Carol Graham - Mentions and Appearances

We think strong cultural and community ties and a tradition of overcoming adversity are one reason [Black and Hispanic] communities are resilient. If you’re focusing on how much better other people are doing than you, it’s pretty hard to overcome adversity.

While [cancer and heart disease] can be differentiated from deaths of despair, the underlying cause—the reality of the economic situation for a large segment of the nation’s population—is the same for many who engage in this behavior. In addition to being more likely to abuse opioids, they are more likely to smoke, and to become obese, two of the most common causes of premature death.

Economic inequality’s impact on people is especially negative when it no longer signals opportunity, but rather signals persistent disadvantage.

Markers of well and ill-being, ranging from life satisfaction to stress, are more unequally shared across the rich and the poor in the U.S. than they are in Latin America, a region long known for high levels of inequality.

Those with more intelligence and the capacity to use it . . . are less likely to spend so much time socializing because they are focused on some other longer term objective.

Unless we collectively correct our course as a nation, in a few decades the concept of an “American Dream” might be nothing more than a dusty, antiquated relic.

U.S. inequality is largely explained by the top of the income distribution pulling away from the rest—the rich getting richer. At the same time, incomes for lower and middle class Americans have stalled.

This drop in Democratic optimism is almost as large as the 10-percent plummet in national happiness after the 2008 recession. Normally, happiness rarely moves more than a tenth of a point or two over month- or year-long intervals.

Poor blacks are 47 percent less likely to say they experience stress than poor whites and those differences remain constant over the other income groups as well.

Latin American poor are getting out of poverty; the middle class is burgeoning. Investments in education have gone up, and remarkably, inequality has gone down at a time in the U.S. when not only inequality of income distribution has gone way up, but inequality of opportunity has also gone up.