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posted by chromas on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the http://i.imgur.com/z4z67Ur.gif dept.

Opinion | Let Teenagers Sleep In

Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for their age group. And sleep deprivation is unremittingly bad news. Anyone who talks about sleep as if it's some kind of inconvenience and getting less of it is a virtue should be challenged. These people are dangerous.

At its most basic, insufficient sleep results in reduced attention and impaired memory, hindering student progress and lowering grades. More alarmingly, sleep deprivation is likely to lead to mood and emotional problems, increasing the risk of mental illness. Chronic sleep deprivation is also a major risk factor for obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancer. As if this weren't enough, it also makes falling asleep at the wheel much more likely.

In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., a policy now backed by the American Medical Association, the C.D.C. and many other health organizations.

[...] Whenever schools have managed the transition to a later start time, students get more sleep, attendance goes up, grades improve and there is a significant reduction in car accidents. The RAND Corporation estimated that opening school doors after 8:30 a.m. would contribute at least $83 billion to the national economy within a decade through improved educational outcomes and reduced car crash rates. The Brookings Institution calculates that later school start times would lead to an average increase in lifetime earnings of $17,500.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 25 2018, @10:07PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 25 2018, @10:07PM (#739893) Journal
    Here's a nice chart of productivity vs total compensation '73 to '12 [heritage.org]. Notice that there is a mild decline in total compensation relative to productivity, but the former still gained three quarters of the productivity gain, roughly +100% productivity over the time span (which I gather was why the end time was chosen) versus 73% in total compensation.

    The real problem isn't that wages are moderately stagnant, but rather that developed world societies are geared towards increasing the cost of living (with the US taking the lead in a number of ways). A common example is high cost of real estate. Notice the use of the words "home", "housing", etc in the quote you inserted? Residential real estate in the US went up a lot more than wages did - it crudely tripled [cnbc.com] over the 1948-2013 period in the US, adjusted for inflation while wages only doubled.