How to improve America: Encourage families to have girls.

And if people insist on having sons, they have to be only children.

Here’s why. There’s a new study out titled “Childhood Socialization and Political Attitudes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment.” And it finds:

Having sisters makes males more politically conservative in terms of their gender role attitudes and their partisanship. Particularly for gender role attitudes, we find that these political socialization effects persist until respondents are well into adulthood.

So, all we have to do is eliminate boys with sisters ... and we’re in business!

Studies show that for Fox News Viewers, "the more you watch, the more you think you know is actually false."

In Dollarcracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America, John Nichols writes:

In November 2011, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll examined how New Jerseyans watched television news, and the poll concluded that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.” 

In some surveys, to be accurate, Fox News does not rank at rock bottom in terms of audience knowledge. But on balance, it is the clown dunce of TV news. No other network ever comes close to getting the sort of assessment Fox News received from World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, in 2010. As one reporter summarized it, PIPA conducted a “survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. 

What’s more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation. So the more you watch, the less you know. Or to be precise, the more you think you know that is actually false.” As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded in their study of the Tea Party, “Fox News makes viewers both more conservative and less informed.” What may be most revealing is that there is no evidence that this finding bothers the management of Fox News in the least.