The Kids Aren't Alright

I'm trying to get some graphs in my life. I'm starting work again at a community center here in Nashville, working with "at-risk" teens. I want graphs that show what the kids score on various personality tests. Hopefully this will give us some concrete things to measure the "success of our intervention" by. Currently, we have few data points to measure success by. Often it is whether or not the kids die within the next few years.

Cool Facts:

Non-cognitive skills, aka "Social Skills," can be augmented at any stage of development. Cognitive skills are things like what an IQ Test measures. Cognitive skills do not change throughout one's life. Social Skills do change.

Social Skills are things that tests like the "Big 5 Personality Test" screen for. These include: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability and Intellectual Openness. In individuals within the lowest 10th percentile economically, an increase in Non-cognitive skills is 2.5-4x more effective at raising future income levels (and their lifespan) than an increase in IQ would.

Basically, social skills are more important than we thought. And they are tremendously more important to those who suffer the most economically.

Non-Cool Facts:

Nashville was ranked the 39th worst city for firearm assisted homicide in 2010 (from the CDC's MMWR 2011). It's by no means the most violent city in America, but surprisingly it is worse per captia than some comparable cities like New Orleans, Richmond VA, and near by Memphis. Check out this graph!

Tennessee Department of Health

First of all you can see the much higher infant mortality rate amongst black children in comparison to white children. The slopes are then roughly equal until black men reach about the age of 16 in Nashville. That's when the black male life line (the solid blue line in the graph) pulls a Wile E. Coyote move.

I'm making an atrocity palatable here. This is obviously a tragedy on every level. But the fact is that we're interested in straightening out that line through early intervention with that demographic. Calling some thing a tragedy doesn't solve it though, and in some respects it denies its existence. 

I once asked my Dad what field it was that studied every aspect of human nature and churned out results on what we should do to improve the world. He told me it didn't exist.