Poverty Is Low Consumption and Low Wealth,Not Just Low Income

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an improved measure of financial poverty, based on household consumption and wealth as well as income. Data come from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) Survey, which appears to be the first national socio-economic panel survey to provide longitudinal data on all three measures of household economic well-being. National measures of poverty in Australia and other Western countries are usually based only on low income. But this is conceptually incorrect; the measures lack validity. To be poor is to have a low material standard of living—involuntarily. So measures of poverty should also take account of household consumption and wealth. If a household has an adequate current level of consumption, it should not be classified as poor right now, even if its current income is low. Similarly, if it has substantial wealth (net worth), it should not be viewed as poor because it could draw down on wealth to boost current consumption. The invalidity of income-based measures has long been recognised in principle (Ringen 1987, The possibility of politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press). In practical terms, the problem is to combine measures of wealth and income, and especially consumption, in the same survey. In the 2005 HILDA Survey a battery of household expenditure items was included which, benchmarked against the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Household Expenditure Survey for 2003–04, appeared to provide valid measurement of 53.4% of total household expenditure. These well measured items correlated 0.76 with total expenditure and, in combination with standard demographic variables, accounted for 78.3% of the variance in the total. This paper uses 2005–06 HILDA data to construct revised measures of financial poverty. The value of these measures for public policy and research purposes is illustrated. In particular, the new measures give much lower estimates of poverty than income-based measures. They can also be used to predict which households are at risk of future poverty.

The Set-Point Theory of Well-Being: Negative Results and Consequent Revisions

An adequate theory of happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) needs to link at least three sets of variables: stable person characteristics (including personality traits), life events and measures of well-being (life satisfaction, positive affects) and ill-being (anxiety, depression, negative affects). It also needs to be based on long-term data in order to account for long-term change in SWB. By including personality measures in the 2005 survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) became the first available dataset to provide long-term evidence about personality and change in one key measure of SWB, namely life satisfaction. Using these data, the paper suggests major revisions to the set-point theory of SWB; revisions which seek to account for long-term change. Previously, theory focused on evidence that individuals have their own set-point of SWB and revert to that set-point once the psychological impact of major life events has dissipated. But the new SOEP panel data show that significant minorities record substantial and apparently permanent upward or downward changes in life satisfaction. The paper aims to explain why most people’s SWB levels do not change, but why a minority do. The main new result, which must be regarded as tentative until replicated, is that the people most likely to record large changes in life satisfaction are those who score high on the personality traits of extraversion (E) and/or neuroticism (N). These people in a sense ‘roll the dice’ more often than others and so have a higher than average probability of recording long-term changes. Data come from the 3130 SOEP respondents who rated their life satisfaction every year from 1985 onwards, among whom 2843 also completed a set of questions about their personality in 2005.

Competing risk analysis in a large cardiovascular clinical trial: An APEX substudy

Competing risk methods are time‐to‐event analyses that account for fatal and/or nonfatal events that may potentially alter or prevent a subject from experiencing the primary endpoint. Competing risk methods may provide a more accurate and less biased estimate of the incidence of an outcome but are rarely applied in cardiology trials. APEX investigated the efficacy of extended‐duration betrixaban versus standard‐duration enoxaparin to prevent a composite of symptomatic deep‐vein thrombosis (proximal or distal), nonfatal pulmonary embolism, or venous thromboembolism (VTE)–related death in acute medically ill patients (n = 7513). The aim of the current analysis was to determine the efficacy of betrixaban vs standard‐duration enoxaparin accounting for non‐VTE–related deaths using the Fine and Gray method for competing risks. The proportion of non‐VTE–related death was similar in both the betrixaban (133, 3.6%) and enoxaparin (136, 3.7%) arms, P = .85. Both the traditional Kaplan‐Meier method and the Fine and Gray method accounting for non‐VTE–related death as a competing risk showed equal reduction of VTE events when comparing betrixaban to enoxaparin (HR/SHR = 0.65, 95% 0.42‐0.99, P = 0.046). Due to the similar proportion of non‐VTE–related deaths in both treatment arms and the use of a univariate model, the Fine and Gray method provided identical results to the traditional Cox model. Using the Fine and Gray method in addition to the traditional Cox proportional hazards method can indicate whether the presence of a competing risk, which is dependent of the outcome, altered the risk estimate.     

Some have to,and some want to: Why firms adopt a post-industrial form

A number of organizational scholars have suggested that to compete in a “post-industrial” world firms must adopt specific structures and approaches to managing. In this article, we explore the why of post-industrial forms, as opposed to the what. Often work in this literature speaks as though in the future only a post-industrial form will allow firms to compete successfully. We argue instead that adoption of a post-industrial form is a contingency: some firms have to operate in this fashion, some firms may want to, and some firms never will adopt a post-industrial form. Based on Thompson’s (Organizations in action, Transaction, New Brunswick, 1967) conception of production processes, we suggest factors that, if present, require firms to be post-industrial as well as strategies that make them want to adopt this relatively new form.     

Towards a Theory of Medium Term Life Satisfaction: Similar Results for Australia,Britain and Germany

We analyse the Life Satisfaction trajectories of respondents in three long-running, national panel surveys: the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia Survey (HILDA), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Previous research has shown that substantial minorities of respondents in all three countries recorded long term changes in LS (Fujita and Diener in J Personal Soc Psychol 88:158–64, 2005; Headey in Soc Indic Res 76:312–317, 2006; Headey et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci 107:17922–7926, 2010; Headey et al. Soc Indic Res 112:725–48, 2013). In a recent SIR paper based on the German data (Headey and Muffels in Soc Indic Res, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s11205-015-1146-8), we showed graphs of LS trajectories which suggested—and subsequent statistical analysis confirmed—that respondents typically spend multiple consecutive years above and, in other periods, below their own long term mean level of LS. Here we extend the analysis to Australia and Britain, showing that results replicate in two more Western countries. It appears that most people go through relatively happy periods of life, and relatively unhappy periods. The evidence runs counter to set-point theory which views adult LS as stable, except for short term fluctuations due to life events. In the second half of the paper we try to contribute to a theory of medium term life satisfaction. We estimate structural equation models with two-way causation between LS and variables usually treated as causes of LS, including health, social support, frequency of social activities, and satisfaction with one’s work, partner and family life. In all three countries we find that there are positive feedback loops between these variables and LS, which partly account for extended periods of high or low LS. The two-way causation models are based on a modified concept of ‘Granger-causation’ (Granger in Econometrica 37(3):424–38, 1969). The main intuition behind Granger-causation is that if x can be shown to be statistically significantly related to y in a model which includes multiple lags of y, then it can be inferred that x is one cause of y.     

Measuring the Efficiency of Health Services in Lower‐income Countries: The Case of Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea (PNG) faces enormous health challenges and information concerning how to allocate limited health resources efficiently is lacking. This article finds that geographical location is important in achieving higher efficiency scores. In addition, it compares efficiency scores against a range of quality indicators. The results demonstrate that different conclusions are reached when efficiency scores are assessed in the context of broader health system objectives. Analyses of this kind can provide valuable information to policy‐makers in lower‐income countries.     

The Problem of Pseudoscience in Social Work Continuing Education

The National Association of Social Workers requires social workers to obtain continuing education (CE) after they receive their social work degrees. A large and profitable industry that has emerged catering to this need for CE that is particularly focused on the needs of licensed social workers. Quality control mechanisms in place to monitor the content and delivery of CE approved by the field of social work is relatively lax, and as a result a considerable number of social work CE programs convey content that can be labeled as pseudoscientific. We provide illustrations of currently approved social work CE courses that provide training in a variety of bizarre and unsupported assessment methods and treatments that are pseudoscientific.