Because It Helps Us Understand (and Change) Our Society

It would be hard not to notice that we are living in a world of increasing inequality. According to data collected by the Federal Reserve, the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the top one percent of U.S. wealth holders increased almost 50 percent, from 22.8 percent in 1989 to 31.9 percent at the end of 2025.  Meanwhile, the gap between high and low earners has also been expanding.  One widely used measure is the ratio of wages of workers at the 90th percentile of the earnings distribution to those at the 10th percentile (the 90-10 gap).   According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 90-10 gap was 3.7 in 1979 and grew to 5.0 by 2014, roughly where it is today. 

This widening gap helps us understand why robust economic growth has not translated into more positive views about the economy. GDP per capita, the conventional scorecard of economic performance, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s.  But, because of the growing income gap, this prosperity has not been widely shared.  For example, adjusted for inflation, the real compensation of production workers today is no higher than it was in 1979 (see MeasuringWorth.com). This marks a major shift.  In the 100 years from 1879 to 1979, the compensation of production workers grew at roughly the same rate as GDP per capita.

These facts both help us to understand our experience of the modern economy and raise a whole host of questions.  Why are the fruits of economic growth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few?  Have there been other times when there has been a similar level of inequality?  What can we learn from past experiences?  What will happen in the future? 

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Because We Need Good Data to Predict the Future

Where do you live? How old are you? Did you finish college? Are you married? Do you have any children? Have you recently moved? What type of job do you have? These may seem like mundane questions, but to demographers the answers yield data that are critical to understanding today’s society and predicting the future.

For 95 years, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has used demographic data to help people make informed decisions that affect communities around the world. PRB works in partnership with the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers to make population research accessible to a broad audience.

Just as roads and bridges are fundamental to our physical infrastructure, demographic information is vital to our data and policy infrastructure. Demography provides a lens that community leaders, policymakers, business leaders, advocates, and residents can use to allocate resources effectively and plan for a thriving future.

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Because It Can Help Prepare Students for Employment

Future graduates face complex global challenges like climate change, as well as ethical, social and cultural implications of emerging new technologies like artificial intelligence.

The urgency of these challenges — and the complexity of skills and capabilities needed to address them — has prompted a revisiting of the role of social sciences and humanities programs in equipping students for civic engagement and as future leaders.

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Because Psychologically Healthy Workplaces Contribute to a Psychologically Healthy Population

An average full-time worker spends about 40 hours a week working. Assuming retirement at 67 years old, an average person will spend approximately 90,000 hours, or 10 years, of their life working. Given this, and the extent to which our work can shape our self-identities, it is not a stretch to say that psychologically healthy workplaces are critical for population mental health. That is, psychologically healthy workplaces meaningfully contribute to a mentally healthy population.

Before continuing, let’s define what we mean by “mental health.” The World Health Organization defines mental health as “a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.” To approach mental health as merely the absence of mental illness does not capture the complexity of our mental well-being. It is better conceptualized as a continuum that ranges from severe mental illness to psychological flourishing.

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Because It Can Help Us Maintain Safer Workplaces

Interventions designed to keep people safe can have hidden side effects. With an increased perception of safety, some people are more likely to take risks.

For example, some vehicle drivers take more risks when they are buckled up in a shoulder-and-lap belt. Some construction workers step closer to the edge of the roof because they are hooked to a fall-protection rope. Some parents of young children take less care with medicine bottles that are “childproof” and thus difficult to open.

Techniques designed to reduce harm can promote a false sense of security and increase risky behavior and unintentional injuries.

As civil engineers and applied behavioral scientists, we are interested in ways to improve workplace safety. Our ongoing research suggests that employers need to do more than provide injury-protection devices and mandate safety rules and procedures to follow. Job-site mottos like “safety is our priority” are not enough. Employers need to consider the crucial human dynamic that can counteract their desired injury-prevention effects – and tap into strategies that might get around this safety paradox.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

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Because It Can Help Employers Compassionately Plan for Returning to the Office

After a year of social distancing, mask wearing and – for millions – working from home, many employers are eager to bring their staff back to the office. But for many, the prospect of readjusting to in-person work is a daunting one.

A recent survey found that out of 4,553 office workers in five different countries, every single person reported feeling anxious about the idea of returning to in-person work.

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Because Money Makes The World Go ’Round

I often get asked questions like, “What is an anthropologist like you doing studying money? I thought that was the domain of economists!” The archaeological and ethnographic record is full of objects, texts, and records of promises humans have used for millennia to mark transactions with one another and figure value. It’s true that I enjoy working with and thinking about those objects, and among my favorite places are the money galleries in museums around the world and at the regional branches of the U.S. Federal Reserve. But the anthropology of money is more than an archive of the arcane. Understanding practices like bridewealth, involving objects like the tevau of the Santa Cruz Islands, can shed light on how contemporary money is far more than a neutral medium of exchange. This matters for product design, financial literacy programming, and macroeconomic policy, too.

Indeed, now that the world is in a global pandemic caused by the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus, what people do with money and its technologies has acquired a new kind of significance. Although the virus apparently does not survive for long on fibrous materials like cloth and paper, reports have surged of Chinese and other officials ordering the disinfecting of banknotes to prevent its spread. The fintech industry conference organization Money 2020, promoting its (almost certainly to be cancelled) next event, proclaimed in an email that the pandemic would usher in the end of cash and the era of digital payments—despite the fact that most in-person digital payments (at your local take-out restaurant now, for example) rely on plastic and metal cards and point of sale devices, touched by many hands, on which the virus can survive for several hours. And in Kenya, the authorities are recommending all Kenyans use mobile phones to pay—about which, more below.

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Because It Makes Informed Democracy Possible

Einstein said famously, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” It gives scientific optimists like me encouragement that great thinkers have concluded it is possible to understand the world, that the world is not chaotic, senseless, and inscrutable. In the empirical world there is a means for determining which of two ideas, explanations, or choices is more likely to be true. Through observation, experiment, and analysis there is a path to reliable knowledge. By going down that path we can gain knowledge that is more and more reliable. If only more people realized this! This is not only, as in Einstein’s words, mysterious that it should be so; it is also astounding. And this is comforting, because it also appears to be true that with reliable knowledge one can improve the human condition, reduce suffering and affliction, and ennoble human life. This is the testament of science. Science, the greatest intellectual development of the past half millennium, brings many material advances, but the greatest gift of science is the idea of science itself.

I suppose some would say I am going off the deep end in idle philosophy, but it seems to me very empowering in a practical sense to know how useful the well-developed practices and standards of science (social science and the scientific techniques of other disciplines) are for resolving many differences of opinion. How very empowering it is to know that there can be and is progress toward a self-consistent and improving understanding of people and things.

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Because It Helps to Address Graduate Unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa

Social scientists are actively involved in working with government officials, academics, the private sector, NGOs and policy officials to understand as well as develop solutions to address the current challenges of graduate unemployment and under employment in sub-Saharan Africa. This is a problem that is close to home for me as an African scholar and a social scientist who undertakes research that has application to social policies and development. I have been keen on understanding and investigating the factors that allow these patterns of unemployment to persist given the enormity of its impact on individuals, households, communities and countries across the continent.

Understanding Sub-Saharan Africa’s Unemployed Graduate Youth Crisis

Sub-Saharan Africa has the fastest growing youth population in the world, with 60 per cent of its population under 24 years old. Harnessing their capability would require increased and focused investments in education, to ensure a healthy labor force that is capable of meeting the demands of our current local and globalized job markets. The International Labour Organization (ILO) suggests that the youth (15–24 years) unemployment outlook for the major economies of the African region remains quite mixed, ranging from 1.8% in Benin to 54.4% in South Africa. ILO further reveals that working poverty rates among youth in sub-Saharan Africa was nearly 70 per cent in 2016, translating into 64.4 million working youth living in extreme or moderate poverty (less than $3.10 per day). According to the same source, the number of poor employed youth has unfortunately risen by as much as 80% over the past 25 years. Many sub-Saharan African countries are experiencing a youth bulge with some having up to 80% of the population under 35 years. Given the region’s emerging demographic projections, this problem will not go away anytime soon. It is my view that for university graduates to effectively contribute to their respective national economies, and address the current youth unemployment crisis, there should be employment initiatives and approaches to transition them to formal employment.

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