Progress Daily

Between 1900 and 2000 human numbers almost quadrupled, from around 1.6 billion to more than six billion. The human life span likely doubled, from a planetary life expectancy at birth of perhaps 30 years to one of more than 60. By this measure, the overwhelming preponderance of the health progress in all of human history took place during the past 100 years.

Between the early 1950s and the first half of the current decade, according to estimates by the United Nations Population Division, the planetary expectation of life at birth jumped by almost 19 years, or about two-fifths, from under 47 years to more than 65 years. Average life expectancy in low-income areas surged upward by well over two decades, a rise of more than 50 percent. Even sub-Saharan Africa - despite its protracted post-independence political and economic turmoil and the advent of a catastrophic HIV/AIDS epidemic - is thought to have enjoyed an increase in local life expectancy of more than one-fifth. (Practically the only countries to register no appreciable improvements in life expectancy over this period were the Russian Federation and a handful of other territories within what was once the Soviet Union.)

In the early 1950s, according to UNPD estimates, 156 out of every 1,000 children born around the world did not survive their first year; by the beginning of the 21st century, that toll was down to 57 per 1,000. In “developed” countries, the infant mortality rate is thought to have fallen by more than 85 percent during those same decades, and by nearly 70 percent in the collectivity of “developing” countries. In sub-Saharan Africa the infant mortality rate is thought to have declined by nearly half, and Russia’s infant mortality rate probably fell by more than 80 percent.

Life expectancy and infant mortality rates in the Third World today now approximate the levels prevailing in the rich countries shortly after World War II. The plunge in worldwide mortality is entirely responsible for the increase in human numbers over the course of the 20th century. This is a simple arithmetic fact. The “population explosion” was really a “health explosion.”

The implications of any health explosion for economic development and poverty alleviation are hardly negative. Healthier people are able to learn better, work harder, engage in gainful employment longer, and contribute more to economic activity than their unhealthy, short-lived counterparts.

Between 1900 and 2001, by Angus Maddison’s reckoning, global gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (in internationally adjusted 1990 dollars) nearly quintupled. In both relative and absolute terms, the developed nations enjoyed disproportionate improvements. Nonetheless, every region of the planet became richer. Africa’s economic performance was the most dismal of any major global region over the course of the 20th century; yet even there, per capita GDP looks to have been roughly three times higher in 2001 than it was in 1900.

With a near quadrupling of the human population in the 20th century, and a virtual quintupling in planetary GDP per capita over those same years, global economic output took a gargantuan leap. World GDP might have been more than 18 times higher in 2001 than it was in 1900. But GDP is a measure of economic output — and for the world as a whole, economic output and economic demand must be identical. If the demand for goods and services multiplied nearly twentyfold during the 20th century, humanity’s demand for, and consumption of, natural resources must also have skyrocketed. Yet the relative prices of virtually all primary commodities fell over the course of the 20th century — in many cases, quite substantially.

Despite the tremendous expansion of the international grain trade over the past century, for example, the inflation-adjusted, dollar-denominated international price of each of the major cereals — corn, wheat, and rice — fell by more than 70 percent between 1900 and 1998. By the same token, The Economist magazine’s industrials price index — a weighted composite for 14 internationally traded metals and non-food agricultural commodities — registered a decline, in inflation-adjusted dollars, of almost 80 percent between 1900 and 1999.

Price data are meant to convey information about scarcity. These data would seem to indicate that the resources that humanity makes economic use of grew less scarce over the course of the 20th century.

It may well be that more than half of the world’s population lives in countries with “sub-replacement” fertility — that is to say, places where current childbearing patterns, if continued indefinitely without migration, would lead ultimately to population decline. Some of today’s largest developed nations are expected to see population declines during the next 30 years, ranging from 4% in Germany to 12% in Japan (and even higher in Russia). But the great majority of current sub-replacement populations are in Third World states.

Unless we suffer a cataclysm, world population is set to increase for some time to come. But the era of the “population explosion” is clearly over. World population growth rates peaked in the late 1960s and are barely half as high now.

“Doom and Demography,” by Nicholas Eberstadt

There is an overall logic to historical evolution that explains why there should be increasing democracy around the world as our societies evolve.

Science is cumulative: we do not periodically forget scientific discoveries. This is what creates the economic world, since technology constitutes a horizon of economic production possibilities and guarantees that the age of the steam-engine will be different from the age of the plough, and that the age of the transistor and the computer is going to be different from the age of coal and steel. Scientific development makes possible the enormous increases in productivity that have driven modern capitalism and the liberation of technology and ideas in modern market economies.

Economic development produces increases in living standards that are universally desirable. The proof of this is simply the way people “vote with their feet.” Every year millions of people in poor, less-developed societies seek to move to western Europe, to the United States, to Japan, or to other developed countries, because they see that the possibilities for human happiness are much greater in a wealthy society than in a poor one.

The desire to live in a liberal democracy is not initially nearly as widespread as the desire for development. In fact, there are many authoritarian regimes like today’s China and Singapore, or Chile under General Pinochet, that have been able to develop and modernise quite successfully. However, there is a strong correlation between successful economic development and the growth of democratic institutions, something originally noted by the great sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. When a country gets past a level of approximately $6,000 per-capita income, it is no longer an agricultural society. It is likely to have a middle class that owns property, a complex civil society, a higher level of elite and mass education. All of these factors tend to promote the desire for democratic participation, and thus drive, from the bottom up, demand for democratic political institutions.

Few liberal societies have been utterly rigid in their defence of individual over group rights; multiculturalism, bilingualism, and other forms of group recognition have become part of public policy in the United States and other western democracies. On the other hand, most liberal societies understand that group recognition can undermine the basic liberal principle of tolerance and the rights of individuals. As Charles Taylor explains, liberalism cannot be completely even-handed toward different cultures, since it itself reflects certain cultural values and must reject alternative cultural groups that are themselves profoundly illiberal.

The basic principle of secular politics has come to be part of the modernisation process for essentially pragmatic reasons. In the history of Christianity, church and state began as separate entities but that separation was never necessary or complete. At the end of the middle ages, every European prince dictated the religious beliefs of his subjects; the sectarian conflicts following the Reformation led to more than a century of bloody warfare.

Modern secular politics thus did not spring automatically from Christian culture, but rather was something that had to be learned through painful historical experience. One of the achievements of early modern liberalism was its success persuading people of the need to exclude discussion of final ends addressed by religion from the realm of politics.

Modernisation has from the beginning created alienation and thus opposition to itself, and in this respect contemporary jihadists are following in the footsteps of anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists, and members of the Baader-Meinhof gang in earlier generations. This is why so many violent jihadists like Mohammed Atta, organiser of the 11 September attacks, or Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, were radicalised in western Europe.

“After the ‘end of history’,” by Francis Fukuyama

A survey of 478 Americans over nine years, before and after they became disabled, found that wealth generally allowed “substantially better well-being, and less sadness and loneliness.”

The advantage eased after a few years of disability.

“Happiness and well-being may not depend on a person’s financial state in times of health, but when that health fails, as it will eventually for most of us, money matters,” said lead researcher Peter Ubel.

Participants were classified as disabled if they became unable to carry out routine tasks — such as walking, getting out of bed, eating and dressing — without help.

Participants whose financial assets were above the median before they were disabled reported, afterward, a smaller drop in well being based on various questions they answered.

Other research has tied psychological well-being to a person’s response to medical treatments. Half of personal bankruptcies are linked to health care costs.

A 2003 study of 16,266 people at 886 companies in the UK found rank had a bigger effect on happiness than pay level.

According to Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, U.S. wealth has tripled over the past 50 years but well-being has not increased.

Scientists at Princeton University had 909 women fill out surveys of their previous days’ happiness. Income and education were found to have less impact on the enjoyment of daily activities than temperament and sleep.

“Measures of wealth or health do not tell the whole story of how society as a whole or particular populations within it are doing,” said Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman.

“When Money Does Buy Happiness,” by Robert Roy Britt
 

Gene M. Grossman and Alan B. Krueger (”Economic Growth and the Environment“) concluded that “for most indicators, economic growth brings an initial phase of deterioration followed by a subsequent phase of improvement. The turning points for the different pollutants vary, but in most cases they come before a country reaches a per capita income of $8,000.”

In January 2001, the World Economic Forum, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy published an Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI). The Index assigns the health of a country’s environment a single number ranging from 0 to 100, in which zero means low sustainability and 100 means high sustainability. Chart 1 illustrates the relationship between The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2001 Index of Economic Freedom scores and the ESI. The chart shows a strong relationship between economic freedom and environmental sustainability. The freer the economy, the greater the level of environmental sustainability.

The Heritage Foundation calculated a “Trade Openness Index” based on the 2001 Index of Economic Freedom by averaging the score for the trade policy, property rights, capital flows and foreign investment, and regulation factors. Consider the relationship between the Trade Openness Index and the Environmental Sustainability Index illustrated in Chart 2. In countries with an open economy, the average environmental sustainability score is more than 30 percent higher than the scores of countries with moderately open economies, and almost twice as high as those of countries with closed economies.

“Trade: The Best Way to Protect the Environment,” by Ana I. Eiras and Brett D. Schaefer

Addiction is one of the nation’s biggest public health problems, costing $524 billion (including lost wages and costs to the public health care and criminal justice systems) each year. The majority of the estimated 20 million alcoholics and drug addicts in America (and millions more compulsive gamblers, overeaters and sex addicts, if you accept an expanded understanding of addiction) never get help. Those who do often relapse repeatedly, sometimes returning to treatment centers 5, 10 or 15 times (if they don’t die first). And many of those who “recover” simply trade one addiction for another.

Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that sends signals between cells in the brain, affects a variety of critical functions, including learning, memory, movement, emotional response and feelings of pleasure and pain.

Scientists now believe that dopamine is a predictor of salience — that is, it tells us, and then helps us to remember, what we should focus on. When you see a person you are strongly attracted to, scientists can now see a spike of dopamine in your brain. If you are hungry and smell a food you like, dopamine also increases. But even unpleasant experiences — like physical pain or the fear of an intruder in the house — can cause a dopamine spike.

Drugs, particularly cocaine and methamphetamines, cause a large increase in the amount of dopamine secreted and pooling between brain cells, leading to feelings of euphoria. With regular, repeated “addictive” drug use, though, the brain eventually responds by reducing its normal release of dopamine. Studies also show a simultaneous decrease in the number of dopamine receptors created. That, in turn, makes the brain’s reward system less likely to respond to behaviors (romance, a good meal, the company of friends) that produce a normal dopamine surge. The addicted brain essentially becomes pathologically selective, dependent on bigger and bigger blasts of, say, cocaine to feel rewarded.

An increase in dopamine creates a craving — and an expectation of a reward. Nina Volkow used a brain scan to look at the dopamine releases in 18 cocaine addicts while they watched two videos: one of nature scenes, the other of people using cocaine. Volkow found that dopamine increased while the addicts watched the cocaine video and that the severity of the increase matched their self-reported level of craving for the drug. For these people, their lives and experience had taught them that when they see others using cocaine, they’re probably about to get rewarded with drugs, too.

Dopamine also travels to the parts of the brain responsible for solidifying memory, like the amygdala, which learns and stores emotional memories (including the high of drugs).

Studies in both animals and humans have indicated that those with low levels of dopamine D2 receptors, which regulate the release of dopamine in the brain, are more likely to find the experience of taking drugs pleasurable.

In one experiment, Volkow increased the level of dopamine D2 receptors in rats that had low levels. After the increase, the rats significantly curtailed their intake of alcohol, which they had eagerly gulped down before.

Walter Ling likes to explain complex brain processes using simple metaphors. GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is to a brain what a braking system is to a car.

GABA’s role is to keep glutamate, the main excitatory transmitter, from overwhelming us. In the extreme, too much glutamate can cause a seizure and too much GABA can put us in a coma.

Frank Vocci: “What’s been shown is that people with alcohol and cocaine problems have less GABA in their brains, and we do know that medications that increase GABA have shown some efficacy in treating addiction.” (It isn’t yet clear whether the absence of GABA is a cause of addiction or a result.) The seizure medication topiramate, for example, works on both GABA and glutamate and has helped some alcoholics in initial trials quit or cut back on their drinking. The muscle relaxant baclofen, which essentially mimics the effects of GABA, may also help some cocaine addicts quit.

Hythiam is aggressively marketing its Prometa protocol for cocaine, alcohol and methamphetamine addiction, which involves therapy and medications, both oral and intravenously injected, not usually used to treat addiction: flumazenil, approved by the F.D.A. to treat overdoses of Valium and Xanax, and gabapentin, approved to relieve neuropathic pain. Addiction-medicine doctors around the country who have administered the protocol report encouraging results. Prometa appears to reduce anxiety and craving by enhancing the brain’s GABA receptors.

Xenova Group Plc has created what it says are effective vaccines for cocaine and nicotine addiction (NABI Biopharmaceuticals in Florida has also developed a nicotine vaccine). The vaccines, which the institute on drug abuse and others are testing, work by producing antibodies to a specific drug, binding to the drug when it enters the bloodstream and keeping it from entering the brain. An effective vaccine won’t stop craving or treat any underlying pathology, but it will make it nearly impossible for an addict to get high on that particular substance.

Beginning in the late ’70s, Bruce Alexander set out to study the role of our environment on addictive behavior. Until that point, most scientists studying addiction put rats in small, individual cages and watched as they eagerly guzzled drug-laced solutions and ignored water and food, sometimes dying in the process. This phenomenon was noted — first by researchers, then drug czars, then parents trying to keep their children off drugs — as proof of the inherently addictive quality of drugs and of the inevitable addiction of any human who used them. This was false. Most people who use drugs don’t become addicted.

Alexander had a simple hypothesis: The rats became addicts because they had awful lives. To prove it, Alexander created a lab-rat heaven he called Rat Park. The 200-square-foot residence featured bright balls and tin cans to play with, painted creeks and trees to look at and plenty of room for mating and socializing.

Alexander took 16 lucky rats and plopped them into Rat Park, where they were offered water or a sweet, morphine-based cocktail (rats love sweets). Alexander offered the same two drinks to the control group of rats he left isolated in cages. The results? The rat-parkers were apparently having too much fun to bother with artificial highs, because they hardly touched the morphine solution, no matter how sweet Alexander and his colleagues made it. The isolated and arguably depressed rats, on the other hand, eagerly got high, drinking more than a dozen times the amount of the morphine solution as the rats in paradise.

Studies show that animals, including humans, who are stressed during early development are more likely to self-administer drugs later in life and that living in an enriched environment appears to protect animals from developing addictive behavior.

In 2003, researchers at the Wake Forest School of Medicine measured the levels of dopamine D2 receptors of 20 macaque monkeys while they were housed in isolation. They then assigned the monkeys to social groups of four monkeys each, letting natural social hierarchies develop. Three months later, they tested the levels of D2 receptors again.

The dominant monkeys had 20 percent higher D2 receptor function, while the submissive ones were unchanged. When the monkeys were then taught how to self-administer cocaine by pressing a lever, the dominant monkeys took significantly less cocaine than the subordinate ones.

Interestingly, though, when the animals that seemed to be protected from addiction were given cocaine repeatedly, the number of their D2 receptors eventually went down, and they then became addicted.

“Some people may be naturally better protected against addiction than others,” Volkow says, “but that’s not enough to keep someone from becoming addicted. The same thing is true for those who are genetically predisposed. We know from twin and family studies that about 50 percent of a person’s vulnerability to addiction is genetic. But if you’re never exposed to illegal drugs, or if you grow up and live in an environment without trauma and too many stressors, you probably won’t become addicted.”

Neurologists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany found that pathological gamblers, like drug addicts, have a sluggish reward system that doesn’t react normally to pleasing stimuli. The scientists used an M.R.I. scanner to compare the brain responses of 12 gambling addicts and 12 nonaddicted people to a card-guessing game. Subjects were told to pick a playing card, and if the card turned out to be red, they won a euro.

The game activated the ventral striatum, an important part of the brain’s reward system. Those nonaddicts who picked a winning card had increased blood flow to the striatum, but the gambling addicts who picked the right card had much less of it (their reward system was less active). The same kind of indifference to basic rewards has been seen in the ventral striatum of cocaine addicts.

Gamblers have to increase their bets to get the same level of excitement, just like someone addicted to drugs who has to keep using more to get an effect.

Obese people have lower levels of dopamine D2 receptors than those who eat normally.

“An Anti-Addiction Pill?,” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

The “Economic Freedom of the World” report by the Fraser Institute measures countries’ promotion of “economic freedom” — defined by low taxes, protection of private property, freedom of contract, free trade and monetary stability — on a scale from zero to ten.

Between 1980 and 2002, the average economic-freedom score rose from 5.1 to 6.5. Only 15 of the 104 countries surveyed in both years had double-digit rates of consumer-price inflation in 2002, compared with 76 in 1980. In 2002, no country in the survey had a marginal personal-income-tax rate of 60% or more. In 1980, 49 countries did. In 1980, 36 countries saw black-market exchange-rate premiums of 25% or more, a sure sign that the currency market is rigged. By 2002, only four countries suffered in this way.

James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, the report’s authors, found that the freest 20% of countries invest around $11,000 per worker, more than 12 times the figure for the least free 20%.

The freest fifth of countries attracted over $3,000 of foreign direct investment per worker, against $68 for the least free fifth. The authors estimate that investment is 70% more productive in the most free countries than in the least free.

After adjustment for differences in initial income, climate, the proportion of people near coastlines and human capital, countries with a freedom score below five saw growth of less than 0.4% a year, on average, between 1980 and 2000. Those scoring more than seven clocked up 3.4%.

“Liberty and investment,” The Economist

The OECD recently published its follow-up to 1994’s Jobs Strategy, backed by data from the annual Employment Outlook.

In broad terms, since 1994 most OECD countries’ labor markets have improved: unemployment rates (the proportion of the workforce looking for jobs) have fallen; employment rates (the proportion of working-age people in jobs) have risen. Some countries, such as Australia, Britain, Denmark and Ireland, have seen marked improvement in more than one of these measures. In other countries, notably France, Germany, and southern and central Europe, too few people are in work. 70% of Swedes and 61% of Americans aged 55-64 work; a mere 32% of Austrians and Belgians in that age range do.

The Employment Outlook sifts study after study of which policies have done best.

In essence, says the OECD, its members can be divided into 4 groups: 2 successful, in that they have lower unemployment rates and higher employment rates than the average, and 2 not.

The first group, labeled “mainly English-speaking” by the OECD (Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland are honorary Anglo-phones), tends to have weaker job protection, less generous unemployment benefits and thinner tax wedges than the average. Its employment rate is comfortably higher than the OECD average; its jobless rate is comfortably lower. In the 2nd, “northern European,” group (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland), taxes and unemployment benefits are high and workers hard to fire. Yet the average employment rate is a little higher than the 1st group’s and the unemployment rate a little lower.

There are 2 reasons why the 2nd group can outmatch the 1st. Their product markets are, like those of the 1st group, fairly loosely regulated, making the whole economy more dynamic. And they spend much more on schemes intended to ensure that the unemployed try hard to find work: benefit-recipients’ job-searches are closely watched and some work-seeking programs are compulsory.

Countries in the 3rd group — mainly southern European ones, plus France and Germany — tend to pay high benefits too. But they have not offset these with labor-market programs on the scale of the 2nd group, and their product markets are more protected. In the last group, which includes the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia, benefits are low. But workers are not especially easy to fire; little is spent on pushing the jobless into work; and product markets are more regulated than in any other group.

“The OECD’s Jobs Strategy,” The Economist

The cost of logistics in India represents some 13% of GDP. For China, the figure is around 21% of GDP — a big improvement on 1991, when it was around a quarter. Back in 1982, logistics represented 14.5% of America’s GDP, but now the share is down to just over 8%. Between then and now inventory costs in America have fallen by 60%. Europe is lagging behind America, with logistics costs of 11% of GDP or more.

Supply-chain efficiencies can be improved in various ways. One of the most dramatic was discovered 50 years ago when Malcom McLean reinforced the decks of the Ideal-X, an oil tanker left over from the second world war, and loaded it with 58 large metal boxes containing goods that would normally have travelled as loose cargo. It was this event, says Marc Levinson in his recent book The Box, which marked the birth of the shipping container.

The Ideal-X sailed from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, where after a five-day trip the boxes were unloaded directly onto trucks and hauled to their final destinations. In 1956 the back-breaking business of loading cargo onto a ship cost $5.83 per ton, says Mr Levinson. McLean calculated that loading the Ideal-X cost less than 16 cents a ton. Containerisation dramatically reduced the cost of shipping products from one place to another.

Today most goods and raw materials spend some time in a container as they move around. The container-shipping industry is booming, especially with exports from Asia. Giant container ports such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Los Angeles have flourished thanks to rapid-loading equipment. And container ships are getting bigger. Some now carry around 9,000 containers, and there are plans for giant vessels with double that number, which would require a line of trucks more than 50 miles long to haul away all the containers they could carry.

FedEx’s purchase in 2003 of Kinkos, whose main business was a chain of photocopying centres, has given the company some 1,300 high-street locations, mostly in America. Fedex is now using these to offer additional services. Despite the internet and e-mail, the demand for paper-based communications shows no sign of diminishing. But instead of shipping printed documents by air, FedEx now provides its clients with a remote-printing service. So instead of sending, say, lots of bulky brochures for a sales conference by air, a client could send them electronically to a Kinkos near the venue and pick them up in printed form from there.

Historically, transport technology has always made a physical impact on centres of commerce. In the days when cargo was loaded onto ships mainly by hand, factories would often cluster nearby because transport costs were high and delivery slow. With the arrival of the shipping container, factories were able to move to cheaper locations and away from crowded city ports such as New York City and the London docks. Container terminals did not have to be so close to large population centres, provided they had plenty of space, railways, good roads and workers prepared to handle containers, which many stevedores in older ports were not.

Something similar is now happening around logistics centres, especially at airports. Companies are moving some or all of their operations to be near such centres because this allows them to process orders late into the day and put their goods on the last flight out, for delivery the following morning. As a result, some surprising businesses are setting up shop near logistics hubs. For instance, even though Louisville is a long way from the sea it is now home to the world’s biggest distributor of fresh lobsters.

“Cargo cults,” The Economist

Melissa Hines of City University London presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the “masculine” toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Simon Baron-Cohen found that one-year-old girls spend more time looking at their mothers than boys of the same age do. And when these babies are presented with a choice of films to watch, the girls look longer at a film of a face, whereas boys lean toward a film featuring cars.

Baron-Cohen and his students took their video camera to a maternity ward to examine the preferences of babies that were only one day old. The infants saw either the friendly face of a live female student or a mobile that matched the color, size and shape of the student’s face and included a scrambled mix of her facial features. To avoid any bias, the experimenters were unaware of each baby’s sex during testing. When they watched the tapes, they found that the girls spent more time looking at the student, whereas the boys spent more time looking at the mechanical object.

“His Brain, Her Brain,” by Larry Cahill

According to a new report from the Institute for American Values, men who have never married or are divorced have higher levels of testosterone than do married men, particularly married fathers. Since testosterone is associated with risk-taking and anti-social behavior, this makes the married man more civilized and dependable.

Girls in intact married households experience puberty later than girls in single-parent households. This is important, W. Bradford Wilcox explains, “because when girls develop prematurely, they are more likely to become attracted to older boys and men and to have sex and become pregnant at an early age.”

If a girl lives with an unrelated male (say, a stepfather or a mother’s boyfriend), she hits puberty even earlier than a girl living with only her mother. The speculation is that the father emits pheromones – biological chemicals communicating sexual signals – that delay puberty in his daughter, while an unrelated male emits pheromones that accelerate it.

Boys in a single-parent home are roughly twice as likely to have served jail time by their early 30s.

White and Hispanic teens living in households with a co-habiting couple actually have more behavioral problems than teens in single-parent households.

Sweden has an all-enveloping welfare state and system of socialized medicine, but even there, the report says, “Boys reared in single-parent homes were more than 50 percent more likely to die from a range of causes – such as suicide, accidents or addiction – than were boys reared in two-parent homes.”

“The Father Effect,” by Rich Lowry