch over years, it is impossible to know how accurate the model is.

"We don't expect that at this second that there are full-blown sucker feedbacks taking effect," Williams said. The effects can take as long as 40 years to be seen in the real world.

The model assumes for the experiment that all the towns along the coast they modeled are alike economically -- no towns are rich, none are poor. That way, the model could concentrate on the physical effects of erosion and renourishment.

Sand naturally is washed up and down the coast by ocean action, waves and currents. When one town renourishes its beach, the ocean moves the sand up and down the coast, extending the beaches of other towns which did not bring in more sand, the model showed.

The town paying for the new sand sees enough benefit to keep bringing in more, and the other towns see erosion on their beaches mitigated and have little inclination to start spending their own money. This gets amplified in the model because sand is getting increasingly more expensive; sand is not an infinite resource, Williams said.

In the long run, the model shows, the renourishing town, the sucker in this analogy, passes a point of diminished return -- more money producing less improvement -- and property values in the town decrease. In the model, which runs for 150 years' time, it would actually be possible to get a negative value to the property, but Williams admits that never happens in the real world because the federal government steps in with subsidies.

Modeling studies such as this need to be taken with a grain of salt, some scientists believe. The not-infrequent differences between models and the real world illustrate a growing schism in science, between scientists working in the field and those at computers developing data-making models -- in other words, scientists who are sure they are seeing the trees and those who think they can describe the forest. The two sides even have their own journals.

According to Orrin Pilkey, a professor emeritus of earth and ocean sciences at Duke who was not part of Williams' experiment, the real world is more complicated than the model.

"In my experience, storms are mainly responsible for nourishing beaches," he said. The Wilmington model assumes it is caused by uniform wave action. Additionally, much sand transport occurs offshore, farther out than assumed by the model.

Not all communities are equal, an assumption in the model, Pilkey said, which affects the economics. Also, single towns often contain pockets that are richer or poorer than their neighbors. But, in his experience with the issue, the choice to add sand to one beach over another can be reduced to politics, not science. 

"It's politics [that] so much determines which beach will get renourished and which doesn't," Pilkey said. 

"Politics erases everything on the coast," he said.

Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

Mindy Lubber is the president of Ceres, a non-profit organization mobilizing business leadership on climate change. She contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Crop losses. Floods. Wildfires.

Climate change and extreme weather are fundamentally changing the United States, and American taxpayers are paying a huge, and growing, cost.          

The U.S. Government Accountability Office warned in February that climate change is a "significant financial risk to the federal government." It threatens everything — not just federal lands and buildings, but food, flood and crop insurance, and disaster relief.

And who pays for all of this? We do, the American taxpayers — a threat to the government's wallet is a threat to our own bottom line. Here are several examples of the escalating costs Americans are already bearing.

Food

Taxpayers subsidize the federal crop insurance program that was created during the 1930s Dust Bowl to protect farmers against crop losses. Today, we're experiencing another devastating drought, and federal crop insurance losses have tripled in the past three years to $16 billion in payouts for 2012. That's a cost of $51 a year for every man, woman and child in America.

And these costs are likely to continue — the latest numbers from the U.S. Drought Monitor show nearly 67 percent of the contiguous U.S. is now experiencing some level of drought.

Floods

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is staggering under massive losses after Superstorm Sandy, which triggered more than 115,000 new claims in just the first two weeks after the storm.

Although NFIP collects about $3.5 billion a year in premiums, the amount of claims the agency has paid out has exceeded the amount collected in four of the past eight years, leading to increased borrowing by the federal government (in other words, taxpayers) to fill the gap. Last year's losses in Sandy's wake are expected to approach $8 billion. That's $25 for every American. [How Sandy Compares to the Worst US Natural Disasters]

Keep in mind, that figure doesn't even include the $50 billion of disaster relief that Congress approved in January for Sandy-impacted states. And with sea levels rising and storm surges reaching further inland because of climate change, risks to coastal communities and costs to taxpayers will continue to rise.

Fires

While Eastern states flood, many Western states are going up in flames. In 2012, more than nine million acres burned in wildfires — an area larger than the state of Maryland — making it the third-worst fire year in U.S. history.

In 2012, the Forest Service overspent its available fire suppression budget by $400 million, as it has almost every year for the last 20 years, transferring millions of dollars away from other land management projects. The costs are not only borne by the federal government; Wyoming and Montana spent more than $90 million of state money fighting wildfires in 2012. [Is Global Warming Fueling Colorado Wildfires?]

Climate models show a likely increase in fires in coming years, and a study by Headwaters Economics found that even a 1-degree rise in temperatures would likely lead to a 300 percent increase in acres burned and a 100 percent increase in fire-suppression costs.

State taxpayer exposure

Extreme weather, influenced by climate change, creates other taxpayer risks. State governments are increasingly liable for the cost of hurricane damages as private insurers pull out of at-risk locations, leaving state taxpayers subsidizing insurance loss claims for homes and businesses.

The state insurer in Florida, for example, is carrying the burden of more than one million homeowners' policies — a financial catastrophe just waiting for state taxpayers the next time a major hurricane hits Florida. State government-loss exposure in hurricane-prone states (such as Florida, Texas and Massachusetts) now exceeds $885 billion, a 16-fold jump from 1990.

Those trends are chilling reminders of the sweeping economic impacts we are now all facing from warming global temperatures. As you pay your taxes on April 15, you should also consider what your political leaders — in Washington and your state capital — are doing to address climate change. Let's hope, for your wallet's sake, they're tackling the issue head-on.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Andrew Hutson, director of global value chain initiatives for the Environmental Defense Fund, contributed this article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Is the business community its own worst enemy? That was my takeaway from a recent post on FastCompany's blog. In it, Joss Tantram makes the provocative argument that trade — "rights of enterprise, private trade and market activity" — is a fundamental human right. But he also notes that that right is increasingly at risk, given the market's failure to address the disruptive effects of climate change and other environmental challenges. 

"Trade as we have known it is endangered," Tantram writes. "Clear trends in demographics, urbanization, water quality and availability, climate stability, resource scarcity and ecosystem health represent risks to the continuation of trade as usual." He suggests changes to trade law, policy and regulation that remedy the problem.

I agree with Tantram. Mostly. Trade is the lifeblood of society and the engine that enables people to live better lives. And, yes, systems of commerce are increasingly at risk due to self-inflicted social and environmental wounds. So we do need new public policies to ensure future prosperity. 

It's also true that a growing number of businesses are keenly aware that environmental threats are also threats to the bottom line. As Tantram notes: 

"A growing number of companies … recogniz(ing) that their longevity relies upon the health and vitality of natural capital and the continuing stable functioning of natural systems, have developed plans to transform their production activities to become sustainable."

So far, so good. But, I don't think Tantram's diagnosis or his cure are precise enough. The real question to ask is: Can business save itself from itself?

In fact, despite the progress that has been made, the primary obstacle to enacting policies that will safeguard the environment and protect the "right to trade" is still the business community and its allies. Far too frequently, their knee-jerk reaction to proposed environmental policies is to try to kill them. Or, nearly as bad, many executives will sit on the sidelines while their more aggressive peers disrupt meaningful, system-wide action.

In the very worst cases, companies speak out of both sides of their mouths. Publicly, they maintain the importance of sustainability; privately, they apply money and influence to thwarting meaningful action — often by undermining sound science (as detailed in this report by the Union of Concerned Scientists).

We've come a long way in the past decade. Environmentalists have gone from being seen as the enemy in corporate boardrooms to trusted advisers. As a result, there are many exciting initiatives underway at corporations around the world aimed at tackling critical environmental problems. But, we cannot continue to pretend that voluntary programs alone are sufficient to solve the scope of the challenges we face.

Over the next decade, being a business leader (or a leading corporation) will mean helping to shape smart government policies that preserve ecosystems vital to the continued profitability of business itself. It will also mean taking a more aggressive role in overriding those voices within the business community that wish to maintain the status quo.

Business leadership of this sort is one of the critical elements to meeting the global threat of climate change. The stakes are high: Our systems of global trade and the ecosystems life depends on hang in the balance.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

People may not be as generous to strangers as social scientists previously believed, at least if a new study is any indication.

The findings, published today (Dec. 17) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help explain a seemingly irrational behavior: People consistently give money to other people, even when it hurts their own bottom line in an economic game used by scientists to study cooperation.

Those findings suggested that people are naturally generous. But the new study suggests people may donate to the common pool not out of generosity, but because they simply don't understand how their actions will lead to payoffs down the line. The findings suggest these games aren't a great way to understand human generosity, said study author Maxwell Burton-Chellew, a zoologist at the University of Oxford.

"It gets at a big question about how much these economic games capture reality," Burton-Chellew said.

Common fund

In the classic economic experiment called the public goods game, people are given some money, say $10, and have the option of putting some of it into a "public fund." Whatever they put into the pot gets multiplied and shared amongst all the players, including themselves, though depending on the multiplier, they wind up with less money than they started with. The most economically "rational" behavior in this instance would be to put zero dollars into the public fund, but in studies, people consistently put in some of their own money, leaving themselves worse off. [The 10 Things That Make Humans Special]

In the past, researchers have pointed to this behavior as evidence of people's natural propensity to help others.

In the new study, Burton-Chellew and colleagues asked 236 participants to play a standard public goods game. They then had half the participants play a different version of the game, where they were told explicitly how much other members of the group had donated and gotten back in turn.

When the payoffs were broken down, people became miserly and put less into the public fund.

Next, the researchers created a stripped-down, "black-box" version of the game where participants were simply told that they could contribute to a black box and get some non-negative amount of money in return, with the amount determined by a mathematical equation.

The players contributed about the same amount in the black-box version of the game as in the standard game. In other words, the people gave just as much when there was no notion of "public good" or generosity involved.

Are people generous?

The findings suggest that altruism can't explain people's seemingly generous behavior in the public goods game. Instead, they may simply not understand how the payoffs work in these games and thus may be exploring many different strategies as they play, Burton-Chellow told LiveScience.

But the study doesn't rule out the idea that people follow social norms to be generous, only that knowing more about perfect strangers' donations doesn't change your own behavior, said Herbert Gitnis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.

But if people are told how their money will benefit society — for instance, by helping flood victims in Bangladesh — they will usually give more, he said.

By contrast, if the researchers said, "'If you donate, this person who is now in jail for rape and murder will get extra cigarettes or extra food rations,' nobody will contribute," Gitnis told LiveScience.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

The short answer: a lot. The long answer: depends on how you look at it. Whatever your viewpoint, here's how $700 billion — the figure inked in the initial dead-in-the-water government bailout bill for Wall Street  — compares to other vast sums. NASA in fiscal year 2009 will launch several missions into space and pay for hundreds of people to operate a host of space telescopes and even remote robots on Mars and run a PR and media department that puts most large corporations to shame. The agency's budget: $17.6 billion, or 2.5 percent of the bailout sum. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has an annual budget of $6.06 billion to support research and education on astronomy, chemistry, materials science, computing, engineering, earth sciences, nanoscience and physics (among others) at more than 1,900 universities and institutions across the United States. You have to turn to much bigger initiatives, like war and defense, to get beyond this chump change and approach the bailout figure. From 2003 through the end of fiscal year 2009, Congress has appropriated $606 billion for military operations and other activities associated with the war in Iraq, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The entire military budget for fiscal 2008 is $481.4 billion. Social Security is a $608 billion annual program. Many analysts fear the bailout because the cost must ultimately be borne by taxpayers. Based on the U.S. Census Bureau's estimate of the current population of about 305 million people, each person would have to pay $2,300 to fund the $700,000,000,000. If each American (including children) paid a dollar a day, it would take more than six years to pay the money in full. One might argue, however, that this $700 billion would be a modest splash in the bucket of national debt, which already stands at well over $9 trillion (which means you already owe $31,642 each). Even the New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez would lose sleep over all those zeroes. Currently the top paid major league baseball player, Rodriguez takes home $28 million a year, meaning it would take 25,000 A-Rod salaries to carry the $700 billion. Nobody is rich enough to pay back this $700 billion by himself. In fact, the Forbes 400 richest list recently came out. It would take most of what these 400 people collectively have — a combined net worth of $1.57 trillion — to dig out of this mess.

Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

In a new perspective on ocean health, one that looks through the lens of both humans and the natural world, scientists give Earth's seas a grade of 60 out of 100, meaning there's lots of room for improvement, they say.

The new index ranks oceans' health and the benefits they provide to humans using 10 categories, such as biodiversity, clean waters, ability to provide food for humans and support of the livelihood of people living in coastal regions.  

In addition to assessing the present, the index provides a benchmark against which to measure progress in the future, writes the research team led by Benjamin Halpern at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in California.

The global score applies only to waters within countries' Exclusive Economic Zones, because sufficient data is not available for the high seas, they write. [Oceans & Us: A Gallery]

"The global score of 60 is a strong message that we are not managing our use of the oceans in an optimal way," study researcher Bud Ris, president and CEO of the New England Aquarium said in a statement. "There is a lot of opportunity for improvement, and we hope the Index will make that point abundantly clear."

Countries' individual scores ranged from 36 to 86, with the Atlantic coast of the west African nation Sierra Leone ranking the least healthy, while the protected Pacific waters around Jarvis Island, an uninhabited island designated a U.S. wildlife refuge ranked as the healthiest.

In general, developed countries performed better than developing nations, however, there were exceptions. Poland and Singapore scored poorly, 42 and 48, respectively, while some developing tropical nations, such as Suriname and Seychelles scored relatively well, at 69 and 73, respectively. 

The U.S. waters ranked 63, Canada's ranked 70 and the United Kingdom ranked 61.

The scores on individual goals varied by country. Here are the 10 goals upon which the ranking is based:

1) Food provision: This goal refers to the amount of seafood a country catches or grows, all sustainably, from its waters.

2) Artisanal fishing: The opportunity for the small-scale fishing efforts that are particularly crucial in developing nations.

3) Natural products: The sustainable harvest of living, non-food natural products, such as corals, shells, seaweeds and fish for the aquarium trade. It does not include bioprospecting, oil and gas or mining products.

4) Carbon storage: The protection of three habitats, mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes, which store carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere and therefore mitigating global warming.

5) Coastal protection: The presence of natural habitats and barriers, including mangroves, coral reefs, seagrasses, salt marshes and sea ice, which physically protect coastal structures, like homes, and uninhabited places, like parks.

6) Coastal livelihoods and economies: Jobs and revenue produced from marine-related industry, alongside the indirect benefits of a stable coastal economy.

7) Tourism and Recreation: The value people place on experiencing and enjoying coastal areas, not the economic benefit which is included in coastal economies.

8) Clean waters: Whether or not waters are free from oil spills, chemicals, algal blooms, disease-causing pathogens, including those introduced by sewage, floating trash, mass kills of organisms and oxygen-depleted conditions.

9) Biodiversity: The extinction risk faced by species as well as the health of their habitats.

10) Sense of Place: Aspects that people value as part of their identity, including iconic species and places with special cultural value.

A description of the new index is published in Thursday's (Aug. 16) issue of the journal Nature.

Follow LiveScience writer Wynne Parry on Twitter @Wynne_Parry or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

How does diversity arise? Does it make a system more productive? How does it impact the overall strength of a system? Does it make a system prone to large events? These are some of the questions Scott Page, professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan is helping to answer.

Page's research focuses on the myriad roles that diversity plays in complex systems. Over his career, he has taken that research and challenged community groups, high schools, corporations, government agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations and university audiences to think about how diversity works.

He has written three books and many papers in disciplines including economics, political science, computer science, management, physics, public health, geography, urban planning, engineering and history.

He says one of the most rewarding aspects of his career is the opportunity to work with brilliant people. Here he answers the ScienceLives 10 questions.

Name: Scott E. Page Institution: University of Michigan Field of Study: Social Science, Complex Systems

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In 1994, when the Federal Communications Commission decided to allocate broadcast licenses via auction rather than lottery, it didn't do so in a vacuum. The rationale for the move came from the work of economists and other researchers — Paul Milgrom key among them. 

He and colleague Robert Wilson developed the "simultaneous ascending auction" based on their previous research in game theory. (You can learn more in Milgrom's book Putting Auction Theory to Work — published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.) As of December, 2011, the spectrum auctions have put more than $51 billion into the U.S. Treasury, according to the FCC.

Milgrom's work has been integral to design of auction systems related to electricity and natural gas as well as radio waves. In 2008, he won the prestigious Erwin Plein Prize in Economics.

"Milgrom’s path-breaking work has developed and popularized new tools for the analysis of asymmetric information and strategic interaction and, most significantly, has shown the usefulness of those tools for the analysis of applied problems," said Charles Manski of Northwestern University, which issues the prize.

Milgrom has gone on to advise Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and governments including the United Kingdom's and Canada's on matters related to auctions and other asset distribution systems.

Despite his considerable research success, Milgrom says he values teaching equally. He has taught and mentored economists who’ve gone on to make significant contributions in their fields. "I love teaching ... and being able to understand the economy more deeply and be able to transmit that knowledge to my students at Stanford, that's fantastic," he said.

 In the video below, he answers 10 questions related to his life as a scientist.

Name:Paul Milgrom Institution: Stanford University Field of Study: Economics

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

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Having fun with trends, an educator and author on his Post Carbon Institute blog, also reveals the absurdity at the end of a drawn-out trend line.

For instance, if technology continues on its course, within 20 years transistors will be the size of an atom, and after another generation or so, he says, they will be the size of an electron! This trend line is based on Moore's Law, which would support the claim that about every two years the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit doubles.

Excepting possibly the expansion of the universe, Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow-in-residence, says all trends ultimately reach their limits and either stall or reverse. He suggests a dose of critical thinking and some statistics know-how are neccessary when looking at trends.

For instance, even taking one trend in isolation may  not make sense, as some trends work against each other and can end up cancelling each other out.

Taking these business-as-usual assumptions, Heinberg says, may be as much a lack of cognition as a motive-driven action; politicians want certain trends, such as the national economy, to continue to expand forever; transportation planners want traffic to continue to proliferate. But in reality, neither is valid. And so on.

So just like the hottest gadget or all-the-rage clothing fashion, many trends won't last for long. You can bank on that.

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Not only are "kids" in their late 20s and early 30s moving back in with Mom and Dad, they're enjoying it, according to the Pew Research Center.

Even so, about 25 percent of those surveyed said their relationship with their parents had suffered due to the move-in, while 24 percent said the move had been good for the relationship and 48 percent said it hadn't made a difference.

The sharing of family finances appears to have benefited some young adults as well as their parents; 48 percent of boomerang children report that they have paid rent to their parents, and 89 percent say they have helped with household expenses.

Most young adults who find themselves under the same roof with Mom and Dad aren't exactly living the high life, however. Nearly 80 percent of these 25- to 34-year-olds said they didn't have enough money to lead the kind of life they wanted, compared with 55 percent of their same-age peers who weren't living with their parents.

The no-shame attitude toward moving back home may have to do with the phenomenon becoming commonplace. Among adults ages 25 to 34, 61 percent said they have friends or family members who have moved in with their parents over the past few years due to economic conditions. Furthermore, 29 percent report that a child of theirs has moved in with them in the past few years because of the economy.

The findings are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 6-19, 2011, with 2,048 adults ages 18 and older living in the continental United States; results were weighted to reveal a nationally representative final sample.

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Tales of foreclosed families and unemployed college students moving back in with mom and dad aren't just anecdotal: A new report finds that more than 51 million Americans now live under one roof with multiple generations of family

That number, up from 46.5 million in 2007, represents the largest increase in multigenerational households in modern U.S. history. Unemployment is the biggest driver of the trend, according to a new Pew Research Center report.

About 6.9 million of America's multigenerational homes consist of two adult generations, such as an adult child returning home to his or her parents. Another 4.2 million households contain three generations or more, while about 857,000 consist of grandparents caring for a grandchild.

A growing trend

Immigration and delayed marriage have been contributing to the slow growth of multigenerational households for decades. Since about 1980, there has been a steady growth of multigenerational homes by about 2 percent per year, Pew reports. The numbers in the report are based on U.S. Census data.

But between 2007 and 2009, the numbers shot up rapidly, increasing by 4.9 million or 10.5 percent. Because actual population grew only 1.8 percent during this time, the share of the population living with multiple generations increased from 15.4 percent in 2007 to 16.7 percent in 2009.

These combined households are most common among those hit hard by recession: About a quarter of the unemployed lived in a multi-generational home in 2009, compared with 15.7 percent of those with jobs. [Read: U.S. Poverty Rate Highest Since 1993]

A quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds and a fifth of 25- to 24-year-olds also moved back in with mom and dad, the report found. This age group has been hit hard by unemployment and underemployment, with 38 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest rate in nearly four decades.

Other research has found that Americans of all ages feel more insecure about their finances in the wake of the recession, with 31.5 percent saying they are "not at all satisfied" with their financial situations.

Asians are more likely than other ethnic groups to live in multigenerational households, with 25.8 percent doing so in 2009. Blacks are next, at 23.7 percent, and Hispanics come in third at 23.4 percent. About 13.1 percent of whites lived with multiple generations in 2009.

The sharpest growth in multigenerational homes between 2007 and 2009, however, was among Hispanics. Hispanic multigenerational households increased by 17.6 percent during that time, compared with 8.7 percent for blacks, 8.5 percent for whites and 7.3 percent for Asians.

Getting by

Moving in with family is a financial lifeline for Americans, the Pew Report revealed. After adjusting for household size, the median incomes of multigenerational homes is lower than in other households, but the poverty rate among people in multigenerational in 2009 was only 11.5 percent, compared with 14.6 percent in other homes.

The poverty-alleviating effects of moving back home were sharpest among the unemployed. The poverty rate for people without jobs who didn't live with other generations was 30.3 percent in 2009. For unemployed people in multigenerational family homes, the poverty rate was 17.5 percent.

Far from harboring freeloaders, multigenerational families share income across the household. In typical households, the head-of-household accounts for 85.7 percent of family income. In multigenerational homes, the head of the household accounts for about half of the family's income. A child 25 or older living with mom and dad typically contributed 24.7 percent of the family's income. An older parent living with an adult child normally contributed a similar percentage.

You can follow Live Science senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

Americans are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller, a new study finds.

The reason, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that when the income gap is large, lower- and middle-income people feel less trusting of others and expect people to treat them less fairly.

The study also provides a potential explanation for why American happiness hasn't risen along with national wealth in the last 50 years.

"Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s," study researcher Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia said in a statement. "With that, we've seen a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness." [Read: Does Big Government Make People Happier?]

Unequal income

The results apply to about 60 percent of Americans, or those in the low- and middle-income brackets. For wealthier Americans, the size of the income gap had no effect on happiness.

Economics researchers have long documented growing income inequality in the United States, which they measure using an index called the Gini coefficient; the larger the number the greater the gap between rich and poor. During the 1960s and '70s, the researchers wrote, the U.S. Gini coefficient was on par with many European countries and lower than France's. According to the United Nations Development Program, the U.S. Gini coefficient between 1992 and 2007 was 40.8, higher than France's 32.7. Traditionally happy Scandinavian countries, such as Finland, have Gini coefficients in the mid to high 20s.

But it's tough to compare happiness between countries, since Argentina (a country with a large income gap) differs from Finland in many ways other than economics. To get rid of some of those variables, Oishi and his colleagues used the U.S.-only General Social Survey, which questioned 1,500 to 2,000 randomly selected Americans every year or every other year between 1972 and 2008. More than 48,000 people answered questions on how happy they were, how much they trusted others, and how fair they thought other people were.

Explaining unhappiness

The results showed that during times when the income gap was large, Americans in the low- and middle-income groups were less happy than during times of lower income gaps. (For wealthier people, the income gap made no difference either way — though another study has found that giving away money, which would seem to lessen that gap, can be very rewarding.) Changes in total household income weren't related to the happiness ups and downs.

The results are correlational, so researchers can't be sure that the income gap directly caused unhappiness, but a little more digging turned up a possible explanation. When the income gap grew, low- and middle-class people became increasingly distrustful of their fellow Americans. They were also less likely to believe that fair treatment from others was the norm. This social fracturing could explain the drop in happiness during these times, the researchers wrote.

If the results hold, the authors wrote, they explain why countries with lower income gaps, including Denmark, France and Germany, have become happier as their wealth has grown, while Americans have not.

"The implications are clear," Oishi said. "If we care about the happiness of most people, we need to do something about income inequality."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

A few weeks back, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis spoke about the labor dispute that threatens to cancel the coming football season and made a prediction that hit almost as hard as one of his quarterback-leveling sacks: Without pro football, crime among fans will increase. "Do this research if we don't have a season," Lewis said. "Watch how much crime picks up, if you take away our game."

Well, we did a little research and while it seems that the crime-reducing effects of the National Football League are highly speculative, Lewis' theory is actually not as wacky as it sounds.

Since at least 1903, researchers have claimed that sports may benefit society. An article that year in the American Journal of Psychology, titled "The Ethics of Football," said the sport "cultivates temperance and self-control ... manly courage, skill in planning, obedience, co-operation, esprit de corps."

Some researchers still believe a version of this today. There is evidence that sports promote social interaction and that after a disappointing loss fans "join together to cheer up each other," said Sandy Wolfson, a psychologist at the University of Northumberland in Britain. So football might reduce crime simply by keeping people cheery.

Another theory is that we're just couch potatoes. This one comes from economics: it's possible to reduce crime simply by keeping people busy. That is what Lewis seemed to argue when he said that without the NFL on TV, "there's nothing else to do."

A forthcoming study on the Great Depression supports this idea. In it, the researchers found that giving unemployed people jobs reduced crime more effectively than giving them direct payments, most likely because it kept them busy, according to economist Price Fishback of the University of Arizona, a co-author of the study, to be published in the Journal of Law and Economics.

Similarly, violent movies might deter violent crime by keeping violent people (who are drawn to such films) occupied, according to a 2009 study by economists Gordon Dahl of UC San Diego and Stefano DellaVigna of UC Berkeley. They found that fewer violent crimes were committed in the U.S. on weekends when the theater audience for violent movies was relatively large. [Read: How Long Do Mafia Victims Take to Dissolve In Acid?]

On the other hand …

While those studies support Lewis' claim, there's also reason to believe that a season without football might actually reduce crime rates. The popular theory that claims that sports provide a healthy outlet for aggression, also known as "catharsis," has been largely debunked, researchers say. "Acting aggressively or excitedly tends to lead to more aggression or excitement, not less. That is why you tend to get violence after a big sports victory in a city rather than a decrease in violence," Art Markman, a psychologist at the University of Texas, told Life's Little Mysteries.

What do the actual statistics say? There are so many other factors that some say research may never be able to isolate the effects of football. "It is nearly impossible to make a correlation between football games and crime," said Anthony Guglielmi, director of public affairs for the Baltimore Police Department. [Read: Where Do Murderous Tendencies Come From?]

Yet a few studies have tried, and have found that for some populations football can do the opposite of what Ray Lewis predicted.

A 2009 study of college football games, led by economist Daniel Rees of the University of Colorado Denver, found sharp increases in assaults and vandalism in neighboring communities on game days. And a 2011 study of six NFL teams found that when a home team suffered an upset loss, male-on-female domestic violence increased. For a narrow window near the end of the game, the increase was 10 percent in the losing team's home state, compared with Sundays when the home team won or was expected to lose anyway.

But are these fairly narrow studies evidence that canceling the NFL season might reduce crime? In the end, Markman suspects the overall effects of an NFL lockout would be small compared to all the other things that affect people's lives.

"That is probably the scariest message for the NFL," he said. "Most people will discover that they have plenty of other things to do if the football season is canceled." Hopefully, those activities don't include committing crimes.

This story was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

In a time of vicious budget debates on Capitol Hill, a new study finds that the path to happiness might be through big government.

But the findings aren't likely to be the last word on the topic, underscoring the difficulty of answering the prevailing political question in the U.S. right now: How large should government be?

According to the new research, published in April in the journal Politics and Policy, bigger governments make for more satisfied citizens. The results, which rank the U.S. 10th out of 15 industrialized democracies in life satisfaction of citizens, seems to suggest that bumping up social welfare expenditures would make for a happier populace. But "suggest" is the key word, according to University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, who was not involved in the research.

"The study as a whole is suggestive, but not convincing," Wolfers told LiveScience. "And the reason I say that is it's ultimately a study of [only] 15 countries." [See the rankings of all 15 countries]

Nonetheless, said Richard Easterlin, an economist at the University of Southern California who studies life satisfaction, the findings are "pretty plausible." Citizens in countries that transition from socialism to capitalism often don't experience the happiness boost one might expect from the resulting influx of goods and services, Easterlin told LiveScience. The reason may be that they lose out on perks like guaranteed health care.

"There really are areas where it seems like the market doesn't do the job," Easterlin said.

Happy citizens

To tackle the question of whether government makes people happy by providing social services, or unhappy by squelching efficiency and growth, Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin and his colleagues used data from the 2005 to 2008 World Values Survey. This survey asks residents of countries around the world how satisfied they are with their lives, among other questions. The researchers limited their analysis to industrialized democracies so they'd be comparing a similar slate of nations. Among the countries studied were Australia, France, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. [Read Who's Happier: Europeans or Americans?]

For each country, the researchers measured the size of the government in four ways: the country's tax revenue as a percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), the government's consumption as a percent of real per capita GDP, average unemployment benefits and social welfare expenditures as a percent of GDP.

After controlling for factors that could skew the results, including health and age of respondents, church attendance, unemployment rates, and the level of individualism in the country's culture, the researchers found that the happiest countries were those with big, busy governments. The result remained even when the researchers took into account the fact that government size and benefits can influence variables such as unemployment and marriage rates, Flavin told LiveScience.

"The jump in happiness in going from a country that's low on the government intervention scale to one that is high on the government intervention scale is about the same as the effect of getting married," Flavin said.

Out of the 15 countries studied, the United States ranked 14th for both tax revenue as a percent of GDP and in social welfare expenditures as a percent of GDP; 13th for government's share of consumption; 11th for unemployment benefits; and 10th for life satisfaction.

The effect is largest for the poor, Flavin said, but richer citizens in big-government countries reported more satisfaction than their small-government counterparts, too.

"This is one piece of evidence that we should think long and hard about, what the effect on citizens' well-being would be if we starting changing Medicare to a voucher system or reducing welfare benefits," Flavin said.

Room for interpretation

The study isn't the first to link government intervention with happiness. One of Flavin's co-researchers authored a 2010 paper in the Journal of Politics finding that U.S. states with bigger governments have happier citizens. [Read: Happiest States Revealed by New Research]

On the other hand, a 2007 study published in the journal Public Choice used the same World Values Survey from 1997 to 2001 to compare government size (as measured by the percent of GDP made up by government consumption) and life satisfaction in 74 countries. That study found the opposite result as Flavin's: Bigger governments seemed to make people unhappy.

Justina Fischer, a senior researcher in economics at the University of Mannheim in Germany and a researcher on the 2007 study, said she thought the difference could stem from the different time periods in which the data was gathered. In the late 1990s, she said, the countries studied had left-leaning governments that may have grown the government too large; In 2005 to 2008, when Flavin's data were taken, those governments had shifted rightward.

"Given this change in governments between the 1990s and 10 years later, I think their finding is an effect of conservative governments cutting too much," Fischer told LiveScience.

In other words, Fischer said, there could be a certain balance between government size and private efficiency that both studies are dancing around. Fischer's study, she said, caught people's attitudes during a time of too much government, so cuts to government spending drew them back toward the ideal. Later, governments may have overcorrected, meaning that a tendency not to cut as much made people happier.

Measuring happiness and government size is difficult, Wolfers told LiveScience, not only because it can be tough to define what those variables mean, but also because cultural differences can confound the results. Nordic countries, which ranked high in happiness in Flavin's study, tend to be cheerful places, Wolfers said, while former communist countries are never quite as happy as would be expected.

To get to the bottom of the question, Wolfers told LiveScience, economists would have to conduct larger studies on more countries. The ideal study would randomly assign people to live in states with big governments and states with small governments and then watched to see how happy they become. Obviously, that sort of research isn't possible, Wolfers said, so conclusions about government size and happiness have to be drawn "from a pastiche of evidence." That leaves room for interpretation.

"It's very likely that a Democrat and a Republican would read that evidence and come to different conclusions," Wolfers said. "And that's because we don't have that single perfect experiment."

You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

While President Barack Obama's announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden set off impromptu celebrations around the country, Wall Street took the news in stride, perhaps signaling its acceptance that the war on terror is far from over.

The Dow Jones industrial average, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq grew by only 0.4 percent, 0.5 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively, soon after opening on Monday. The value of the dollar rose against that of the euro and the yen, but fell against the pound.

The markets in Europe and Asia, some of which were open or opened shortly after Obama's special announcement late Sunday evening, ticked up slightly more significantly than the American markets. The most significant change happened to the Nikkei index of Japan, which gained 1.6 percent.

Each of these upticks was likely driven by expectations that bin Laden's death signals a slightly more stable environment in the Middle East, which could in turn stimulate oil trades and, perhaps, divert those American dollars spent on hunting bin Laden back into the U.S. economy.

"Still, compared to the enormous political and psychological significance of [bin] Laden's death, the stock market reaction was relatively muted," reported the New York Times.

Stock traders, it seems, did not get caught up in the euphoria of people in the streets when making investments this morning. "Basically, financial markets did not get worked up about this," Gur Huberman, a behavioral finance professor at Columbia University, told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "As far as stock markets and currencies go, my impression is that the movements today have not been exceptional."

"The Nikkei went up by 1.57 percent, and that's nice but even that change is not truly exceptional," he said. Indeed, the Nikkei index is at its highest since a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, but not since long before.

The muted financial response to bin Laden's death does not mirror the response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "When Osama bin Laden became a mass murderer on Sept. 11, the markets closed for two days, and then when they reopened they dropped by a few percentage points, so the news strongly affected those markets. But having killed him has not affected the markets much," Huberman said.

The difference, he explained, lies in the fact that the war on terror began on Sept. 11, but it did not end yesterday.  "I don't think it's the end of the struggle with al-Qaida. It's not like Hitler who died with the end of the war -- this war is a very complicated and long process."

A reasonable bump

The market responses to these events -- the big drop in the case of 9/11 and today's small rise -- are perfectly rational on the part of investors, Huberman said. "I think the explanation lies in traditional economics theory: After 9/11, people had realistic expectations that the economy would slow down and resources would be diverted to the war machine, and in fact this is exactly what happened.

"But in the case of bin Laden's death, I don't see this as being the end of the war. It's a step in a very long process," he said. At this juncture, people do not expect resources directed toward the war on terror to immediately be diverted back to the economy.

The price of crude oil fell more significantly than stock markets rose, with a barrel of Brent crude falling 3.4 percent today. Al-Qaida threatens geopolitical uncertainty and supply disruptions, and according to Ric Spooner, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in Sydney, the death of its leader may be interpreted as easing those threats. "[Bin Laden's death] carries hope of reduced threats of terrorism and political risk in northern Asian and the Middle East," Spooner told Bloomberg News.

Still, even the effect on oil was relatively insignificant. The price of Brent crude is only the lowest since April 20.

This article was provided by Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover.

Societal and economic shifts may put more men in Western countries at risk for depression, scientists worry.

"Western men, particularly those with low education levels, will face a difficult road in the 21st century," write the authors of an editorial in the March issue of The British Journal of Psychiatry. "It may be more difficult, on average, for men to adjust to a domestic role than for women to adjust to a work role."

Currently, women have nearly twice the lifetime risk of suffering from major depression, although it's not fully understood why.

A confluence of trends could change this ratio, they write, including fewer job options for men who no longer outearn their partners. As the job options narrow, men begin to assume a more prominent role as caregivers in the home – a role traditionally associated with women. [Study: Women Are in Charge at Home]

The recent economic downturn has been dubbed the "Mancession" for its disproportionate effect on traditional male industries, such as construction and manufacturing. Meanwhile, women are outpacing men in the pursuit of undergraduate and graduate degrees and becoming a larger share of primary household earners.

Men's failure to fulfill the role of breadwinner is associated with greater depression and marital conflict, but if societal expectations are altered, men may experience less distress, write researchers Boadie Dunlop and Tanja Mletzko, both of Emory University School of Medicine.

If men are innately less suited to care for young children and maintain households, then their increased contribution in this area could lead to lowered self-esteem and more depression. However, if women are better equipped to care for young children simply because they learn to be that way, through socialization — rather than because of biological differences between the sexes — it may be possible to help expectant fathers make this transition, they write. [Dads Get Postpartum Depression, Too]

Even so, "men in the changing economy will still face the same risks for depression that women faced in older economies: trapped in a family role from which they cannot escape because of an inability to find employment," the researchers write. 

Raising a country from poverty to affluence should make the nation's population happier, right? Wrong, according to a new study of 54 countries worldwide.

Money doesn't buy happiness over the long term, the study found. The results apply to developed and developing countries worldwide, said study researcher Richard Easterlin, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California.

"Happiness doesn't increase with the rate of economic growth even in less-developed countries or transitional countries," Easterlin told LiveScience. "We already know that to be true of developed countries, but now it's been extended to countries of lower levels of income."

Easterlin and his colleagues reported the results this week (Dec. 13) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The happiness paradox

Almost 40 years ago, Easterlin discovered a strange economic pattern in the United States: If you look at snapshot data, richer people are happier than poorer people, and wealthier countries have more satisfied populations than less well-off nations. But when you look at data collected over time, more income doesn't bring happiness.

"If you look across countries and compare happiness and GDP [gross domestic product] per capita, you find that the higher the country's income, the more likely it is to be happier," Easterlin said. "So the expectation based on point-in-time data is if income goes up, then happiness will go up. The paradox is, when you look at change over time, that doesn't happen." [US is Richest Nation, But Not Happiest]

The 'Easterlin paradox,' as it is known, has been the subject of much academic debate. The new study, Easterlin said, is the broadest finding about the paradox so far. The researchers gathered between 10 and 34 years of happiness data from 17 Latin American countries, 17 developed countries, 11 Eastern European countries transitioning from socialism to capitalism and nine-less developed countries. They found no relationship between economic growth and happiness in any case.

Even in a country like China, the researchers wrote, where per capita income has doubled in 10 years, happiness levels haven't budged. South Korea and Chile have shown similarly astronomical economic growth with no increase in satisfaction.

"With incomes rising so rapidly in these three different countries, it seems extraordinary that there are no surveys that register the marked improvement in subjective well-being that mainstream economists and policy makers worldwide would expect to find," the researchers wrote.

Wealth and want

The paradox seems impossible on the surface, but there's good reason happiness and income could be linked in the short-term and not over many years, according to Easterlin. As people's incomes rise, he said, so do their aspirations. When incomes fall, he said, aspirations don't. No one wants to give up the standard of living they've grown accustomed to. So in the short term, an economic collapse is painful, while growth feels good.

But in the long run, Easterlin said, more wealth simply creates more want.

"The higher your income goes up the more your aspiration goes up," he said. "Over time, the change in aspirations negates the effect of changing income."

The results suggest that individuals and policy makers should focus on non-monetary factors, like health and family concerns, that influence happiness, Easterlin said.

"Economic growth may not be the way you get happier," he said. "There are other avenues that may produce more happiness."

Easterlin said he expects further controversy about his paradox — "Policy makers are generally very reluctant to accept this conclusion about economic growth," he said — and a counterargument came shortly after the paper's release. Writing for the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers argued that the new study doesn't prove the Easterlin paradox exists.

"In putting together his dataset, he sort of picks and chooses what he wants to include," Wolfers told LiveScience. The surveys Easterlin and his colleagues analyzed asked questions about life satisfaction in different ways and can't be lumped together, Wolfers said.

"What he's got is noisy data," Wolfers said. "In noisy data, it can be hard to find a significant correlation, but that doesn't mean the result is zero."

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include Wolfers' response.

You can follow LiveScience Senior Writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas.

For the third year running, money, work and the economy top Americans' list of stressors, according to a survey on stress released today (Nov. 9) by the American Psychological Association.

In the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults and children, nearly three-quarters of the respondents report unhealthy stress levels in 2010, about the same as in 2009. Satisfaction with work-life balance drops from 42 percent in 2009 to 36 percent in 2010. Meanwhile, stress over job stability is on the rise, from 44 percent of people experiencing job stability concerns in 2009 to 49 percent in 2010.

Parents may underestimate the impact of stress on their families, the survey results revealed. While 69 percent of parents say their stress has little or no impact on their children, 91 percent of kids ages 8 to 17 report that they can tell when their parents are stressed.

The Stress in America survey was conducted online in August by Harris Interactive. Participants were 1,134 American adults, including 100 parents of children ages 8 to 17. In addition to that national sample, the survey queried 987 additional parents and 1,136 children ages 8 to 17.

Economic woes

As in years past, money woes were a leading cause of stress, with 76 percent of Americans reporting money as a significant stressor. Work stress was cited as significant by 70 percent of adults, and the economy was a significant source of stress for 65 percent of respondents. All three responses have topped Americans' list of concerns since 2007, with the exception of the economy, which did not appear on the survey until 2008.

Stress crosses generational lines, but Gen Xers (ages 32 to 45) report the highest levels of stress, at an average of 5.8 on a scale of 1 to 10. People over age 65 are the least stressed, with an average stress level of 4.4, and are almost twice as likely as the general population to say their stress levels have gone down in the past five years.

Money is the most common source of stress for all generations except for the over-65 crowd, who are more likely to cite the economy as their major stressor.

Kids, weight and stress

The survey uncovered a link between stress and weight among both adults and children. One-third of the children in the survey reported being overweight. The overweight children were more likely to report that their parents were stressed (39 percent versus 30 percent for normal-weight children).

Overweight and obese kids were also more likely to experience health problems related to stress, the survey found:

• 48 percent of overweight kids had trouble falling asleep, compared with 33 percent of normal-weight kids
• 43 percent of overweight kids had headaches, compared with 28 percent of normal-weight kids.
• 48 percent of overweight kids reported eating too much or too little, compared with 16 percent of normal-weight kids.
• 22 percent of overweight kids reported getting angry or getting into fights, compared with 13 percent of normal-weight kids

Both kids and adults can get into a viscous cycle of weight gain and stress, said Katherine Nordal, the APA's director for professional practice. Stress has been shown to cause weight gain both due to biological factors and stress-related behaviors like overeating or lost sleep, she said. And being overweight or obese is an additional stressor that makes it less enjoyable to exercise.

Parental stress can affect children of any weight in a big way, the results showed. One-third of children surveyed believed their parents were often stressed or worried, and 86 percent said their parents' worries made the kids themselves sad. While only 8 percent of parents believed their children were highly stressed, one in five kids reported lots of worries in their lives.

"We've got parents that don't really appreciate that their children and teenagers are very quick to pick up on their parents' emotional distress," Nordal told LiveScience. "And besides picking up on it, those children themselves become very distressed."

Toll on health

Americans perceive stress as taking a big toll on their health, the survey found. Only 40 percent of respondents thought they were in good or excellent health, a number similar to the 44 percent who say their stress levels have increased in the past five years.

Two-fifths of adults reported eating poorly or overeating in response to stress in the past month, while 33 percent had skipped a meal because of stress. Over 40 percent had lain awake at night due to stress, while 45 percent experience irritability and 41 percent experienced fatigue.

Stress hit the unhealthy and obese harder, the survey found. Almost 30 percent of obese adults experienced high levels of stress, compared with 20 percent of normal weight adults. Those who rated their health as fair or poor had an average stress level of 6.2 compared to 4.9 for those who were in good or excellent health.

While 70 percent of Americans have the right information about how to improve their health and lower their stress levels, only 30 percent put that information into play, said Norman Anderson, the chief executive officer of the APA.

"I think most Americans have heard recommendations about stress and health repeatedly," Anderson told LiveScience. "But they're all worth repeating."

To manage stress, Anderson said, people should try to remove themselves from the stressful situation if possible. When that doesn't work, the solutions have to be internal, such as practicing relaxation techniques, exercising and prioritizing sleep. The key, Anderson said, is to tackle one manageable goal at a time.

"Willpower is a function of setting a goal, arranging the environment to accomplish that goal, and keeping that goal really simple so it' ssomething they can accomplish," Anderson said. "Once they do that, it builds confidence — or what some people call willpower."

The full report is online at stressinamerica.com.

Federal funding for basic science, including stem-cell research and climate-change studies, could hinge on what happens in the newly Republican-controlled House of Representatives. However, if the past is any guide, dollars allocated for science will transcend both politics and the economy. Here's a look at science funding over the years.

• Budget Cuts Would Take Decades to Affect Science, If at All
• Republican Fiscal Plan Could Slash Science Budgets
• Health Research Funding Could Face Cuts in New Congress

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This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

While organ donation is not a category for which economics may first come to mind, the reality is that economic theory has been invaluable to making sure people who need organ transplants can get them. Al Roth is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, for incompatible patient-donor pairs, and has been deeply involved with the Alliance for Paired Donation, another kidney exchange network.  He is the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and in the Harvard Business School, and he and his students and colleagues are engaged in a new kind of economic engineering called market design, using tools from game theory, experimental and behavioral economics, and computer science.  Roth has also been involved in the reorganization of many of the markets for advanced medical fellowships and helped design the matching system used in New York City to match approximately ninety thousand students to high schools each year—for students entering high school since the fall of 2004—and a similar program for Boston Public Schools. He is also the chair of the American Economic Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for new Ph.D. economists. For more on Roth’s work, read an August 2010 profile in Forbes Magazine, and an NSF story about his work on kidney exchange. His web page of Game theory, Experimental economics, and Market Design contains many of his papers and other links, and he also blogs about market design. Below, Roth answers the ScienceLives 10 Questions.

Name: Al Roth Age: 58 Institution: Harvard Field of Study: Economics

What inspired you to choose this field of study? My Ph.D. is in operations research, not economics, and I chose that field because I hoped to be able to find ways to help make the world work a little better. I studied game theory because I was interested in the parts of the world we make by interacting with each other. This drew me towards economics. I wanted to test the mathematical ideas I studied as a game theorist, and this led me to experimental economics, and to field studies of the “rules of the game” by which various markets operate. And, as we developed reliable knowledge about some of these things, that led naturally to market design, to see if we understood some kinds of markets well enough to fix them when they were broken, and construct them when they were absent.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received? There’s no limit to what a person can accomplish if he isn’t worried about who gets the credit.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child? I went to public school in NYC, and as I recall we had science fairs each year starting in grade school. The first projects I recall weren’t experiments; they were demonstrations, little bits of engineering. I remember that I built a carbon arc furnace out of boards, a flower pot, curtain rods and pieces of carbon from the core of a flashlight battery.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher? You can schedule your own mind. There are plenty of jobs in which a person has an opportunity to solve interesting problems, but a researcher, particularly an academic researcher, gets to choose which problems to work on.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher? There are lots of different ways to be an effective researcher, maybe almost as many as there are effective researchers. You have to be able to find problems that are worth solving, and you have to be able to solve them. Each of those takes a combination of talents, and people have those in different proportions and deploy them in different ways.

What are the societal benefits of your research? That’s an easy question for a market designer. Well-designed marketplaces create social benefits by allowing people to coordinate. Before we helped redesign the high school assignment process in New York City, about 30,000 children a year had to be assigned without regard to their families’ preferences; now that number is down to around 3,000. Before various medical specialty markets had effective centralized “match” clearinghouses, many doctors and hospitals dealt with each other via exploding offers that had to be quickly accepted or rejected sometimes years in advance of the beginning of employment, and now there is an orderly process that better accommodates the preferences of both sides of the market. Before kidney exchange, patients who had willing, live donors who turned out to be incompatible with them had to join the end of the long queue for deceased donors; now they can receive a live donor kidney from the incompatible donor of another patient, while their donor donates a kidney to that patient. This helps not only the patients receiving these kidneys, but also those on the queue for deceased donors, since the extra kidney donations remove people from that queue.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher? I think my older brother Ted first persuaded me that science was exciting, and I learned a lot from my Ph.D. advisor at Stanford, Bob Wilson. Over the long term, the group of people from whom I’ve learned the most are my students and post-docs and co-investigators; I’ve been very fortunate in who I’ve been able to work with.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most? Perhaps the most surprising thing about market design is the variety of things we get to do. We get to talk to people about their jobs and how they find them, or about the difficulties in allocating scarce resources like school places or kidneys for transplantation. We get to look at aggregate data to understand the big picture. We build mathematical models and prove theorems about them. We create small marketplaces in the laboratory and conduct experiments to see how peoples’ behavior changes as we vary the rules. We do computer simulations. We study successful markets, and market failures. We get to collaborate with and learn from not only other economists, but also the participants in the markets we study. We get to explain this work not only to our colleagues, but to policy makers and stakeholders in these markets. Sometimes we even get to suggest an improved way to organize a market or matching process or assignment method, and shepherd it through adoption and implementation.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be? As often as not there’s a student or postdoc in my office. I’d rescue him or her.

Editor's Note: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

Children with psychological disorders, such as depression, are less likely to marry and will earn less on average as adults than their mentally healthy counterparts, a new study suggests.

The lost income adds up, as the researchers calculated $2.1 trillion in economic loss for the one in 20 Americans who experience these psychological problems as children, over their lifetimes.

"This study shows childhood psychological disorders can cause significant long-lasting harm and can have far-reaching impact on individuals over their lifetimes," said study researcher James P. Smith, the corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "Our findings illustrate what the enormous potential might be of identifying and treating these problems early in life."

Researchers were able to test whether their findings were caused by some type of unmeasured family or neighborhood impacts by examining the life course of siblings where one reported childhood psychological problems and another did not.

Specifically, those who reported having psychological problems in childhood:

• Averaged a 20-percent reduction in income over their lifetimes.
• Averaged $10,400 less income per year when compared with siblings who did not have similar problems. The lower income was partly a consequence of working an average of seven weeks fewer per year.
• Were 11 percent less likely to marry than their siblings who did not suffer such problems.
• Reported about half a year less of schooling than those who did not report problems.
• Were seven times more likely to develop an adult psychological condition than a person without a childhood history of these conditions,

If about one in 20 adult Americans experienced these psychological problems during their childhood years (about the current prevalence), the total lifetime economic damages for all those affected would be $2.1 trillion.

Data for the analysis came from a large study that has followed American families for more than 40 years. The researchers collected economic and demographic information from a nationally representative sample of about 3,800 people from 5,000 American families starting in 1968. Participants had to be younger than 16 in 1968, or at least 25 by 2005.

In 2007, participants were surveyed about their psychological and medical history. Study participants indicated whether they had any of 14 important physical illnesses before age 17 (such as bipolar disorder) and whether they had suffered from depression, drug or alcohol abuse, or other psychological conditions when they were young.

Six percent reported some psychological problem as a child — consistent with the proportion found among the nation as a whole. About 4 percent reported having depression, 2 percent reported alcohol or drug abuse and another 2 percent reported other psychological problems. Some people reported having more than one of the conditions during childhood.

"Not all of the people who have psychological problems during childhood will carry these problems into adulthood," Smith said. "But they are 10 to 20 times more likely than others to have these shortfalls during adulthood."

Researchers say the principal cause of the economic shortfalls during adulthood appears to be recurring psychological problems.

The results are published online in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

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