What We Read Today 18 June 2014

Econintersect: Every day our editors collect the most interesting things they find from around the internet and present a summary “reading list” which will include very brief summaries of why each item has gotten our attention. Suggestions from readers for “reading list” items are gratefully reviewed, although sometimes space limits the number included.

• Unimaginable Human Tragedy On The Texas Border (Gart Halbert, Advisor Perspectives). The flood across the southwestern U.S. border has changed dramatically from just a few years ago. Mexicans no longer constitute much of the traffic; those caught are 75-80% from Honduras, San Salvador, and Guatemala. But this is becoming less of a migrant worker problem and more of a refugee problem: this year 60,000 to 80,000 will be unaccompanied children, some as young as four. There are projections that this could soar to as many as 130,000 in 2015. The number of children has been more than doubling each year, up from 6,000 in 2011. See also Migrants Flow in South Texas, as Do Rumors (Julia Preston, The New York Times)

• America Is Getting the Science of Sun Exposure Wrong (Jessica Siegel, Nautilus) Doctors are telling some patients to get in the direct sun and use no sunscreen because of vitamin D deficiency. New research finds that people regularly exposed to sun on a daily basis have a lower risk of getting melanoma and also have a higher survival rate if they do.

• Newborns Exposed to Dirt, Dander and Germs May Have Lower Allergy and Asthma Risk (Ekaterina Pesheva and Helen Jones, Johns Hopkins Medicine) Things like household germs, pet and rodent dander and roach detritus an increase immune system robustness in those exposed in the first year of life. Don’t you start trying to increase your exposure – the effect disappears after age one.

• Political Polarization in the American Public (Pew Research Center) Political ideology is increasingly divided repeated surveys by the Pew Foundation finds. The divide is magnified by likelihood to vote which is much higher among consistently conservative and consistently liberal, especially for consistently conservative who are twice as likely to vote (78%) as those with mixed ideology (39%). The obvious conclusion is that the platform is much more important in getting elected than is the individual candidate.

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