What Do the Poor Need? Try Asking Them

What Do the Poor Need? Try Asking Them tells about Neighborhood Centers in Houston: Neighborhood Centers, a Houston nonprofit that grew out of the settlement house movement, has been around since 1907. Although it has grown exponentially, in large part because of the leadership of Angela Blanchard, the organization’s president and chief executive officer for the past two decades, its philosophy remains unchanged. “The people are the asset, the source of potential solutions, not the problem,” Ms. Blanchard says. Instead of telling poor neighborhoods what’s wrong with them, the organization takes a bottom-up approach. “We go where we’re invited and do what we’re asked to do.”

Münchhausen by Proxy revisited

In the article The New Child Abuse Panic a parent (and law professor) discusses the high number of parents who are accused of “medical child abuse” in the US. She estimates it at 1600. This is a new and increasingly popular accusation against parents in the US. This is a popular broadening of the older accusation of "Münchhausen by Proxy". The author notes that many parents get this accusation when they don't agree with some medical specialist and seek help elsewhere. Specially parents with chronically ill children where the cause is not clear and who may have some rare genital defect get accused of this crime. The author notes that many of the parents who have been accused of "Münchhausen by Proxy" were later found to be innocent - their child having a real illness. As a consequence quite a few parents have lost custody.

Reducing gun violence by paying the perpetrators

To Stop Crime, Hand Over Cash tells the story of the Office of Neighborhood Safety that reduced gun violence and the murder rate in Richmond, California: We modeled our approach on “Cure Violence,” a community outreach program in Chicago founded by the epidemiologist Gary Slutkin. The Chicago project evolved from the Operation Ceasefire program begun in Boston in the mid-1990s, since replicated in scores of cities across America. Many of these were successful at reducing gun violence, but we felt that they were too law-enforcement-driven and lacked the social services to help the most vulnerable in our neighborhoods. We employed street-savvy staff members, whom we called neighborhood change agents. Think of their work as a kinder version of stop-and-frisk, more like stop-and-blend with the profile subjects, to build healthy, consistent relationships with those most likely to shoot or be a victim of gunfire. Once we’d identified the city’s potentially most lethal young men, we invited them to a meeting (the first was in 2010). Then came the big innovation of the Operation Peacemaker fellowship program. We offered those young men a partnership deal: We would pay them — yes, pay them — not to pull the trigger. The deal we offered was this: If they kept their commitment to us for six months — attended meetings, stayed out of trouble, responded to our mentoring — they became eligible to earn up to $1,000 a month for a maximum of nine months.

The town shrink

The NY Times has an article The town shrink about Mindy Thompson Fullilove who was trained as psychiatrist and advises now cities. The article discusses that ghettoization is often partially caused by political decisions that isolate those areas from their surroundings and tries to dump poor citizens on them.

As Cognition Slips, Financial Skills Are Often the First to Go

An interesting article in the NY Times: As Cognition Slips, Financial Skills Are Often the First to Go. When Helen Clark brought her father-in-law, then 83, to the doctor last year, she knew his mind was slowing, but a mental status exam confirmed it. He knew the year, where he lived and the name of the president. But when the doctor asked him to count backward from 100, subtracting seven from each number — 100, 93, 86, 79 — a look of confusion washed over his face. Studies show that the ability to perform simple math problems, as well as handling financial matters, are typically one of the first set of skills to decline in diseases of the mind, like Alzheimer’s [...] The signs, while perhaps not surprising, are subtle, making them easy to miss: It may become more difficult for people to identify the risks in a particular investment, and they may focus too much on the benefits. Completing various tasks on a financial to-do list may start to take longer, such as preparing bills for the mail. Everyday math may become more laborious or prone to errors, whether that’s figuring out a tip in a restaurant or doing a calculation that requires two steps. Financial concepts, like medical deductibles and minimum balances required in savings accounts, may also become harder to grasp. Naturally, these behaviors should represent a significant change: If a person was never adept with personal finances, this won’t serve as much of an indicator. [...] He said he wishes all 65-year-olds would start by simplifying their financial lives, reducing the money clutter to just a few mutual funds at a reputable institution.

Racial bias in all of us

It is well known that nearly all people have some racial bias - as can for example be shown with the Implicit Apperception Test. This article (Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions) lists some of the consequences. It mentions Daniel Kahneman's distinction between quick and slow thinking. Some of the information we process is processed in "quick" (unconscious) thinking. A nice example was that an iPod offered on eBay got 20% more offers when on the picture of the advertisement it was held by a white hand than when it was held by a black hand.

Social programs that work

Another interesting NY Times article: Social programs that work. It is written by a Republican asking his fellow Republicans not t blindly cut social programs but to look at what works. Interesting is a list of programs that were shown to work.