I'll be back on July 8th. Don't forget to declare independence.

I only just recently came across the innovative work of sociologist Mario Luis Small. Some highlights

• Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life: "Exploring the experiences of New York City mothers whose children were enrolled in childcare centers, this book examines why a great deal of these mothers, after enrolling their children, dramatically expanded both the size and usefulness of their personal networks. Whether, how, and how much the mother's networks were altered--and how useful these networks were--depended on the apparently trivial, but remarkably consequential, practices and regulations of the centers. The structure of parent-teacher organizations, the frequency of fieldtrips, and the rules regarding drop-off and pick-up times all affected the mothers' networks. Relying on scores of in-depth interviews with mothers, quantitative data on both mothers and centers, and detailed case studies of other routine organizations, Small shows that how much people gain from their connections depends substantially on institutional conditions they often do not control, and through everyday processes they may not even be aware of. Emphasizing not the connections that people make, but the context in which they are made, Unanticipated Gains presents a major new perspective on social capital and on the mechanisms producing social inequality."
• Michele Lamont and Mario Luis Small, How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding of Poverty: "Poverty scholarship tends to reveal a rather thin understanding of culture. Over the last two decades, however, cultural sociologists have produced theoretical and empirical research yielding a subtle, heterogeneous, and sophisticated picture of how cultural factors shape and are shaped by poverty and inequality."
• Urban Orgs: New Thinking on Organizations, Inequality, and Urban Conditions: "This site supports an informal network of scholars independently doing research on formal organizations and inequality in urban contexts. Topics include gentrification, immigration, amenities, well-being, social networks, non-profit organizations, social capital, organizational density, politics, crime and punishment, housing, community building organizations, and governance."
  

Theda Skocpol, Robust Health Care Reform is the Moment of Truth for Obama and the Democrats:

• "Key leaps forward for U.S. public social provision -- Social Security, Medicare, etc. -- have NEVER happened through "bipartisan" compromises and they always happen in close votes. They have always sqweaked through after gargantuan effort, strong presidential pressure, and refusal to allow eviscerating compromises. Think of Social Security if the Clark amendment -- allowing corporate opt-out -- had passed in 1935. We would not have it. And conservatives and the medical and insurance establishments cried "socialism" in 1965, too. We would not have Medicare if we had listened."
• "Good policy design as well public desire for change and considerations of social justice and economic efficiency insist that they enact health care reform with a strong public plan in the mix. That is the only way to move toward cost control and guaranteed access with quality to all -- especially for Americans in lower economic strata or in rural states where one or two private insurers call the tune. There is no need for "bipartisanship" and the calls for it from some weak-kneed Democrats are merely excuses for doing the business of the medical-insurance establishment. Senators Baucus, Conrad, Feinstein, Nelson, Landrieu, Bayh -- this means you. All of you come from states where people really need robust reform and you should step up."
• "The stakes here in political-economic terms are NOT between a "free market" and "government control." They are between two alternative uses of government regulations and subsidies: We will in America continue on the path set over the past thirty years: using government regulations and subsidies to distribute income and security upward, to guaranteed private profits; or will we redirect government interventions toward expanding popular security and leveling the economic playing field for various businesses? So-called conservatives seeking "compromise" on health care reform want more subsidies for their buddies' profits, and want to force more Americans to buy inefficient products (through a mandate to buy private insurance). If Obama and the Democrats agree to such compromises under the name of "reform" they will have squandered the country's future economically -- and undercut their own political fortunes for the future."
• "And to return to my theme at the start: no matter if Senate Democrats still think they are operating in the world of the 1980s or 1993, they are not. Activist Democrats -- mobilizers, volunteers, bloggers, analysts, and donors -- are watching them. We will know exactly who blocks or eviscerates real reform here. We WILL blame the Senate and the responsible individual Senators. And many of us will blame the Obama adminsitration if it does not take a strong stand on the public option and real reform, starting right now. Whatever he says in public, Obama needs to draw lines in the sand with Democrats in private -- and get tough. If he does not, and this fizzles into no legislation or reform in appeance only, energy will dissipate from the Demorats and the Obama movement. There will be the wrong kind of turning point for them -- and for America."
  

• NYTimes, City Seeks New Powers in a Stalled Quest to Reduce Homelessness: "In June 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made a lofty promise to address one of the city’s most intractable problems: he would reduce the homeless population of 38,000 by two-thirds in five years. Today, with the total homeless population down only slightly, and with more families in shelters than five years ago, the administration is seeking state approval for a new set of policies designed to move families out more quickly, applying the same market-driven, incentive-based philosophy to homeless shelters that it has used in schools and antipoverty programs."
• Stumbling and Mumbling, Inequality vs. Relative Poverty: "In the Speccie, Charles Moore writes: 'If poverty comes to be defined relatively for all purposes of public policy — households with less than 60 per cent of the median income, says the government — then poverty and inequality become the same thing.' This is a common claim. But it is plain wrong, not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact."
• Michael Mandel, A Lost Decade for Jobs: "Private sector job growth was almost non-existent over the past ten years.... Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.
  It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years. "

• Dean Baker, Spreading the Wealth Around to the Insurance Industry and Friends: "The basic story is simple. The insurance, pharmaceutical and medical supply industries, along with the hospitals and the American Medical Association, have rigged the deck so that they get rich at the public's expense. They have structured our health care system so that we pay more than twice as much per person as people in other wealthy countries, even though we get worse care by many measures."
• Mindy Fried and Lynn Hatch, Getting Compensation for Child Care Workers on the the Policy Agenda in Massachusetts: "This case study looks at how advocates in Massachusetts are building public support for child care teachers, including how they frame the issues, mobilize workers, and shape policy tools for improving the quality of child care programs."
• Maurice Isserman, Michael Harrington, Warrior on Poverty: "Today the poor are no longer invisible, thanks to writers like William Julius Wilson, Alex Kotlowitz and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and to a popular culture that has young people in middle-class suburbs emulating the styles of the inner city. But Harrington’s prediction is otherwise correct. For all the changes ushered in by the 2008 election, a renewed war on poverty does not seem to be in the offing."
• AP, SCLC Renews Poverty Campaign Before Small Crowd: "With a wet towel draped across his head and a garbage bag of aluminum cans in his left hand, Jamot Poe watched members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference march Saturday on a sweltering spring day. Poe, 32, was not among the fewer than 1,000 marchers in the roughly 1-mile trek to the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol through a tough Jackson neighborhood. ... The SCLC, co-founded by King in 1957, had hoped to mobilize 50,000 people Saturday and though far fewer showed up, Interim SCLC President Rev. Byron Clay vowed to take the campaign to Washington and challenge Congress to help the poor."
• Rania Antonopoulos, Promoting Gender Equality through Stimulus Packages and Public Job Creation: "The author presents the results of a Levy Institute study that examines the macroeconomic consequences of scaling up South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme by adding to it a new sector for social service delivery in health and education. She notes that gaps in such services for households that cannot afford to pay for them are mostly filled by long hours of invisible, unpaid work performed by women and children. Her proposed employment creation program addresses several policy objectives: income and job generation, provisioning of communities’ unmet needs, skill enhancement for a new cadre of workers, and promotion of gender equality by addressing the overtaxed time of women."
  

• Robert Fuller and Thomas Scheff, Bleeding Heart Liberals Proven Right: Too Much Inequality Harms a Society: "Since the French Revolution, belief in the social benefits of egalitarianism has been central to progressive thought. Now [Richard] Wilkinson and [Kate] Pickett have produced some hard evidence for this plank in the liberal platform. They show conclusively that the well being of whole societies is closely correlated not with average income level but rather with the size of the disparity of income between the top 20% and the bottom 20%. Countries with smaller disparities like Norway, Sweden, and Japan (4 to 1) have fewer medical, mental, crime, and educational problems than countries like the Britain, U.S. and Portugal with higher disparities (7 or 8 to 1). France and Canada both have mid-range disparities (6 to 1) and place in the middle on health, education and psychological indicators. Even within American society, it's not the absolute income level of a state that determines its social well being, but rather the level of income disparity. Economic inequality and social dysfunction go hand in hand, and Wilkinson and Pickett have marshaled the evidence to make the case."
• Mark Elk, Union Busting Ended My Love Affair with a Beer: "Over many years, I have developed an intimate relationship with the sweet, lager taste of Yuengling Black & Tan. After moving to the cutthroat world of Washington, D.C. politics, I found that Yuengling always comforted me with memories of my working class roots and the world of flannel hunting jackets, wedding receptions at union halls, 4th of July barbecues, and tailgate parties that represented my native Western Pennsylvania. ... This past weekend when I discovered that Yuengling had illegally busted their union, I was emotionally devastated. ... I couldn't possibly enjoy drinking a Yuengling knowing what they had done to their workers."
• Associated Press, Big Turnout Not Anticipated for SCLC Poverty March: "The head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference says busloads of poverty protesters are expected this weekend in Jackson to relaunch a Poor People's Campaign initially launched four decades ago by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But SCLC Interim President Rev. Byron Clay, who's been traveling the country seeking to rally support, stops short of saying the demonstration at the state Capitol will draw an enormous crowd."
  

• Ajit Zacharias and others, "Who Gains from President Obama's Stimulus Package...And How Much?": "We estimate that [the Recovery Act] will improve the shares of all quintiles in aggregate income, with the exception of the topmost. However, the pro-poor pattern of income growth under the Recovery Act represents only a small compensation for the losses suffered between 1999 and 2007 for the bottom 60 percent of the distribution. ... the likely size of [expected] movements [in money income] will make no appreciable dent in the substantial disparities in money income that exist among groups."
• China Daily, Climate Change a Root Cause for Poverty, Says Report: "Climate change has emerged as the main reason for poverty in China as over 95 percent of the poor live in ecologically fragile areas and are the most affected by the changing patterns, according to a new report. The report goes on to add that a map of China's poverty-stricken areas overlaps the map of the country's ecologically fragile regions."
• San Francisco Chronicle, Debt Pushes Millions Below Poverty Line: "Four million Americans would fall below the federal poverty line if the interest they pay on their credit cards and other consumer debt were subtracted from their incomes, say two economics professors who call these people the "debt poor. In two academic journal articles, economists Steven Pressman and Robert Scott of Monmouth University in New Jersey say the poor couldn't get credit when poverty guidelines were created in the 1960s, and so debt burden wasn't included in the calculations."
  

• Christopher Wildeman, Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage: "This article estimates the risk of parental imprisonment by age 14 for black and white children born in 1978 and 1990. This article also estimates the risk of parental imprisonment for children whose parents did not finish high school, finished high school only, or attended college. Results show the following: (1) 1 in 40 white children born in 1978 and 1 in 25 white children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (2) 1 in 7 black children born in 1978 and 1 in 4 black children born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned; (3) inequality in the risk of parental imprisonment between white children of college-educated parents and all other children is growing; and (4) by age 14, 50.5% of black children born in 1990 to high school dropouts had a father imprisoned. These estimates, robustness checks, and extensions to longitudinal data indicate that parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel-and distinctively American-childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents."
• John Seabrook, Don't Shoot: "David Kennedy, a professor from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, went to Cincinnati in the fall of 2006 to pitch his program, which is sometimes known as Ceasefire. Kennedy explained that, in Cincinnati, the police would identify gang members who were on parole or probation and compel them to attend a meeting. There, the cops would demand that the shootings end, and promise that, if they did not, the punishment would be swift and severe and target the entire gang. The city would also make life coaching and job counseling available to those who wanted out of the thug life. The police were initially skeptical about the program, but in 2007, they began implementing Ceasefire with a team that included social workers and academics."
• Lisa Guernsey, Recession is Erasing Decades of Gains in Children's Well Being: "Virtually all the progress made in children's well-being since 1975 -- particularly the improvements since the 1990s -- will be wiped out by the current recession, according to a report released at a New America event this morning. "We will lose ground that had been gained over the past three decades," said Kenneth C. Land, project coordinator for the Child and Youth Well-Being Index, which uses federal statistics to track how American children are faring in domains such as health, safety and education. The 2009 edition was released today and included a special focus report on anticipating the impacts of the 2008-2010 recession."
  

• AFP, Dublin Ignores Recession to Celebrate Bloomsday: "Thousands of James Joyce fans Tuesday cast aside worries about recession in Ireland to recreate Bloomsday, the fictitious day at the centre of the author's most famous novel, "Ulysses". The annual literary hooley involves devoted Joyceans dressing in the fashions of 1904, eating the "inner organs of beasts and fowls", attending readings and celebrating at various venues and pubs mentioned in the book."
• Colum McCann, But Always Meeting Ourselves: "Two months ago — 31 years after my grandfather’s death — I got a case of osteomyelitis, a bone infection. I was admitted to a hospital in New York for a surgical debridement and a high-octane dose of antibiotics. I got a private room, largely because I’m middle class and insured, but also because it was an infectious disease. ... I had brought an old copy of “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s masterpiece that takes place in the back streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. I wanted to read it cover to cover. I have been dipping into the novel for many years, reading the accessible parts, plundering the icing on the cake, but in truth I had never read it all in one flow. ... Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom."
• Ian Bogast, Bloomsday on Twitter: "We took [the] Wandering Rocks [chapter of Ulysses] and adapted it into a large series of 140-character or less utterances in the first person. We organized and timed these and built a database for them. We registered key characters in the novel as users on Twitter. For example: "STEPHENDEDALUS: I see Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress, shut the book quick, don't let see" Then we wrote some software to automate the performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, so basically we just turn it on and it runs. The result, we hope, will offer both an interesting and unique perspective on the novel and on Twitter. I'll let our critics be the judge of that."
• Boing, Boing, Rare Recording of James Joyce Reading: "Happy Bloomsday! Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton notes, "When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a 'Dub' -- i.e. with the accent of most of the street characters in Ulysses.""
  

• Mark Thoma, Why Op-Eds?: "Here's something I've been wondering. Now that we have blogs and the internet, why do high ranking government officials - Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers today in the Washington Post, or Peter Orszag in the Financial Times for example - publish op-eds behind paywalls? Why should people be forced to pay to hear read important policy discussions? Doesn't that exclude a lot of people from participating in the discourse? Even if the policy discussions aren't behind paywalls, other papers don't reprint the remarks in full, at least hardly ever, so the distribution is still limited." When, say, the president wants to say something, why publish it on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, etc.? Why not simply post it on the White House web site, and make it absolutely clear that anyone who wants to can republish it in its entirety. ....
• Andrew Gelman, According to Page and Jacobs, Americans are Conservative Egalitarians ...: "... Page and Jacobs are persuasive that majority public opinion is consistent with tax increases targeted to specific government programs aimed at bringing a basic standard of living and economic opportunity to all Americans. They discuss how survey respondents generally feel that such an expansion of the role of government is consistent with generally expressed free-market attitudes, a philosophy which they call "conservative egalitarianism."
• Steven Greenhouse, To Avoid Layoffs, Some Companies Turn to Work Sharing: "As companies struggle to make it from recession to recovery, many are turning to a novel but unheralded program that cuts their costs while sparing their workers’ jobs. Under the program, known as work-sharing, employers reduce their workers’ weekly hours and pay, often by 20 or 40 percent, and then states make up some of the lost wages, usually half, from their unemployment funds. Even though 17 states have adopted the program, and many executives and economists hail it as a way to keep workers employed and companies staffed with skilled labor, only a fraction of the businesses and workers that are actually eligible are benefiting."