Sad Facts

A selection of very sad facts.

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The lowest employment rate for white Americans over the past 20 years was still higher than the highest point for black Americans over the same period of time

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About 800 people die on the tracks each year in Germany, a form of taking one's life officially referred to as "rail suicide."... Eight hundred suicides a year amounts to an average of more than two a day. Every train driver, in other words, can expect to run over a person once or twice in their working life.

http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/rail-suicide-a-train-driver-struggles-with-lives-taken-a-1191500.html

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The mass of insects collected by monitoring traps in the Orbroicher Bruch nature reserve in northwest Germany dropped by 78% in 24 years.

Where have all the insects gone?

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Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers in 2013 were still earning within 10 percent of the minimum wage a year later, up from about half in the 1990s. And two-fifths of Americans earning the minimum wage in 2008 were still in near-minimum-wage jobs five years later, despite the economy steadily improving during much of that time.

It’s getting harder to move beyond a minimum wage job

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Abortion foes have also legislated the dosage of medication a woman may take. Typically, doctors now prescribe 200 milligrams of Mifeprex and 800 micrograms of misoprostol. That's different from the amounts the Food and Drug Administration originally approved when RU-486 first arrived on the scene in 2000. And while such tweaking is common in medicine as new evidence accumulates, five states (Iowa is not one of them) have now passed laws requiring doctors to prescribe abortion pills according to the original, outdated FDA guidelines. Those older dosages make the medication harder to tolerate—failure rates more than double, and almost every woman experiences at least one severe side effect like nausea, vomiting, or cramps. Many abortion providers simply refuse to prescribe abortion drugs under these rules. I found only one provider, David Burkons of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, who uses the old dosages and was willing to talk about it on the record. "I explain it to patients. I explain there could be these effects," said Burkons, not a little defensively. "And still, there are people who, this is what they want to do." The whole thing requires four trips to his office: Once to hear Burkons read a script describing the fetus, which is required by the state, once for each dose, because the old guidelines prevent them from taking the second dose at home, and a fourth time for a follow-up. Women often bleed after the second dose—only now it's in their cars instead of at home. Because the old rules require a higher dose, the procedure currently costs an extra $160. And it gets more Kafkaesque: Since Burkons started prescribing abortion pills under the rules promoted by abortion opponents, he has reported 17 instances of patient complications to the state health department. Almost all of those women had experienced incomplete abortions—an inevitable outcome when using the outdated dosage. Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group, got hold of those reports and splashed them across its website. "His dangerous abortion operation should be closed permanently," said Troy Newman, the group's president, "in order to protect women."

The war on women is over - and women lost

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The war on women is over - and women lost

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Blacks are four times as likely as whites to say police violence is a major problem

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A recent Menzies School of Health Research study analysed the school attendance records of about 6,500 children born in the Northern Territory between 1994 and 2004. It found that two-thirds (66%) of the Indigenous students in the sample attended school less than 80% of the school days over their school career. In contrast, just 5% of non-Indigenous students fell below the touchstone 80% attendance level.

How crowded homes can lead to empty schools in the bush

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A typical cow in the European Union receives a government subsidy of $2.20 a day. The cow earns more than 1.2 billion of the world's poorest people. 

Farm subsidies gone wild: Cows in Europe earn more per day than 1.2 billion poor people

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Fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence.

Self-segregation: Why it's so hard for whites to understand Ferguson

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were far less likely than non-Indigenous people to have completed Year 12 or higher qualifications (35.9% compared with 67.3%). 

Exploring the gap in labour market outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

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The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Neal, D. & Rick, A. (2014). Prison boom and the lack of black progress after Smith and Welsh. NBER Working Paper 20283.

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The great American Hispanic wealth gap

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Millennials got hammered by the Great Recession. Retirement will hurt even more.

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83% of people in tech jobs at Google are men and about 94% are White or Asian. In senior management positions, 79% are men and about 95% are White or Asian.

Google Diversity

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Who gets to graduate?

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By their fourteenth birthday, African American children whose fathers do not have a high school diploma are more likely than not to see their fathers incarcerated.

Ten economic facts about crime and incarceration in the United States