Stephen Bevan — Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Being in poor-quality work which, perhaps, is boring, routine or represents underemployment or a poor match for the employee’s skills is widely regarded as a good way for the unemployed to remain connected to the labor market – and to keep the work habit. But Butterworth’s data contradict this. The HILDA data show unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Butterworth looked at those moving from unemployment into employment and found that: 

"Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed."

So now we have a slightly different answer to the question about the unemployed being better off in work. Yes they are, as long as they are in good-quality jobs. If they are in bad jobs, there is a perversely strong chance that they will be worse off – especially in terms of their mental health. 

Again, for those who think that there should be punitive undertones to policies to get unemployed people back to work would do well to question whether the “any job is a good job” maxim is as accurate as they like to think. Moreover, we should probably question whether the revolving-door characteristics of some policies in which many people fall back out of work soon after being found a job might – in part – owe their poor performance to the damaging psychosocial quality of the work itself.

This shouldn’t stop us from straining every sinew to help people find work. But it should make us think a lot more about how the quality of jobs can affect our health and productivity.…

The Washington Post
Unemployed? You shouldn’t just take any job.

Stephen Bevan | Director of the Centre for Workforce Effectiveness at the Work Foundation and an honorary professor at Lancaster University

ht Dan Lynch

Ezra Klein — Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States

Ezra summarizes some of the research.

The Washington Post | Wonkblog
Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States
Ezra Klein

Related:

Ezra Klein, Six facts about guns, violence, and gun control, July 23, 2012

Interesting to compare Ezra's latest article with his last, at the time of the Aurora, AZ attack.

Gary Kleck, Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, address delivered to the 1991 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association based on his book of the same title.

Data is dated but the analysis is still relevant.

Harvard University Press Blog, Gun Control, Mental Illness, and the Arizona Shootings

In a Salon piece titled “Why Psychiatrists Can't Predict Mass Murderers,” McNally addresses the reasonable urge to make sense of the senseless and to learn from this incident. While many in the media have been recounting Loughner’s troubled past and wondering why authorities seemingly failed, time and again, to take action in ways that could have prevented this tragedy from occurring, McNally explains the difficulty of such intervention:

Let's assume that we've identified a set of characteristics often exhibited by mass murderers. What does that buy us? It enables us to answer the question, “Given that someone is a mass murderer, what characteristics is he likely to exhibit?” That's an interesting question, but it's not the one we want to answer. Rather, the question we really want to answer is, “Given that someone exhibits this profile of characteristics, how likely is he to commit mass murder?” Answering this question is extremely difficult because the predictors are invariably far more common than the event we hope to predict, and mass murder is very rare. Although mass murderers often do exhibit bizarre behavior, most people who exhibit bizarre behavior do not commit mass murder.

Despite the difficulties presented, McNally accepts for science the need to learn from incidents like the Arizona shooting. “The consequences of missing a future mass murderer in our midst are appalling, and the enormity of such a mistake fuels the hope that someday science will overcome the daunting challenge of distinguishing the truly dangerous from the merely odd.”

 Balkanization
A Thought Experiment
Gerard N. Magliocca | Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law

Take the test.

Mark Follman — Mass Shootings: Maybe What We Need Is a Better Mental-Health Policy

What our in-depth investigation reveals about mental illness and America's mass killings with guns.

Mother Jones
Mass Shootings: Maybe What We Need Is a Better Mental-Health Policy
Mark Follman | Senior Editor

Lynn Parramore — Gun Control Is Not the Only Option: Let's Talk About America's Dangerously Gutted Mental Healthcare System

The Right’s program for public safety: Everyone should have a gun and few should get adequate mental healthcare.

AlterNet
Gun Control Is Not the Only Option: Let's Talk About America's Dangerously Gutted Mental Healthcare System
Lynn Stuart Parramore