The number of American households that were unbanked last year dropped to its lowest level since 2009, a dip due in part to people opening accounts to receive financial assistance during the pandemic, a new report says.
Roughly 4.5% of U.S. households – or 5.9 million – didn't have a checking or savings account with a bank or credit union in 2021, a record low, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's most recent survey of unbanked and underbanked households.
Roughly 45% of households that received a stimulus payment, jobless benefits or other government assistance after the start of the pandemic in March, 2020 said those funds helped compel them to open an account, according to the biennial report which has been conducted since 2009.
"Safe and affordable bank accounts provide a way to bring more Americans into the banking system and will continue to play an important role in advancing economic inclusion for all Americans,'' FDIC acting chairman Martin J. Gruenberg said in a statement.
A lack of banking options delayed some households from getting federal payments aimed at helping the country weather the economic fallout from the COVID-19 health crisis.
Battle against predatory lending:Mississippi social justice firm fights payday 'predatory lending' in low-income communities
Checks arrived late for some of the unbanked:For 'unbanked' Americans, pandemic stimulus checks arrived slowly and with higher fees. But that could change.
The FDIC initiated an educational campaign to get more Americans to open an account to enable the direct deposit of those funds. And banks such as Capital One and Ally Financial ended overdraft and other fees that have been a key barrier to some Americans accessing the banking system.
What does it mean to be unbanked?
A household is deemed unbanked when no one in the home has an account with a bank or credit union. That share of households has dropped by nearly half since 2009. And since 2011, when 8% of U.S. households were unbanked, the highest since the start of the survey, and the record low reached in 2021, roughly half of the drop was due to a shift in the financial circumstances of American households the FDIC says.
Who are the underbanked?
Those who have a checking or savings account, but also use financial alternatives like check cashing services are considered underbanked. The underbanked represented 14% of U.S. households, or 18.7 million, last year.
Why are people unbanked or underbanked?
Many of those who are unbanked say they can't afford to have an account because of the fees for insufficient funds and overdrafts that are tacked on when account balances fall short. Roughly 29% said fees or not having the required minimum balance were the primary reasons they didn't have a checking or savings account, as compared to 38% who cited those obstacles in 2019.
Are some groups more likely to be unbanked?
The numbers of the unbanked were greater among households that included those who were working age and disabled, lower income, included a single mother, or were Black or Hispanic. Among white households for instance, 2% didn't have a bank account last year as compared to 11% and 9% of their Black and Hispanic counterparts.
Meanwhile, nearly 15% of households with a working age member who had a disability were unbanked compared to almost 4% of other households. And nearly 16% of households with a single mother were unbanked as compared to about 2% of married couples who lacked an account.
"These gaps attest there's still a lot of opportunity to expand participation across the population in the banking system,'' Keith Ernst, Associate Director of Consumer Research and Examination Analytics at the FDIC, said during a media call about the report.
Will the number of unbanked rise if the U.S. has a recession?
Perhaps.
"During the last recession unbanked rates did indeed go up,'' Karyen Chu, chief of the Banking Research Section at the Center for Financial Research, said during the call.
Additionally, last year, homes where the head of household was out of work were nearly five times more likely to not have a bank account as compared to those where the household head was employed.
Recession predictions 2023:Is a recession inevitable in 2023? Here's what experts are saying.
"To the extent that income goes down ... that has generally been associated with increases in unbanked rates,’’ Chu said.
Claude Robert Cloninger (born April 4, 1944) is an American psychiatrist and geneticist noted for his research on the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual foundation of both mental health and mental illness.[1][2][4][5] He previously held the Wallace Renard Professorship of Psychiatry, and served as professor of psychology and genetics, as well as director of the Sansone Family Center for Well-Being at Washington University in St. Louis.[6][7][8][9] Cloninger is a member of the evolutionary, neuroscience, and statistical genetics programs of the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences at Washington University,[6] and is recognized as an expert clinician in the treatment of general psychopathology, substance dependence, and personality disorders.[7][10] Dr. Cloninger is currently professor emeritus [1].
Cloninger is known for his research on the genetics, neurobiology, and development of personality and personality disorders.[11][12][13][14] He identified and described heritable personality traits predictive of vulnerability to alcoholism and other mental disorders in prospective studies of adoptees reared apart from their biological parents.[15][16][17][18] Cloninger also carried out the first genome-wide association and linkage study of normal personality traits,[20] and has developed two widely used tools for measuring personality: the Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ) and the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).[21][22]
In 2004, he published Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being.[23][24][25] Cloninger serves as director of the Anthropedia Institute, the research branch of the Anthropedia Foundation.[26] In collaboration with Anthropedia, he helped develop the Know Yourself DVD series.[27][28]
Cloninger has earned lifetime achievement awards from many academic and medical associations, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.[29] He has authored or co-authored nine books and more than four hundred and fifty articles, and is a highly cited psychiatrist and psychologist recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI).[2] He has served in an editorial capacity on many journals, including Behavior Genetics, American Journal of Human Genetics, Archives of General Psychiatry, Comprehensive Psychiatry,[2][29] and the Mens Sana Monographs.[30]
Education and early research[edit]
Cloninger was born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944.[29][31][32] His father Morris Cloninger was a former English teacher and businessman, and his mother Concetta was a former actress who directed the local community theater.[29][31] He attended the University of Texas in Austin from 1962-1966 in the Plan II Honors program.[23][29][33] In addition to pre-medical studies, he studied philosophy, cultural anthropology, and psychology for which he received honors.[29]
Cloninger attended a research-intensive medical school at Washington University in St. Louis from 1966 to 1970, and has remained on the faculty there throughout his career.[29] In addition to regular medical training, he did a research fellowship in preventive medicine and public health. He began research in psychiatry in 1969 under the guidance of Samuel Guze.[34] Cloninger wanted to understand why antisocial personality disorder, substance dependence, and somatization disorder were so often found together in the same individual and in the same family. This question led to longitudinal studies of people with each of these disorders and then family and adoption studies.[17][35]
In order to better quantify and test hypotheses about the inheritance of psychiatric disorders, he studied quantitative genetics with Theodore Reich in St. Louis and with Newton Morton and D.C. Rao of the Population Genetics Lab of the University of Hawaii.[36] During the late 70s, Cloninger worked on modeling complex patterns of inheritance using path analysis to allow for both genetic and cultural inheritance.[37] He extended path analysis with the introduction of the "copath" to facilitate the analysis of assortative mating and cultural inheritance.[38] He worked to develop methods for disentangling genetic, cultural, and other environmental influences on mental disorders until he concluded that such statistical modeling would never convince skeptics or provide precise estimates when biological parents also reared their own children.[39] His clinical studies of psychiatric disorders also revealed much complexity in the clinical features of mental disorders: people often had multiple overlapping syndromes and changed over time in unpredictable ways.[40] As a result, he shifted his efforts after 1980 to more compelling experimental designs, such as adoption and linkage studies.
Stockholm adoption study[edit]
The answer to the need for better data about separation experiments came in the form of a long-term collaboration between Cloninger and Michael Bohman, the head of child psychiatry at the University of Umea in Sweden.[41] Bohman had read some of Cloninger's papers on the analysis of separation experiments and asked for Cloninger's assistance in his own research. For several years, Bohman had been studying the behavior of a large birth cohort of children born in Stockholm. The children had been separated from their biological parents at birth and reared in adopted homes.[18] Extensive data about alcohol abuse, criminality, and physical and mental complaints to physicians were available in Sweden as a result of the extensive health and social records for all people in the country.[18] Cloninger developed methods for what he called a "cross-fostering" analysis. Information about the genetic background of adoptees was measured by data about their biological parents.[18] Information about their rearing environment was measured by data about their adoptive parents and home environment.[18] This permitted study of the independent contributions of the genetic and environmental backgrounds independently and in combination in a sample of thousands of adoptees.[18] Their first joint paper on a cross-fostering analysis of the inheritance of alcoholism in men[15] became an ISI Science Citation Classic that convinced most scientists that vulnerability to alcoholism was genetically heritable in part.[2]
Cloninger, Bohman, and Soren Sigvardson distinguished two subtypes of alcoholism that differed in their clinical features and pattern of inheritance: type 1, associated with anxiety proneness and loss of control over alcohol intake after age 25; and type 2, associated with impulsivity and antisocial behavior before age 25.[15][42] Cloninger proposed that the differences between these two groups of people were explained by personality traits that were observable in childhood, long before any exposure to alcohol.[18] He confirmed this by measuring the personality of boys when they were in the fourth grade, about 10 years of age, based on detailed interviews with their teachers and without any knowledge of their drinking status as adults.[16] The personality ratings of Cloninger were based on his tridimensional model of temperament.[21] The personality model also helped the team to understand other findings they obtained about the inheritance of criminal behavior, somatization (i.e., many physical complaints), anxiety, and depressive disorders.[17] The original findings were later confirmed by a replication study using the same methods conducted in Gothenburg, Sweden.[43] Overall, these adoption studies provided strong evidence for the contribution of both genetic and environmental influences on vulnerability to alcoholism, somatization, criminality, anxiety, and depressive disorders.[18]
Temperament and character inventory[edit]
Observations about personality provided Cloninger a practical way to predict vulnerability to mental disorders. In the mid-1980s, he developed a general model of temperament based on genetic, neurobiological, and neuropharmacological data, rather than using factor analysis of behavior or self-reports as has usually been done by personality psychologists.[21][44] He focused on the structure of learning abilities within the person, as has long been desired by social-cognitive psychologists.[45] To test the adequacy of his structural model, Cloninger compared his model of development within the individual (i.e., ontogeny) to the evolution of learning abilities in animal phylogeny.[46][47] Initially he described three dimensions of temperament that he suggested were independently inherited: harm avoidance (anxious, pessimistic vs. outgoing, optimistic), novelty seeking (impulsive, quick-tempered vs. rigid, slow-tempered) and reward dependence (warm, approval-seeking vs. cold, aloof). These dimensions are measured by using his Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire (TPQ).[21][44]
Studies quickly showed that Persistence (persevering, ambitious vs. easily discouraged, underachieving) was a fourth independently-inherited temperament dimension with specific brain circuitry, rather than a facet of Reward Dependence.[23] These temperament dimensions proved to be a powerful way to distinguish subtypes of personality disorders and vulnerability to a wide range of mental disorders.[48][49] Cloninger was initially criticized for reducing personality to emotional drives. For example, in his book Listening to Prozac, Peter Kramer called the temperament model of personality "a humanist's nightmare".[50]
Likewise, Cloninger and his colleague Dragan Svrakic found that temperament alone did not capture the full range of personality. They found that, by itself, temperament could not reveal whether a person was mature or had a personality disorder.[23] On average, there were differences in the probability of personality disorder in people with different temperament configurations, but every configuration could be found in people who were mentally healthy as well as in people who had personality disorders.[23][50] Consequently, Cloninger identified a second domain of personality variables, using character traits to measure a person's humanistic and transpersonal style: self-directedness (reliable, purposeful vs. blaming, aimless), cooperativeness (tolerant, helpful vs. prejudiced, revengeful) and self-transcendence (self-forgetful, spiritual vs. self-conscious, materialistic). These character dimensions measure the components of an individual's mental self-government and can strongly measure the presence and severity of personality disorder. Cloninger often cites Immanuel Kant, who defines character as "what people make of themselves intentionally".[51] Character dimensions have strong relations with recently evolved regions of the brain—such as the frontal, temporal, and parietal neocortex—that regulate learning of facts and propositions.[23][52][53][54] By contrast, the temperament dimensions have strong relations with the older cortico-striatal and limbic systems that regulate habits and skills.[54][55][56][57]
These three character dimensions have been found to be as heritable as the four temperament dimensions, each with about 50% heritability in twin studies.[58] All seven dimensions of temperament and character have been found to have unique genetic determinants[58] and to be regulated by different brain systems as measured by functional brain imaging.[23][52][53][54][55][56][57] Each dimension is influenced by complex interaction between many genetic and environmental variables, so personality develops as a complex adaptive system.[23] Cloninger's temperament and character inventories have been extensively used in a wide variety of clinical and research purposes, and cited in thousands of peer-reviewed publications.[59] The construction of the inventories on the basis of genetic and neurobiological considerations challenges the traditional statistical assumptions of factor analytically derived inventories,[60] which have been targeted by social and cognitive psychologists for many years.[45] Fortunately, in terms of overall statistical information, there is extensive overlap among the TCI and other multidimensional personality inventories, except that other inventories lack the dimension of Self-Transcendence.[61][62]
Self-transcendence[edit]
Self-transcendence refers to the interest people have in searching for something elevated, something beyond their individual existence.[23] According to Cloninger's model, self-transcendence can manifest as an intuitive understanding of elevated aspects of humanity, like compassion, ethics, art, and culture.[5] Others who experience it may also describe an awareness of a divine presence.[5] People scoring high in TCI Self-Transcendence report frequent experiences of boundlessness and inseparability.[23][63][64] They lose awareness of their separateness when absorbed in what they love to do or when appreciating the wonders and mysteries of life. Cloninger observes that such experiences of self-forgetfulness and transpersonal identification correspond to what Freud called "oceanic feelings",[65] which is different from intellectual adherence to particular religious dogmas or rituals.[5] The TCI Self-Transcendence scale is often used as a measure of spirituality.[53][63][64] Cloninger proposed that the psyche is the aspect of a human being that motivates the search for self-transcendence and underlies the human capacities for self-awareness, creativity, and freedom of will.[23] As suggested by transpersonal psychologists and other psychiatrists like Carl Jung and Viktor Frankl, Cloninger has emphasized that self-transcendence is an essential component in the processes of integration and maturation of personality.[23] He found that when people who score high on all three character traits are compared to others, they have the highest level of well-being, as measured by presence of positive emotions, absence of negative emotions, satisfaction with life, or virtuous conduct.[23] The capacity for love and work have long been recognized as important for well-being, but Cloninger also observed that people need to experience self-transcendence in order to cope well with suffering and to enjoy life's wonders and mysteries fully.[5]
The Science of Well-Being[edit]
In his book Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being, Cloninger describes the impetus for his new work:
I think it is important that we bring a scientific basis to psychiatry and psychology at a level that goes beyond the level of description. In order for us to advance systematically, as for instance chemistry and physics have done, we need a specific theory of the person and our nature of being. As a result of that I have tried to work out such a systematic model, and have progressed by stages to more and more inclusive theoretical frameworks. The basic position I have now is that we have to see the whole person as more than a collection of disease states: a person is composed of multiple elements of body, mind, and spirit. Each of these has to be carefully defined and measurable, so that we can avoid fantasy and speculation and have testable models. ... What has become increasingly clear to me is that man has a natural integrative tendency that leads to health, and that disease emerges whenever there is a block. Blocks can come from a genetic predisposition that interferes with natural development, from social learning, or from prior experiences that are unique to the individual.[66]
Cloninger has also suggested that not only is there a natural integrative tendency, but that "all human beings have spontaneous needs for happiness, self-understanding and love."[23] He describes practices that improve character development and satisfy these strong basic needs.[5] Just as people can become stronger in the body through physical exercise, he has found they can become mentally and spiritually healthier with mental and spiritual exercises, including certain meditations that enhance mindfulness and spirituality. He describes examples of such exercises[23][27] in detail in a DVD series called Know Yourself, which was developed with the Anthropedia Foundation.[67] The Know Yourself series is intended for use as well-being coaching or as an adjunct in psychotherapy.[67][68]
The mental exercises described by Cloninger are intended to stimulate character development and self-awareness, thereby fostering a healthy way of living with three sets of goals and values:
Working in the service of others, thereby increasing love and cooperativeness; letting go of fighting and worrying, thereby increasing hope and self-directedness; and growing in awareness, thereby increasing faith and Self-Transcendence. Cloninger's approach combines principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy, person-centered therapy, and positive psychology with personality assessment and meditative practices that enhance mindfulness and self-awareness of the cognitive schemas that organize and direct our attention and motivation in different situations.[68] His approach differs from other forms of psychotherapy by its emphasis on integration of a person's awareness of their body, thoughts, and psyche. He suggests that the separation of biomedical, psychosocial, and spiritual approaches interferes with the development of well-being, whereas their integration has been shown to reduce drop-out, relapse, and recurrence rates in randomized controlled trials of well-being therapy.[23][68] Cloninger's integrative approach is intended to synthesize work done in the mental health field, fostering what Juan Mezzich of the World Psychiatric Association has called "psychiatry for the person".[69] Several studies show that psychotherapy, alone or in combination with medications, can help people with mental disorders recover faster and stay well longer, but that a declining number of psychiatrists are providing psychotherapy to their patients.[70] Cloninger is working with the World Psychiatric Association and the International College of Person-centered Medicine to advance a more integrated approach to mental health and well-being.[27] The American Psychiatric Association has recognized Cloninger for his contributions to better understanding the biopsychosocial basis of mental health and illness with its 2009 Judd Marmor Award.[71][72]