December 2017 – Page 2 – Difficult Run

According to the CDC, no. A 2017 study came to the same conclusions. As the authors explain at Vox,

Our research, recently published in the journal Econo mics & Human Biology, examined this assumption by looking at who eats fast food using a large sample of random Americans. What we found surprised us: Poor people were actually less likely to eat fast food — and ate it less frequently — than those in the middle class. And the poor are only a little more likely to eat fast food than the rich.

In other words, the guilty pleasure of fast food is shared across the income spectrum, from rich to poor, with an overwhelming majority of every group reporting having indulged at least once over a nonconsecutive three-week period.

…What we learned from our research is that pretty much everyone has a soft spot for fast food. We analyzed a cross-section of the youngest members of the baby boom generation — Americans born from 1957 to 1964 — from all walks of life who have been interviewed regularly since 1979. Respondents were asked about fast-food consumption in the years 2008, 2010 and 2012 — when they were in their 40s and 50s.

…The data also show middle earners are more likely to eat fast food frequently, averaging a little over four meals during the three weeks, compared with three for the richest and 3.7 for the poorest.

They continue:

Another problem with the stereotype about poor people and fast food is that by and large it’s not actually that cheap, in absolute monetary terms.

The typical cost per meal at a fast-food restaurant — which the US Census calls limited service — is over $8 based on the average of all limited service places. Fast food is cheap only in comparison to eating in a full-service restaurant, with the average cost totals about $15 on average.

Moreover, $8 is a lot for a family living under the US poverty line, which for a family of two is a bit above $16,000, or about $44 per day. It is doubtful a poor family of two would be able to regularly spend more than a third of its daily income eating fast food.

Many have argued that the poor don’t have access to healthy food. But as one writer notes,

Government data also shows that people on food stamps purchase soda (#1) and bag snacks (#4) at higher rates than non-SNAP households. It certainly seems possible that these unhealthy items are being purchased in larger quantities than they would absent food stamp (or “EBT”) income.

Now, there is an old argument that suggests that poor people eat unhealthy food because they cannot afford to eat healthy food. But I’ve always found this argument unpersuasive.

The America Farm Bureau Federation says the price of eggs, arguably the healthiest food on the planet, is $1.32 per dozen. Other highly nutritious foods – beans, rice, and bananas, to name a few – are similarly inexpensive. It seems more likely that most welfare recipients choose to eat unhealthy food because it’s easy (no prep), tastes good, is designed to be addictive, and they have the resources to buy large quantities of it thanks to their monthly government benefit.

Nonetheless, would access to healthier foods make a difference? Not really, according to the research. As Slate reports,

Obesity levels don’t drop when low-income city neighborhoods have or get grocery stores. A 2011 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed no connection between access to grocery stores and more healthful diets using 15 years’ worth of data from more than 5,000 people in five cities. One 2012 study showed that the local food environment did not influence the diet of middle-school children in California. Another 2012 study, published in Social Science and Medicine, used national data on store availability and a multiyear study of grade-schoolers to show no connection between food environment and diet. And this month, a study in Health Affairs examined one of the Philadelphia grocery stores that opened with help from the Fresh Food Financing Initiative. The authors found that the store had no significant impact on reducing obesity or increasing daily fruit and vegetable consumption in the four years since it opened.

Earlier research suggesting that better fresh-food access improves diet and would therefore improve the health of people living in poverty was drawn from small samples or looked at store availability in narrow geographical slices—often without information about how or where the people who lived there shopped. “They never link the neighborhood characteristics to actual individuals,” explains Helen Lee, author of the Social Science and Medicine study. “Without that, all you have is speculation.”

Lee also notes in her study that, on closer inspection, food deserts don’t actually exist in the U.S., at least not as a national problem—on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods. Even before Obama’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative was announced in 2010, studies suggested that the food desert explanation for obesity wasn’t right. A report from Department of Agriculture researchers presented to Congress in 2009 also showed more grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. In 2012, USDA researchers crunched the data again and found once more that low-income neighborhoods had more—not fewer—grocery stores.

What’s more, the poor ignore “proven weight-loss strategies, relying instead on quick fixes like diet pills.” As The Atlantic explains,

For a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from Concordia University looked at the incomes and health habits of more than 3,000 children and teens between the ages of 8 and 19 and more than 5,000 adults over the age of 20.

At least two-thirds of the study subjects reported attempting to reduce food intake or exercising in order to lose weight in the past year. Despite these efforts, the adults in the study gained an average of three pounds, while the youths gained about 12 pounds. The people in the lower income brackets gained about two pounds more than those in the highest one.

One reason for the disparity might have to do with the tactics they used to try to shed pounds: Compared to adults making $75,000 or more, those making less than $20,000 were 50 percent less likely to exercise, 42 percent less likely to drink a lot of water, and 25 percent less likely to eat less fat and sweets. And adults making between $20,000 and $75,000 were about 50 percent more likely to use over-the-counter diet pills, which aren’t proven to work.

The data for the young people were similar: The poorest among them were 33 percent less likely to exercise, but they were twice as likely to skip meals as the richest ones. Skipping meals, too, isn’t a sure-fire way to slim down.

The piece offers this more likely explanation:

…[I]t might be that the stressful lives of poor people make sticking to a diet and exercise plan more difficult. It’s hard to exercise when you live in an unsafe neighborhood. Stress leads to emotional eating. You can’t plan for gym time when you only know your work schedule three days in advance.

An emerging body of research helps explain how the stress of poverty hampers the decision-making process. A study in Science last year found that poverty equates to a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points. Another study just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who experienced economic uncertainty gave up on solving a difficult puzzle faster.

As Maria Konnikova wrote in the New York Times, living an unpredictable, erratic life can erode self-control: “If we’re not quite sure when the train will get there, why invest precious time in continuing to wait?”

Often, low-income people aren’t sure what tomorrow will bring. So why waste time trying to diet?

Not really, despite what Nicholas Kristof has recently claimed. As W. Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia explains,

Here, Kristof is indebted to a book by family scholars Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families, which makes the case that blue states have more successful and stable families than do red states. Arkansas, for instance, has one of the highest divorce rates in the nation, whereas Massachusetts has one of the lowest.

…But this state-based argument obscures more than it illuminates about the links between partisanship and family life for ordinary families in America. Scholars and journalists who have bought into the idea that red Americans are hypocrites on family values because some red states do poorly when it comes to family stability are committing what is called the “ecological fallacy” of conflating the family behaviors of individual conservatives with the family behaviors of states dominated by conservatives.

…Indeed, when we look not at states but at counties in the United States, we see that counties that lean Republican across the country as a whole have more marriage, less nonmarital childbearing, and more family stability than counties that lean Democratic. In fact, an Institute for Family Studies report I authored found, “teens in red counties are more likely to be living with their biological parents, compared to children living in bluer counties.” So, even at the community level, the story about marriage and family instability looks a lot different depending on whether or not one is looking at state or county trends. At the county level, then, the argument that Red America is doing worse than Blue America isn’t true.

Finally, when we turn to the individual level, the conservatives-are-family-values-hypocrites thesis really falls apart. Republicans are more likely to be married, and happily married, than independents and Democrats, as Nicholas Wolfinger and I recently showed in a research brief for the Institute for Family Studies. They are also less likely to cheat on their spouses and less likely to be divorced, compared with independents and Democrats. So, Donald Trump is the exception, not the norm, for Republicans.

He continues,

When it comes to family stability, Republican parents are less likely to be divorced. In fact, Republican parents who have ever been married are at least 5 percentage points less likely to have been divorced, compared with their fellow citizens. The 2017 American Family Survey also indicates Republicans are less likely to have their first child outside of marriage, compared with Democrats and independents. So, contra Kristof, it’s actually Republicans, not Democrats, who are more likely to enjoy a stable, happy family life anchored around marriage…When American parents are separated by whether or not they have a college degree, it turns out that Republican parents have about a 10-percentage-point advantage in the likelihood that they are in their first marriage. In both college-educated communities and less-educated communities, then, it looks like Republican parents are more likely to be raising their children in their first marriage…[E]ven [when] we limit our focus to whites, we still see that white Republican parents are more likely to be in their first marriage. Specifically, 62 percent of white Republican parents are in their first marriage, compared with 54 percent of white Democratic and 44 percent of white independent parents…When we break out parents by those who attend religious services frequently (several times a month or more) versus parents who attend infrequently or never, Republicans still have an advantage in both the more religious and less religious groups. In fact, in both groups, Republican parents are more likely to be in first marriages than their fellow citizens. Moreover, even after controlling for religiosity, as well as education, race, ethnicity, region and age, the data indicate that Republican parents are still more likely to be in their first marriage, compared with Democrats.

“[B]ecause married parents are more prosperous and less dependent on government for their financial security,” he writes, “[Republicans] are less likely to gravitate to the Democratic Party and more likely to gravitate to the party of small government and lower taxes. Indeed, counties with large numbers of lower-income single parents are more likely to lean Democratic, partly because the Democratic Party supports policies designed to provide them with more financial security. The figure below is illustrative of the link between family structure and voting at the county level in 2016.”

Wilcox highlighted this last point in a City Journal article back in July:

The problem with the progressive approach to poverty is that it denies the importance of culture and character to household prosperity—especially when it comes to marriage…Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies and I recently co-authored a report, The Millennial Success Sequence, which demonstrates and quantifies the extent to which early life choices correlate with personal affluence. Though young people take a variety of paths into adulthood—arranging school, work, and family in a dizzying array of combinations—one path stood out as most likely to be linked to financial success for young adults. Brookings scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill have identified the “success sequence,” through which young adults who follow three steps—getting at least a high school degree, then working full-time, and then marrying before having any children, in that order—are very unlikely to become poor. In fact, 97 percent of millennials who have followed the success sequence are not in poverty by the time they reach the ages of 28 to 34.

Sequence-following millennials are also markedly more likely to flourish financially than their peers taking different paths; 89 percent of 28-to-34 year olds who have followed the sequence stand at the middle or upper end of the income distribution, compared with just 59 percent of Millennials who missed one or two steps in the sequence. The formula even works for young adults who have faced heavier odds, such as millennials who grew up poor, or black millennials; despite questions regarding socioeconomic privilege, our research suggests that the success sequence is associated with better outcomes for everyone. For instance, only 9 percent of black millennials who have followed the three steps of the sequence, or who are on track with the sequence (which means they have at least a high school degree and worked full-time in their twenties, but have not yet married or had children) are poor, compared with a 37 percent rate of poverty for blacks who have skipped one or two steps. Likewise, only 9 percent of young men and women from lower-income families who follow the sequence are poor in their late twenties and early thirties; by comparison, 31 percent of their peers from low-income families who missed one or two steps are now poor.

…Young men and (especially) women who put “marriage before the baby carriage” get access to the financial benefits of a partnership—income pooling, economies of scale, support from kinship networks—with fewer of the risks of an unmarried partnership, including breakups. By contrast, millennials who have a baby outside of marriage—even in a cohabiting union—are likelier to end up as single parents or paying child support, both of which increase the odds of poverty. One study found that cohabiting parents were three times more likely to break up than were married parents by the time their first child turned five: 39 percent of cohabiting parents broke up, versus 13 percent of married parents in the first five years of their child’s life. The stability associated with marriage, then, tends to give millennials and their children much more financial security.

In a Hoover Institute interview, Yuval Levin commented, “Today’s progressivism–for all of its talk of communitarianism and of ‘we’ and of ‘You didn’t build that’–the purpose of it really is to liberate the individual from dependence on other people. It is in fact based on a very radical individualism that at the end of the day wants total moral individualism and is willing to abide some economic collectivism to get there.” The data above seem to confirm this suspicion.

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