It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, January 17, 2025
Reducing teens’ psychological stress could save billions for US budget, study suggests
THE BOTTOM LINE, BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
Findings could be applied in government budget analyses to aid policymaking
PLOS
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Federal policy impact analyses do not incorporate the potential economic benefits of adolescent mental health policies.
A new study suggests that boosting adolescent mental health is linked with long-term economic benefits. In contrast to similar findings from prior studies, these estimated relationships could be readily incorporated into standard government budgeting analyses for assessing potential policy impacts. Nathaniel Counts of The Kennedy Forum, US, and colleagues present this work in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine on January 16th.
A growing body of research shows that improving adolescent mental health holds the potential to yield a variety of long-term benefits, such as greater labor force participation and lower usage of public assistance. However, government budget analysts rarely include these effects when assessing potential new policies because most studies on the topic do not present parameters that are comprehensive enough to be compatible with analysts’ typical approaches for modeling policy outcomes.
To help address that gap, Counts and colleagues analyzed data on 3,343 participants in an ongoing study known as the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997, which regularly captures information through interviews. Using data from the year 2000, when participants were aged 15 to 17, and again from 2010, the researchers examined relationships between the participants’ mental health as adolescents and later economic outcomes.
They found that clinically significant psychological distress in adolescence was associated with lower annual participation in the labor force 10 years later, as well as a reduction of $5,658 in annual wages per person. These estimated relationships could be applied by government budget analysts as parameters in existing economic models in order to evaluate the potential benefits of policies for improving adolescent mental health.
To demonstrate how the estimated parameters could be applied, the researchers used them to model the impact of a hypothetical policy that would expand access to preventive mental health care, reaching 10 percent of adolescents who otherwise would have developed psychological distress. They found that, from labor supply impacts alone, such a policy could offer $52 billion dollars in U.S. budget savings over 10 years.
This study’s estimated parameters could be applied to help guide real-world policymaking in the U.S. The researchers also outline potential directions for future research to further refine the parameters.
Counts adds, “As the U.S. faces a crisis in adolescent mental health, the need for greater investment has never been more urgent. Previous studies found that investing in mental health early could save money down the line. Our new research finds that, at the scale of the United States economy, improvements in adolescent mental health may bring many billions of dollars of federal budget benefits over ten years, potentially offsetting the costs of policy change that could cover critical services for young people such as integrated care.”
Citation: Counts NZ, Kreif N, Creedon TB, Bloom DE (2025) Psychological distress in adolescence and later economic and health outcomes in the United States population: A retrospective and modeling study. PLoS Med 22(1): e1004506. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004506
Author countries: United States
Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.
Despite the challenges that school districts are currently having recruiting novice teachers, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of education policy, organization and leadership Paul Bruno found in a recent study that California schools are not adjusting their pay scales strategically to better compete with neighboring school districts.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Despite concerns about teacher shortages in certain school districts and subject areas, a recent study found that schools are not adjusting their salary scales strategically so they can better attract novice teachers.
Paul Bruno, a professor of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found little evidence that schools frontload salary scales — boost the pay for entry-level and early career teachers — to aggressively compete with nearby school districts for qualified teachers.
In the study, published in the Labor Studies Journal, Bruno found that when teacher salaries in districts increased by 1%, adjacent districts increased their own pay scales by just .15% to .25%. And the ratios of increases were no bigger for novice teachers’ salaries than for more experienced educators.
“I don’t find much evidence that school districts are raising their salaries when neighboring districts are in order to compete strategically as they could or should, with all of the current concerns we have about teacher shortages,” Bruno said. “That’s particularly concerning if we want school districts to be thinking carefully about how to get the best teachers into the classrooms that need them.”
Salary schedules for teachers are often heavily “backloaded”— meaning that salary increases are deferred to relatively late in teachers’ careers — and it is unclear whether this promotes recruitment and retention, Bruno said.
“Some previous research suggested that it might be more advantageous if school districts increased the salaries for novice and early-career teachers to be more competitive with neighboring districts and that’s what motivated this analysis,” Bruno said.
In recent years, there has been growing concern about a nationwide shortage of teachers in the U.S. and that primary and secondary schools may be putting underqualified instructors in classrooms.
In a 2024 study, Bruno and first author Tuan D. Nguyen of the University of Missouri and Chanh B. Lam of Kansas State University examined data across all U.S. states and estimated that there are at least 39,700 unfilled teaching positions and at least 288,000 positions currently held by underqualified teachers.
Published online in the journal American Educational Research Association Open, the findings also were cited in the recently released 2025 Economic Report of the President, prepared by U.S. President Joseph Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. The findings were mentioned in an analysis of the challenges that primary and secondary schools are experiencing with teacher recruitment and retention in the labor market.
In the current study, Bruno explored whether the structures of teacher salary schedules are shaped by competition with adjacent school districts and whether they are influenced by teachers’ unions.
The study sample contained the salary and benefit schedules for 498 California school districts’ collective bargaining units that were submitted to the California Department of Education. Bruno restricted the sample to those schools with complete information for every school year from 2009-2010 through 2018-2019, and he compared the pay at contiguous school districts for teachers with a bachelor’s degree and an additional 60 units of educational credits.
He included several control variables for school characteristics that might influence teacher compensation, such as school districts’ proportions of minority students and students eligible for free or reduced lunches, whether districts had a trend of declining enrollment and the number of service days for returning teachers.
On average, schools’ pay increases were very modest and most beneficial to mid-career teachers. For example, a 1% increase at Step 1 of the pay scale — i.e., the starting pay for entry-level teachers — was about $554, while the same proportion of increase amounted to $898 for experienced teachers at Step 30. By comparison, when a district’s neighbors increased their salaries by that much, that predicted a district would increase its own salaries for novice and experienced teachers by just $97 and $130, respectively. That did not indicate a strongly competitive response for attracting teachers, Bruno said.
Bruno explored whether the small spillover effects on salaries at adjacent school districts might be due to their serving differing grade levels and therefore not competing for the same pool of teachers. However, he said there was little evidence that was the case.
“My results suggest that even if schools are somewhat sensitive to neighboring districts’ teacher salaries, they do not respond in optimally strategic ways,” Bruno said. “Even where unions are increasing teacher salaries, they don’t seem to be increasing the pay for brand new teachers because the raises are disproportionately benefitting experienced teachers.”
Bruno said that the larger pay raises for veteran teachers were plausibly consistent with labor union involvement because these members tend to be more influential in their unions than their less experienced colleagues.
Therefore, it might be advantageous for unions to better engage early-career teachers so that their interests are similarly represented and salary levels are prioritized when contracts are negotiated at the bargaining table, he said.
Around 800,000 single-use disposable theatre caps are consumed every year in Scottish hospitals. The new caps are made from cellulosic fibre which is derived from plant-based material. They offer a sustainable alternative to traditional disposable options.
At the end of their lifecycle, the new reusable theatre caps will be biodegradable, reducing the environmental impact of medical waste. Some existing single use theatre caps contain materials that can take up to 300 years to decompose entirely.
Beyond their eco-friendly credentials, the theatre caps serve multiple practical purposes. They aim to relieve anxiety among patients, through the use of fabric colours and patterns and help staff to more easily identify each other in busy clinical environments, which is beneficial for patient care. Current headwear doesn't differentiate between different roles in hospitals.
The Golden Jubilee University National Hospital has become the first hospital to co-design friendly and reusable theatre caps made from sustainable plant-based material as part of a research project being led by the University of Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt University.
The project aims to reduce waste created by single-use disposable theatre cap products used by NHS Scotland while alleviating patient anxiety and improving the identification of theatre staff roles.
Around 800,000 single-use disposable theatre caps are consumed every year in Scottish hospitals. The new caps are made from cellulosic fibre which is derived from plant-based material. They offer a sustainable alternative to traditional disposable options.
At the end of their lifecycle, the new reusable theatre caps will be biodegradable, reducing the environmental impact of medical waste. Some existing single use theatre caps contain materials that can take up to 300 years to decompose entirely.
Beyond their eco-friendly credentials, the theatre caps serve multiple practical purposes. They aim to relieve anxiety among patients, through the use of fabric colours and patterns and help staff to more easily identify each other in busy clinical environments, which is beneficial for patient care. Current headwear doesn't differentiate between different roles in hospitals.
The theatre caps have been carefully designed with input from NHS Golden Jubilee theatre staff to ensure they meet practical needs while maintaining sustainability goals. Staff will now test and feedback on the innovative caps to assess their potential for wider adoption across NHS Scotland.
The theatre cap project is part of the broader Design HOPES project (Healthy Organisations in a Place-based Ecosystem, Scotland) which is led by Professor Paul Rodgers at the University of Strathclyde and Professor Mel Woods at the University of Dundee. Design HOPES was recently awarded more than £4.6M by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as one of four Green Transition Ecosystem (GTE) Hubs in the UK, which aim to address distinct challenges posed by the climate crisis including, but not limited to, realising net zero goals.
Dr Euan Winton, Assistant Professor of Design at Heriot-Watt University, commented on the urgent need for innovations like the new theatre caps: "NHS Scotland faces massive resource-driven issues, with millions of single-use disposable theatre caps going to incineration in Scotland annually. The new sustainable theatre caps represent a crucial step in addressing this significant wastage and demonstrating the power of design in tackling environmental challenges in healthcare.
“Our specialist School of Textiles and Design in the Scottish Borders is proud to be part of the Design HOPES GTE Hub tackling a broad range of global challenges, using our expertise to find new and innovative solutions to sustainability. Along with Professor Paul Rodgers of the University of Strathclyde, we are working closely with user groups to create new products that are fit for purpose. We’ve worked closely with theatre staff on the design of the new caps and feedback has shown they will have other benefits like reducing anxiety among patients.
Carole Anderson, Director of Transformation, Strategy, Planning and Performance at NHS Golden Jubilee, expressed enthusiasm for the project: "NHS Golden Jubilee is proud to be at the forefront of this sustainable innovation in healthcare. These new theatre caps align with our commitment to reducing our environmental impact and also enhance our ability to provide safe and high quality patient care. By improving staff identification and potentially easing patient anxiety, these caps offer multiple benefits beyond their eco-friendly design."
Professor Paul Rodgers from the University of Strathclyde's Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management, said: “Working closely with our NHS Scotland partners, we will continue to support them on their green transition journey, developing collaboratively design-led solutions that will create positive change. This project showcases the power of collaboration between universities, healthcare providers, and design researchers. By bringing together expertise from various fields, we've been able to create a solution that is both practical and sustainable. Moreover, this project has potential for creating new green jobs across Scotland that will have socio-economic as well as environmental impact.
“The success of this project opens the door for further design-led innovations in health and social care. As we continue to face the realities of climate change, it's crucial that we find creative ways to reduce our environmental footprint while maintaining and improving the quality of care. The new reusable theatre caps are a significant step in that direction."
Dr Lisa Macintyre, Associate Professor in Textile Technology at Heriot-Watt’s School of Textiles and Design added: "The caps have been carefully developed at our facilities to establish the most sustainable and comfortable materials and most efficient printing methods. We will be ensuring they meet the high standards required for medical use while maintaining their eco-friendly properties."
Design HOPES forms part of the wider Future Observatory programme, which fosters collaboration, research, and innovation within the design field. Funded by AHRC in partnership with Future Observatory at the Design Museum, the £25m multimodal investment aims to bring design researchers, universities, and businesses together to catalyse the transition to net zero and a green economy.
Design HOPESwill present anew work-in-progressdisplay, running at the V&A Dundee from 6 December 2024 to 17 February 2025. This display marks an exciting milestone in the first year of Design HOPES, giving an insight on the people, processes and progress of this transformational initiative, and asks ‘How can design help us live healthier lives, for people and planet?’
Ends
For more information, please contact Annie Pugh, 07939 153 649 a.pugh@hw.ac.uk
Image: Staff from The Golden Jubilee University National Hospital wearing the new co-designed sustainable theatre caps. Credit: Marsaili Mainz
Notes to editors
Heriot-Watt University is a global research-led university based in the UK, with five campuses in Edinburgh, the Scottish Borders, Orkney, Dubai and Malaysia.Around 27,000 students from 154 countries are currently studying with us. We have 166,000 alumni in more than 190 countries.
We are specialists in business, engineering, design and the physical, social, sports, environmental and life sciences subjects which make a real impact on the world and society.
Heriot-Watt was founded in Edinburgh in 1821 as the world’s first mechanics institute. In 1966, it became a university by Royal Charter. The university is named after 18th century Scottish engineer and inventor James Watt and 16th century Scottish philanthropist and goldsmith George Heriot.
86.8% of Heriot-Watt's research is classed as world-leading and internationally excellent in the Research Excellence Framework 2021 – the UK’s system for assessing the excellence of research in UK higher education providers. The university runs 113 undergraduate programmes and 170 postgraduate programmes across six academic schools and Edinburgh Business School.
Nine in ten Afghans struggle with diminished quality of life
PLOS
A survey of more than 800 people living in Afghanistan carried out since the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, shows high rates of stress, food insecurity, and limited healthcare access.
A new paper published this week in PLOS Mental Health by Jessi Hanson-DeFusco of Lawrence Technical University, USA, and colleagues has found that approximately nine in ten Afghans included in the study currently face diminished quality of life correlates related to higher psychosocial stress. They also report that nearly three-quarters face food insecurity, and more than 7 in 10 have poor access to healthcare.
After the August 2021 withdrawal of U.S. military forces, the Taliban reestablished control over Afghanistan, leading to international sanctions, growing issues of economic hardship, and changes to daily life.
As part of their study, researchers collected digital survey data in 2023 from 873 respondents, aged 18 through 65, living in Afghanistan. 94.2% were men, and more than half were aged 18-29. The survey included multiple choice questions related to psychosocial stress, demographics and quality of life, as well as additional open-ended questions where participants could elaborate.
Overall, 88.38% of participants reported suffering some level of food insecurity; 88.78% had limited or no healthcare access; 83.59% had infrequent contact with family and friends; 84.82% experienced threats of violence, and 71.97% lost at least one or more family members (killed or displaced) since the American withdrawal. In addition, reported psychosocial stress levels were moderately high, with anxiety, poor sleep, and anger being the most prominent stressors. Comments from participants highlighted a lack of humanitarian aid access, lack of freedom of speech and women’s rights, struggles with malnutrition and high rates of job loss and unemployment.
“The bleak conditions in the country have worsened in such a way that nearly everyone irrespective of their background appears to be negatively affected,” the authors say. “This research validates many of the concerns of the humanitarian crisis on the ground, as well as provides insight into how political shifts have resulted in socio-economic hardships affecting Afghans who remained in country after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal.”
Citation: Hanson-DeFusco J, Sobolov A, Stanekzai S, McMaster A, Popalzai H, Shah H, et al. (2025) The association of diminished quality of life of Afghan adults’ psychosocial wellbeing, in the era of the Taliban 2.0 government. PLOS Ment Health 2(1): e0000118. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmen.0000118
Author Countries: Afghanistan, United States
Funding: NK and HS received the 2023 Hobson Wildenthal Honors College Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) grant to serve as co-researchers on this project, from the University of Texas at Dallas (https://honors.utdallas.edu/research/undergraduate-research-apprenticeship-program/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No other authors received specific funding for this work.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Compounding drought and climate effects disrupt soil water dynamics in grasslands
Summary author: Walter Beckwith
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
A novel field experiment in Austria reveals that compounding climate conditions – namely drought, warming, and elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2 ) – could fundamentally reshape how water moves through soils in temperate grasslands. The findings provide new insights into post-drought soil water flow, in particular. Soil water, though a minuscule fraction of Earth's total water resources, plays a critical role in sustaining terrestrial life on Earth by regulating biogeochemical cycles, surface energy balance, and plant productivity. Soils also govern the fate of precipitation, directing it back to the atmosphere via evapotranspiration or into surface and groundwater systems, depending on soil water storage and flow properties, such as soil texture and structure. However, droughts – expected to become more frequent and severe under change – could disrupt these crucial processes. Atmospheric warming may increase evapotranspiration and soil water loss, while elevated atmospheric CO2 could reduce transpiration by narrowing plant stomata and conserving soil moisture. Thus, the combined effects of warming and elevated CO2 can produce complex, albeit poorly understood, hydrological outcomes. Grasslands, which cover 30-40% of Earth's land surface, depend heavily on shallow soil water, making them ideal for studying rootzone ecohydrological dynamics.
Jesse Radolinski et al. conducted a novel deuterium (²H) labeling field experiment in a temperate grassland in Austria to examine how elevated atmospheric CO2, warming, and recurring drought – individually and in combination – affect soil water. Radolinski et al. induced experimental drought conditions and then applied 2H-labeled rainfall under ambient and simulated future climate scenarios. According to the findings, elevated CO2 increased rootzone moisture, while warming reduced soil moisture, with soil water remaining well mixed under most conditions. However, combined summer drought, warming, and elevated CO2 drove grassland plants to conserve water by reducing transpiration, which restricted soil water flow to large, rapidly draining pores, limiting mixing with smaller pores. The findings suggest that future drought conditions could fundamentally alter soil water dynamics by limiting post-drought soil water flow and grassland vegetation water use.
Panoramic view of the ClimGrass Facility in Styria, Austria which subjects a temperate grassland to individual and combined atmospheric warming (+3°C) and CO2 enrichment (+ 300 ppm), and recurring drought.
New research co-led by the University of Maryland reveals that drought and increased temperatures in a CO2-rich climate can dramatically alter how grasslands use and move water. The study provides the first experimental demonstration of the potential impacts of climate change on water movement through grassland ecosystems, which make up nearly 40% of Earth’s land area and play a critical role in Earth’s water cycle. The study appears in the January 17, 2025, issue of the journal Science.
“If we want to predict the effects of climate change on Earth’s water resources, we need data showing how the hydrologic cycle will respond at a small scale where we can define mechanisms, but that just hasn’t been available,” said Jesse Radolinski corresponding author of the study, a post-doctoral research associate in the UMD Department of Environmental Science & Technology who began the work at the University of Innsbruck. “Our experiments found that under summer drought conditions, and higher air temperatures that are expected under a future with elevated CO2, two things change fundamentally: One, the structural properties of the soil in the root zone change so that water flows differently than we expected, and two, these altered climate conditions and soil properties cause the plants to access water differently.”
Currently, new rainfall tends to linger in the root zone where it mixes with existing soil water (i.e., previous rainfall) before percolating into local streams and rivers. Radolinski said this study suggests that under future climate conditions, intense rainfall may move more quickly through the soil into local water bodies, interacting less with this stored water and potentially bringing nutrients and pollutants with it. In addition, plants subjected to these future drought conditions conserve more water, releasing less back to the atmosphere through transpiration. That could mean less atmospheric cooling, triggering a feedback loop of more drought and more warming.
Radolinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment with the University of Innsbruck in open plots in an Austrian grassland. They simulated six different climate conditions by manipulating air temperature and CO2 levels, and introducing recurring drought with large, automatically deployed shelters that prevented natural rainfall from reaching the plots. When they simulated rainfall, they used water with a traceable isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, and then tracked its path through the plants and the soil.
Their results showed that after recurring droughts in plots with elevated CO2 and warming, the structure of pores in the soil changed so that older water could remain locked in smaller pores, while newer water flowed into larger pores that drained more quickly. In addition, the plants were effective at accessing the most readily available soil moisture and conserved water loss by releasing less to the atmosphere through transpiration. This may help plants adapt to water stress under future drought conditions, though more research is needed to tease out the effects on growth.
The study reveals that soil and plant water interactions could be much more complex than previously thought, with significant consequences for the ability of ecosystems to withstand and recover from drought. These insights will be critical in informing conservation strategies and managing ecosystems in a rapidly changing climate.
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Radolinski completed his fellowship as a post-doctoral research associate in the laboratory of Dr. Gurpal Toor in January, 2025. The study was an international collaboration co-led by researchers at the University of Innsbruck.
Automatic rainout shelters engaging to suppress rainfall from an approaching storm during experimental drought period at the ClimGrass Facility in Styria, Austria.
Measuring water stable isotopic signatures of vapor in transpiration chambers to aid inferring the source of grassland water use.
