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The 2010s were perhaps the most tumultuous decade since the 1960s. The effects of the Great Recession continued to be felt. The administration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, encouraged many to think that America was now 'post-racial', an illusion broken by the election of Donald Trump. Polarisation reigned, communicated on social media. Netflix and Amazon jumped into production. By 2019, Netflix produced more feature films than the traditional studios combined. Cinema's move from film to digital, in production and in exhibition, was complete by mid-decade. `MeToo and `Oscarssowhite signaled a reckoning with gross gender and racial inequalities in the media, matched by that in the wider culture. The essays of this book explore the blockbusters, low-budget sleepers, and films in between.

Brazil's profound regional social inequalities raise concerns about their impact on adult mortality and data quality. Although the quality of mortality data has improved in recent decades, substantial regional disparities in death registration and mortality rates persist. Our study examines the spatial and temporal trends in death record quality and adult mortality across Brazil's small regions from 1980 to 2010. It assesses whether adult mortality rates are converging or diverging and whether the vital registration system is progressively improving. Utilizing mortality data and census records, we adopt a two-step approach. First, we evaluate data quality and calculate adult mortality estimates across subnational microregions using death distribution methods and TOPALS regression. Second, we employ bivariate choropleth mapping to explore the relationship between adult mortality and socioeconomic factors, measured across 558 microregions and disaggregated by sex. Our findings highlight regional and temporal evolution of completeness of death count coverage. Results show that social inequality is a key factor driving regional disparities in adult mortality. Additionally, assessing and adjusting for the under-registration of death counts is crucial for understanding the spatial relationship between adult mortality and the distribution of socioeconomic inequality.

How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: “qualificational spaces,” exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and “organizational spaces,” exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education.

In recent decades, scholars of world cultural diffusion have begun to examine the structure of the world society itself, finding evidence of regionalization within the network of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). There is little research, however, on how the structure of world society shapes processes of transnational diffusion. In this paper, I propose that the regionalization of world society, measured through INGO membership composition, structures the transnational diffusion of cultural norms like LGBT associations. Analyzing an original, comprehensive dataset of 3,141 domestic, voluntary LGBT associations founded between 1979 and 2009, I find that countries embedded in anti-LGBT regions are more resistant to the diffusion of domestic LGBT associations. I further find that the negative effect of embeddedness in anti-LGBT regions on domestic LGBT association founding is weakened by dependence on Western foreign aid. The findings highlight the importance of examining the composition of INGOs as well as attending to the role of regional culture in studies of transnational diffusion.

The risk of death declines rapidly over the first month of life. It has been theorized that the fast pace of this decline is explained by hidden population heterogeneity resulting in a mortality selection process whereby the frailest infants leave the population at the fastest rate. A competing explanation situates the rapid mortality decline on the individual level, pointing toward the risky transition of birth and the subsequent adaptation of the newborn to the unfamiliar surroundings. This study estimates heterogeneity in the level and shape of age-specific mortality within a cohort of newborns and quantifies the degree to which mortality selection explains the shape of the average neonatal mortality trajectory. Given individual-level data on 20,322,147 births and 82,562 neonatal deaths in the United States from the 2008-2012 U.S. birth cohort, I calculate life tables for 252 mutually exclusive strata each defined by a unique combination of observed birth characteristics. Using this information, I characterize the distribution of mortality risk and its evolution over the first 28 days of life and decompose changes in key characteristics of this distribution--the mean, the variance, and the mean-to-mode ratio--into a mortality selection and a direct component. The average age trajectory of neonatal mortality is highly influenced by a small group of frail newborns and does not reflect the rather flat age effect estimated for the healthy majority of the birth cohort. While the risk decline over the first day of life is substantially influenced by mortality selection, the overall age trajectory is better explained by the convergence of high-risk toward low-risk population strata.