• BC’s child poverty rate rose to 12 percent in 2009, the highest child poverty rate of any province for the eighth year in a row.
• The BC rate also remained higher than the national child poverty rate of 9.5 percent in 2009, and has been higher than the national rate for a decade.
• The poverty rate for people of all ages in BC also rose to 12 percent. It was the highest overall poverty rate of any province for the 11th consecutive year.

Download the full news release (with quotes from Policy Note blogger Adrienne Montani) at http://www.firstcallbc.org/

Almost everything that is vital to a healthy community, from life expectancy to levels of depression to crime rates, is affected by inequality. This is true in both rich and poor countries.  (The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett).

Social factors begin to affect us at conception, so that life in the womb and the perinatal period can affect well-being later on.  Even if exposed to stress in the womb, however:

A nurturing environment after birth can provide the child with enormous potential to change their course of development. This is known as “developmental plasticity,” which means that the brain can adapt and change as the child grows with a positive environment.

The important message here is in how we as a community support pregnant women. Stressful lives are most often linked with socioeconomic disadvantage. This research shows we should be targeting these women with support programs to ensure the stress does not negatively affect the unborn child.  (Repeated Stress in Pregnancy Linked to Children’s Behavior)

Poverty can even cause brain damage. Researchers discovered that U.S. children from “low socioeconomic environments” displayed a response in their pre-frontal cortex that was similar “to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke” (Poor Children’s Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows).

The damage may result from conditions such as poor nutrition, lack of time with over-worked and over-stressed parents, or fewer opportunities for intellectual stimulation – all of which may affect the quality of care that a child receives.  This does NOT mean that all poor children are so afflicted, but the average poor child is more likely to suffer.

Every dollar invested in the young not only saves lives and prevents illness, but it will also save at least $7 dollars in future social costs. For instance, lead poisoning, ADHD, and autism resulting from toxic chemicals and pollution in the United States cost $77 billion annually. Globally, almost 350,000 women die each year in childbirth – most of whom could be saved for the cost of just six fighter jets. Even worse: over 22,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from hunger and preventable diseases – almost 9 million every year. This year’s U.S. military budget is around $800 billion, and the world spends twice that on war. The simplest change would be to redirect wasteful military spending to end the worst elements of global poverty.

In 2009, the combined net worth of the world’s 1,011 billionaires increased to $3.6 trillion, up $1.2 trillion in just one year. This NEW wealth alone could end global poverty.

Perhaps the most important point is that none of these social, economic, and environmental problems are necessary. All scarcities, as Murray Bookchin pointed out over 40 years ago, are artificial. We possess the knowledge and the wealth to eliminate the worst of these afflictions. Why aren’t we doing so?

A Deloitte LLP report predicts that 2.4 million households in Canada will be in the millionaire club by 2020, an increase of 668,000 households from the present.  This will give us the eighth largest concentration of millionaires among the 25 countries surveyed. This should reassure all those who were concerned that we might move to reduce the growth in income inequality in this country.

And it gets better:  These uber-rich households will control $6.77 trillion by then, “nearly double the current level of $3.35 trillion.”   Aren’t you glad all that money will be in so few hands?

Sure makes it easier to know who we need to talk to about paying for all the social ills Canadian society will experience as a result of such an extreme level of income inequality.  For example, maybe we could get the cost of new prison construction off the public’s tab and just ask these guys to cover it, since the line between wealth concentration on this scale and higher rates of crime is pretty direct.

Oh, but that’s the route they’ve gone in the US — private prison corporations, generating — you guessed it — more private wealth for some already rich people.  Oops!  Forget that idea. 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m just so relieved that we aren’t losing the race to be the most unequal country on the planet.  To bring it home, here in BC the richest 10% of families with children gained almost $85,000 in average annual income over the past two decades, while the poorest 40% lost almost $7,000 per year.  That’s what I call growing the gap!

But let’s face it: the list of ills in our democracy is much longer than that a minor amendment to the voting age. We can let them vote, but why would they want to? The big problem of our day is that the people do not trust politicians, and they feel that the political system does not translate the will of the people into action. That is why voter turnout is down. So give 16-year-olds the vote, but also give them a reason to vote.

At a time when the public is engaged by the sheer deception over the HST, and another election lie from 2001, the promise not to sell BC Rail, democracy needs to be on the table. We need to be talking about ways to boost accountability, and root out crony capitalism, whether that be actual corruption (as in BC Rail) and the day-to-day influence of large corporations (who do not vote but seem to have no problem making “democracy” work for them). We need to think about what a more democratic society should look like and how our legislatures facilitate that democratic intercourse, rather than the highly centralized power of the PMO or Premier’s office.

Democracy is an evolving set of institutions, including legislatures and eligibility to vote representatives to those legislatures. But how those legislatures function (or do not) is of as much importance as who gets to vote. Electing a representative means little in our world of caucus solidarity – if our “representatives” do not get to speak their mind freely, we might as well just have a presidential-style election for premier. In BC, the legislature has only been sitting a few months of the year, so having a representative means even less than it used to.

At least, the evolving institutional framework has now brought forth a referendum on the HST, one small victory against despotism. Referenda are a rather crude form of democracy (as ballot initiatives in the US have demonstrated), but do have their place. But there are also participatory budgets, constituent assemblies, and other democratic engagement models to experiment with, some of which BC already has experience with.

As for the voting age, eligibility to vote was never clean cut: there have always been rules restricting suffrage. In the British tradition, the “vote” in the earliest Parliaments was with the nobility, who steadily wrested power from the king. That shifted to male property owners, then to all men, and to women. Periodically, religion has popped as a means for disqualification, so at times Catholics, Jews and others were banned from voting in England.

In Canada, women have only had the vote for less than 100 years, First Nations people for half that. The voting age was lowered to 18 forty years ago from 21. So lowering it to 16 is just one more step in the progress of democracy. Yet, every time that march has sought to take another step, the same patronizing arguments have been made in opposition. The most common complaint is 16-year-olds are too stupid/ignorant/inexperienced to vote. Substitute First Nations, blacks, Jews or women into that sentence, and have the rough history of arguments against suffrage.

True, teenage brains are flooded with hormones and they may lack real-life experience. But kids today are sophisticated and more prone to be idealistic that we can change things that are wrong with the world or our province. Because we teach them, so why deny them voice? Besides, it is their future that we are polluting, and they have a right to be angry about that at the ballot box. Even if you think 16 year-olds too dim, then I suggest we invest more in public education.

Lowering the voting age would, in fact, provide a great opportunity it would be to teach newly eligible voters about real issues during an election campaign, at school and at home. Just as 16-year-olds need a voice on climate change, they will have valid perspectives on the HST, fish farms and corruption. It would be great to see how 16 year olds would respond to reading David Basi’s personal memos.

But given the tragic state of our political system, it would be foolish to think that allowing 16 year-olds to vote is a panacea for voter participation. They may just get cynical faster — as long as politicians keep pulling betrayals like the HST and BC Rail. In the spirit of democracy I’d like to see Mike de Jong or any other Liberal candidate call for a full public inquiry into the corruption of the BC Rail affair (I’m betting the rot goes much deeper than just BC Rail).

If we want more democratic engagement we need institutions that are themselves more democratic. That is, we need a 21st century democracy, not a small tweak to the 19th century version. Younger voting ages should be part of that reform, but they are not the solution to an ailing system.

When many of us think about UNICEF we think of an organization concerned about children in the world’s poorest countries.  But in November UNICEF published a report on children in the richest countries.  In one area in particular, Canada does not come off well.

The report, The Children Left Behind, compares 24 of the world’s wealthiest countries for three indicators: material inequality, education inequality and health inequality.  Why look at inequality among children?  The report states:

The idea that inequality is justified as a reflection of differences in merit cannot reasonably be applied to children.  Few would deny that children’s early circumstances are beyond their own control.  Or that those early circumstances have a profound effect on those present lives and future prospects.  Or that growing up in poverty incurs a substantially higher risk of lower standards of health, reduced cognitive development, of under achievement at school, of lower skills and aspirations and eventually of lower adult earnings, so helping to perpetuate disadvantages from one generation to the next.

None of this is the child’s fault.

The study looks at inequality by measuring the gap between those at the middle of the pack (the median position) with those at the bottom.  The critical question, the report says, is just how far behind children should be permitted to fall?

Is there a point beyond which falling behind is not inevitable, not unavoidable but unacceptable, not inequality but inequity?

On educational inequality Canada does pretty well falling only behind Finland, Denmark and Ireland.  On health inequality we are in the middle of the group, close to the OECD average.  But on inequality in material well being, we land in the bottom group, clustered with Spain, Portugal and Greece with the highest levels of child income inequality.

Income for children, the report says, is the key factor. 

The most potent fact about children who fall significantly behind their peers is that, by and large, they are children of families at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale.

The report is based on information from good economic times and cannot report in detail on the impact of the recession.  It does note, however, in the United States that great economic growth in recent years,

Did not capture the fact that children who remained below the poverty line fell even further behind.  It is therefore essential to ask not only “how many” but “how far.”

What caused the growth in inequality?  The report suggests that many governments are spending more on family benefits and social protection but they are swimming upstream against forces like technological innovation and globalization.  UNICEF cites a 2008 report (Growing Up In North America) that found:

Inequality of market and disposable income has been increasing in Canada, Mexico and the United States since the 1980s.  In particular markets have disproportionately benefited families at the top of the income ladder – though families in every income group have been working longer and harder.  The scale of government intervention via public income transfers was not enough to offset the growing gap in market incomes.

So what is the solution?  UNICEF cites the OECD report Growing Up Unequal from 2008 saying,

The only sustainable way to reduce inequality…is to stop the underlying widening of wages and income from capital.  In particular we have to make sure people are capable of being in employment and earning wages that keep them and their families out of poverty.

Canada is among the worst for income inequality for children but there is special relevance here for British Columbia?

Year after year, in good times and bad, BC continues to have the highest rate of child poverty in Canada.  Some steps have been taken such as the Strong Start program and four year old kindergarten.  But the most important problem – child poverty – has not been improved. 

One specific recommendation in the report is to increase minimum wages, something that has not happened in BC in a decade.  Several countries have taken this step.  In the United Kingdom the 2010 report of the National Equity Panel argued:

The minimum wage is a powerful tool in reducing labour market inequality.

Here in BC it is not powerful enough.  Even an increase to $10 will not be sufficient.  What is needed is a living wage policy such as that which was introduced in New Westminster.  What is needed is an anti poverty program which many provinces, but not BC, have adopted.

There are other measures that can be taken.  Tax policies, social programs and adequate child care can make a difference.  But as the report concludes:

If the effort to prevent the unnecessary falling behind of children in different dimensions of their lives is not made, then a fundamental unfairness will continue to shame our pretensions to equality of opportunity – and our societies will continue to pay the price.

Shame our pretensions?  When I look at income inequality for children in Canada, and consider that BC has the highest percentage of poor children year after year, I wonder if our governments have any shame at all.

The piece highlights cuts to welfare, and notes, “One of the keenest slashers was British Columbia, which despite being one of the richest provinces has one of the highest rates of child poverty (10.4%) after taxes on family income.”

It continues:

Half a dozen provincial governments, including those of populous Ontario and Quebec, have launched poverty-reduction programmes; many include attempts to prod or help people back into work. Newfoundland, helped by royalties from oil and mining, has cut its poverty rate in half (to 6.5%). Earlier this month, a House of Commons committee urged the federal government to adopt a national strategy. The response of Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration was that the best long-term strategy to fight poverty is “the sustained employment of Canadians”. That is certainly a necessary condition, but is it sufficient? Both the government and its critics might ponder why it is that growth seems to bypass so many.

Too true.

First, last week brought news that Danny Williams is stepping down as premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. Personally, I’m sad to see him go. Rarely mentioned in the news reports last week about his record of accomplishments is the leadership Williams brought to the poverty reduction file, not only in Newfoundland, but nationally. Newfoundland’s Poverty Reduction Plan was among the most bold in the country, and it was driven by Williams himself. The one downside of the Newfoundland plan was that it did not embed specific targets in legislation. So hopefully it will remain a center-piece of the Newfoundland government after Williams’ departure.

Second, two weeks ago, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (the HUMA Committee) released its excellent and long-awaited final report on the federal role in poverty reduction. Its core recommendation: “We are recommending that the federal government join with the provinces to introduce an action plan for reducing poverty in Canada.” This is truly an outstanding report, and managed to find all-party support on most of its many recommendations. The full report can be downloaded here. A number of national organizations are asking people to lobby the government in support of the HUMA report’s recommendations. You can find an easy way to add you voice here (on the website of Make Poverty History).

Also two weeks ago, Food Banks Canada released its annual HungerCount report (you can find it here). Food Bank use went up 5% in BC (comparing March 2010 with March 2009), and was up 9.2% nationally.

Finally, last week also saw the release of the annual report cards on child poverty. The BC Report Card was released by First Call and SPARC BC, and can be found here. BC has now had the highest child poverty rate in Canada for seven years running.

Dr. Glenn, who is the Dean of the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, began by saying that, “Economists, writers, and researchers are beginning to discover…what we have known for decades: that the events and environment surrounding pre-conception, pregnancy, birth, and early infancy set the template out of which we live our lives.”

“The time is right,” she added, for a shift in the paradigm.”

Recent coverage such as on prenatal health in “Time” magazine, and epigenetics in “Newsweek”, symbolize this profound change in consciousness.

Some of the specific insights that Dr. Glenn mentioned included:

*  “Early experiences determine brain architecture.”
*  “By the sixth prenatal month, most of the 100 billion neurons found in the adult brain are already there.”

She also highlighted the most important point of all: preventing trauma in the first place.  For instance, she noted that a father’s supportive involvement during pregnancy can reduce infant mortality.

Dr. Glenn also quoted Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, who points out that every dollar invested “in the very young” not only saves lives and prevents illness, but it will also save from $4-17 dollars in future social costs.

Heckman has written:

“Recent research demonstrates important differences in the family environments and investments of advantaged and disadvantaged children. Gaps in cognitive stimulation, affection, punishment, and other parental investments for children from families of different socioeconomic status open up early.” (Read the full article here.)

My presentation at the Congress overlapped with Dr. Glenn’s focus, beginning with the current state of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, and how the emerging consensus supports his long-held contention about just how fragile we are while in the womb.

I pointed out how Janov believes that too many children have been emotionally damaged from an early age, and that one element of healing is to re-connect with the buried memories.

The second part of my talk discussed how to PREVENT hurting children in the first place.  In short, research has shown that providing optimal conditions for pregnant women, such as low stress, adequate nutrition, and quality pre-natal care could prevent children from suffering from a host of intellectual, emotional, and physical illnesses.

In addition, around 500,000 women die each year in childbirth.  Adam Jones (UBC Okanagan) has pointed out that most of those mothers could be saved for the cost of – six fighter jets.

Canada, for instance, could set an example for the world by forgoing the unnecessary purchase of the F-35 fighter jets, save the lives of countless women, and still have money left over for vital domestic needs.

Providing optimal conditions for mothers and their children would cost only a tiny fraction of what the world spends on advertising, or the Olympics, or the military.

This Paradigm Shift can’t happen too soon.

That’s the take-home message from a recent talk by UC Berkley economist and public policy professor Jesse Rothstein who came to SFU to present his latest research on using standardized test scores to measure teacher effectiveness in the US. 

Prof. Rothstein was involved in a 3-year pilot project in Tennessee designed as an experiment to check whether offering teachers bonus pay would improve students’ test score performance. Teachers were randomly assigned to two groups, one was offered bonus pay if their students did well on standardized tests (experimental group) and the other one wasn’t (control group).

After 3 years, there weren’t significant differences in student achievement on standardized tests between the two groups, clearly showing that offering teachers bonus pay did not improve student achievement. Yet, the Obama administration (for which Professor Rothstein worked recently) is continuing to explore incentive pay as a way to improve the education system.

Come to think of it, the idea of incentive pay has become the holy grail in governments’ quest for improving the performance of complex social systems like health care and education. On the surface, there’s a certain intuitive appeal to the idea of paying more to those doing a better job. The “economic theory” behind it is that offering to pay people more for doing a good job will lead to increased work effort as rational individuals choose to maximize their pay.

That’s what’s driving US policy makers to test schemes of offering teachers incentive pay to improve school achievement. That’s what’s driving BC Health Minister Kevin Falcon to offer hospitals funding based on the number of surgeries they do (what he calls patient-focused funding).

But when used mechanically — by tying incentives to some quantitative measure of performance, like test scores or number of surgeries done — such schemes are likely to fail.

The devil — as usual — is in the details. And the details here are that before policy-makers can give somebody a bonus for doing a good job, they need to be able to measure what a good job looks like. This is where standardized tests come in along with other quantitative measures such as the number of medical procedures performed, or the length of hospital stay.

But it turns out — surprise! — that it’s really hard to measure quality in complex social systems and employing simplistic quantitative measures can backfire. In fact, Prof Rothstein quoted an obscure scholar of methodology by the name of Donald Campbell, who coined a rather pessimistic “Campbell’s law” in the late 1970s:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

In other words, the perverse incentives that pay-for-performance schemes create in complex social systems may well outweigh any positive incentives for real improvement.

Campbell looked at education in particular (see his working paper here), and argued that

“achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.

What does this tell us about BC’s new incentive-based funding model in health care?

—

Kudos to the SFU Centre for Education Research and Policy for organizing the public event.

The ads showed young men in embarrassing situations being interrupted by the police.  One risqué ad showed a lone teenage male in a locker room furtively using a tape measure, with the implication that he was measuring the length of his body parts.  The message in the ad was that getting caught drinking and driving was just as embarrassing as being, well, caught with your pants down.

The NDP demanded to know why the ads hadn’t been killed before $1.7 million had been spent developing them.

I think the government made the wrong decision and the NDP asked the wrong question.  A better question would have been, would these ads have helped stop young people from killing themselves on our roads?

No one spends millions of dollars on ad campaigns without doing public opinion research to find out if the ads are effective and worth the money.  ICBC is no exception.  In response to my FOI request, the Corporation released the results of two sets of focus groups.  In focus groups small groups of people are asked for their opinions and insights into an idea, a product, or in this case, an advertising campaign.

Last summer InQuest Consumer Insights and Planning held five focus groups in July to provide insights into developing an advertising campaign.  In November Ipsos conducted three focus groups to get opinions on the soon to be controversial advertising campaign.

Among the findings was that the biggest deterrent to drinking and driving was the fear of getting caught.  The risk of crashing simply didn’t enter peoples’ minds because “it won’t happen to me.”  Younger males were fearful of being caught doing something embarrassing.  “It was the fear of parents that was most evident,” and “Additionally, if being caught in the act of doing something brought disrespect to the family, that also evoked fear.”

The people in the focus groups were not offended by the suggestive campaign.  Ipsos found the campaign, “clearly resonates among all the respondents, younger and older.  There was a belief that it could encourage people to talk about the issue of drinking and driving.”

In 2008, 47 of the 225 people killed in car accidents in BC were between the ages of 15 and 24.  Many more had their lives ruined with permanent injuries.  A study by the Traffic Injury Research Foundation found that in 2007 alcohol was involved in more than 90% of traffic fatalities.  For people between the ages of 16 and 19 the figures was 100%.

Older people in the focus group said they had no problem with their children being exposed to the ads, but there is no doubt many people would find the ads in poor taste. 

So how do we balance it out – poor taste vs. perhaps saving young lives?  I think our elected officials on both sides of the chamber made a very serious error when they decided poor taste was more important.

First, on Tuesday, BC Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall released a special report entitled Investing in Prevention. The report received quite a lot of media attention. However, most of the coverage dealt with the common-space issues of healthy eating, exercise and smoking. Almost no attention was paid to two of Dr Kendall’s five key recommendations. Specifically, Recommendation 2 calls on the government to:

Recommit to early childhood development. The report 15 by 15: A Comprehensive Policy Framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC, produced by the Human Early Learning Partnership, provides a blueprint for government to follow.

And Recommendation 3 says:

Look at those provinces and territories that have committed to poverty reduction (e.g., Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Yukon) and create a “Made in BC” program.

And more good news: this morning at the annual Union of BC Municipalities convention, the UBCM delegates passed a resolution calling on the province to adopt a comprehensive poverty reduction plan.

You can hardly tell by their actions. BC did introduce full-day kindergarten in some communities this fall, but other than that the family policy front has been rather quiet lately.

The latest childhood vulnerability numbers won’t tip you off either as vulnerability has grown over the last decade, reaching 30.3% in 2009/10.

Don’t get me wrong. Setting goals is an significant first step and the government should be commended for taking a stand on this important issue.

However, without changing policy and taking action goals remain nothing more than laudable aspirations.

This is precisely the point that the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at UBC makes with their new BC Smart Policy Report Card, released earlier in September. The report card assesses government actions in the area of family policy and compares them to benchmark recommendations developed by HELP in their 15 by 15 report, which was commissioned by the BC Business Council last year.

The findings? There has been some movement on the family policy front over the past year, but the BC government has only made about 5% of the recommended new investments in family policy. At this rate, the researchers estimate that it would take 20 years to reduce early childhood vulnerability to 15%, or 15 years longer than the government’s stated goal of “15 by 15.” It seems that the provincial government is well on its way of failing to achieve their goal unless they take decisive action on family policy and soon.

Many would have been satisfied to end it here with calling current government family policy a failure and making a call for bolder action. But HELP’s report card moves beyond name calling and assigning failing grades to analyze what it would take for smart family policy changes to be implemented.

HELP researchers recognize that politicians are rarely leaders; they follow what they perceive to be the popular mood among their constituents. So HELP’s report card looks beyond the need for political leadership and explores the role of the broader community in pushing for increased investments in smart family policy. Here’s their read on where the broader community is at and where it needs to be:

HELP’s recommendations for moving forward? An broad-based, frank discussion about priorities and trade offs around family policy.

British Columbians need to talk about how to find new funding or reallocate existing dollars in order to invest in the social and economic benefits that smart family policy will promote.

HELP researchers end their report card with an appeal to all British Columbians to take responsibility for changing the status quo:

Please start talking about [the key questions and trade offs] at your dinner tables, among your neighbours, in your offices and with your political leaders.

I fully agree that starting the conversation is how we move forward. So why not start by posting a comment here on the blog and, as I’ve noted before, by participating in the 2011 BC Provincial Budget Consultation?

On the other hand, social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have shown how situations can override a person’s usual inclinations and cause them to do something which they would normally abhor, such as killing other people in wartime.

Our understanding of human behaviour has grown dramatically with the development of neuroscience. Many of my future posts will consider what these discoveries tell us about creating healthy human beings, and healthy societies.

Of course, these are very political questions.

One key concept is that of  “outside-inside” (in the words of psychologist Arthur Janov). We tend to internalize what we experience in our environments. Food and air, for instance, are obvious examples. It matters whether our food and air are clean or if they are polluted with various toxins.

A second key concept is “neuroplasticity.”  Neuroscience has shown that our brains are not static and unchanging. For instance, every thought and feeling in our minds corresponds to a physical change in our brains. Learn something new, and your brain changes.

In other words, every experience in our lives alters our brain.

A third element are the so-called “mirror-neurons,” which are a fundamental to our “social brain” (Dr. Dan Siegel). In brief, these neurons fire in our brains when we observe the feelings of others. In fact, we absorb the feelings of other people so much that Siegel suggested that we call them “sponge neurons.”

Finally, people tend to absorb the dominant values and beliefs of their culture, including its political ideology. Marx wrote that the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of society, and Gramsci elaborated on the concept of this ideological hegemony.

As political scientist Gary Olson wrote in Capitalism Short Circuits Our Moral Hard-Wiring, “Capitalists maintain domination, in part, through subtly but actively creating society’s prevailing cultural norms.”

Our brains as well as our beliefs are shaped, more than we realize, by the ideology of capitalism, with its emphasis on greed, selfishness, competition and individualism.

In the words of  Frans B.M. de Waal, “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

These norms and expectations often overrule our natural compassion, even though it is now clear that “the human brain is hard-wired for empathy,” in Olson’s view.

Finally, research has shown that poverty (e.g. stress, overwork, poor nutrition) take a terrible toll, not only on adults, but children, and even babies in the womb. Not only is physical health damaged, but emotional and intellectual health suffer.

We need to go beyond these symptoms and address the root causes of human suffering.

The study, Global Employment Trends for Youth, outlines the devastating impact the recession has had on young people worldwide.  More than 80 million people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed at the end of 2009, the highest number ever recorded.

The impact of this is felt differently in the developed and the developing world.  Here in British Columbia the August 6, 2010 Labour Force Report from Statistics Canada shows young people have not escaped the ravages of recession.

The Stats Can report describes British Columbia as a good news story saying:

British Columbia posted gains [in employment] of 16,000 in July, bringing the province’s unemployment rate down 0.3 percentage points to 7.5%.

However, reading along further in the report shows that since 12 months ago while employment has gone up by 3 per cent for the whole population, it has gone down by 1.8 per cent for people between 15 and 24.  Although many young people are school age, as a group they are more than twice as likely to be working part-time.

Happily, unemployment has fallen among young people but in spite of this “recovery” while the population of young people has gone up by 3,400 there are still 6,000 fewer young people working now than a year ago.

The ILO report suggests there are long term consequences for coming of age during a recession:

Given the possible transition mechanisms between business cycles and youth employment, what are the potential costs in terms of future consequences for the youth who are unlucky enough to reach maturity at a time of economic crisis? A body of literature now exists on the topic of “scarring”. The premise is that there are longer-term consequences for young people whose first labour market experience is one of unemployment. Presumably, the unemployed youth will lower his reservation wage with the passage of time, and accept poorer quality jobs that are less secure, and thus, be more vulnerable to future spells of unemployment (the disorderly transition mentioned above). Results are mixed in terms of the existing analyses, with stronger evidence to support wage scarring than the unemployment scarring argument; for example, a recent study by Kahn estimated that a 1 percentage point increase in unemployment in the United States results in a 6 to 7 per cent decrease in the wages of college graduates and that, while the wage cost lessens with time, it still remains statistically significant 15 years later. The effects are believed to be more severe for youth entering the workforce with an education level below the tertiary level.

 What surprises me is how remarkably little attention seems to have been paid to the issue of youth unemployment in this recession.  No effort has been made to make higher education more accessible and less costly.  Virtually nothing has been done to target youth in employment programs.  The ILO report suggests we may see consequences for this inaction.

In his column Dr. Paul Martiquet reports that in BC the minimum age for working a regular job is 12 – the lowest of any jurisdiction in North America.  This resulted from changes in the Employment Standards Act in 2003.  Before that anyone under the age of 16 required permission from the government to work.

Now the Employment Standards Branch no longer keeps track of where children work.  All that is required is the permission of one parent and most parents have little or no knowledge of the dangers on a work site.

WorkSafeBC does keep track of injuries and Dr. Martiquet reported a tenfold increase in injury claims among 12 to 14 year olds between 2005 and 2008.

This is not the first report on increasing injuries among children on the job.  Last October the BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition published a report on the subject.  Cuts are the most common type of injury for children followed strains, dislocations and fractures.  Most of the children are reported to be working in accommodation and food services but some work in genuinely dangerous industries such as agriculture, and construction.

WorkSafeBC told the CBC that the tenfold increase in injured children to 2008 had declined in 2009 to a fivefold increase thanks to the failing economy.  Apparently things were so bad in 2009 employers could no longer afford to hire as many 12 year olds at the $6 sub-minimum wage. 

The news about injured children should not come as a surprise.  In 2004 Helesia Luke and Graeme Moore published a report for the CCPA that looked at the implications of reduced regulation for child labour.  The report looked at education and the exploitation as well as health and safety issues.

Helesia and Moore pointed out that young workers between the ages of 15 and 24 were already far more likely to be injured than other workers for a variety of reasons including inexperience and lack of training.  They concluded:

It is logical to assume that children under 15 will be at least, if not more, affected by the same characteristics that increase the risk of injury to those 15–24. An increase in the number of children working, without an increase in training or supervision, may lead to many more job related injuries, especially when there are no prohibitions against children working in hazardous occupations.

Dr. Martiquet concluded his column with the following: 

It seems strange that children can be used to fill jobs in this way.  Age 12?  Age 13? When will they get to be children?  B.C. should honour the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: the minimum work age should not be lower than the age for finishing compulsory schooling (15 typically), children may do only light work as long as it does not threaten their health, safety or hinder their education and training.