Todd May, The Meaningfulness of Lives: " ... we are currently encouraged to think of ourselves either as consumers or as entrepreneurs. We are told to be shoppers for goods or investors for return. Neither of these types of lives, if they are the dominant character of those lives, strike me as particularly meaningful. This is because their narrative themes — buying, investing — are rarely the stuff of which a compelling life narrative is made. (I say “rarely” because there may be, for example, cases of intensely lived but morally compromised lives of investment that do not cross any moral limit to meaningfulness.) They usually lack what Wolf calls “objective attractiveness.” To be sure, we must buy things, and may even enjoy shopping. And we should not be entirely unconcerned with where we place our limited energies or monies. But are these the themes of a meaningful life? Are we likely to say of someone that he or she was a great networker or shopper, and so really knew how to live? In what I have called an age of economics, it is even more urgent to ask the question of a meaningful life: what it consists in, how we might live one."

Henry Farrell, Neo-Liberalism Again: "If you believe, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Paul Krugman etc believe, that the decline of the US labor movement is an important explanatory factor for the rise of inequality in the US, and if you believe that inequality is a problem, then of course you want to think about the consequences of anti-trust policy for union strength. Weakening unions can plausibly further increase inequality, by weakening actors who used to serve as an important counterweight to e.g. financial interests. But I am not at all sure that Matt [Yglesias] himself has any deeply rooted philosophical objections to this way of thinking. In a more recent post he quotes a Dean Baker argument that patents and intellectual property contribute to inequality .... This seems absolutely right to me – but also to call for an emphatically non-neoliberal approach to politics. As Matt is saying in this post, profound political inequalities are baked into the cake of our current market economy. But if this is right, then it is implausible that we can let markets do their thing, and then worry about the distributional issues later, since inequalities, the power of financial interests, etc not only are part of the system as it is, but also make it very unlikely that we will ever get to the stage of doing substantial redistribution. While Dean Baker (whom Matt is relying on in this post) depicts his reform agenda as a set of pro-market measures, they are not by virtue of this, neo-liberal measures (which would suggest that we should let the market organize itself, and then worry about distribution later). Instead, Dean wants to restructure markets from the get-go so as e.g. to rein in the political power of finance by taxing certain transactions, getting rid of the ‘too big to fail’ problem etc. This political program (like all political programs) emphasizes some problems and de-emphasizes others. But it is, emphatically, a political program, with a theory of what is wrong with the US political economy, and how to fix it."

Duncan Green, We Measure Relative Poverty in Rich Countries; Absolute Poverty in Poor Ones—What if We Combine Them?: "Martin Ravallion, the World Bank’s head of research, has been doing some interesting thinking on poverty lines. We currently have an odd divide between poor countries, where absolute measures are more often used (eg $1.25 a day, the current international poverty line) and rich countries, which tend to use measures of relative poverty. For example, in Western Europe (including the UK) the poverty line is set at a constant proportion (typically 60%) of median income. Ravallion calls this a “strongly relative line”. Ravallion argues that both approaches make sense – an absolute line in establishing who is able to feed and clothe themselves, a relative line in determining whether people feel socially excluded or not. In very poor countries, absolute survival plays a bigger role, but as countries’ average wealth rises, so social inclusion, and thus relative poverty, becomes more salient. However, Ravallion argues that social exclusion matters even in the poorest imaginable country. So a sensible poverty line cannot simply rise and fall proportionately to average income, as in the strongly relative poverty lines used in Europe. Look at Ravallion’s graph. The strongly relative line keeps falling toward zero. The strongly relative lines will be too low (below survival levels) in poor countries. Ravallion says we need “weakly relative lines” which incorporate an absolute minimum ...."

Chris Dillow, Dissociating from Poverty: "In this interview with Laurie Taylor, Tracy Shildrick describes how Britain’s poor don’t’ regard themselves as poor. “People don’t want to associate with the stigma associated with poverty” she says. ... Dissociating oneself from poverty, then, seems to be a persistent attitude of the poor - even those who we would regard today as absolutely poor.
This is an example of what Jon Elster called “sour grapes”. Our preferences adapt - partially - to our circumstances with the result that we don’t feel bad about our lives, however awfully they are going. This is a necessary coping mechanism. Counting your blessings is a way of keeping going in the face of adversity. There is, though, a problem here. If people don’t sufficiently acknowledge that they are poor or are being mistreated by society, the demand for redistributive policies will be low. If this coexists alongside a desire by the rich to bash "scroungers", then there’ll be a systematic bias in public preferences and discourse against the interests of the poor."

Peter Moskos, Imprisonment and the Lash via Crooked Timber: "In much of America, prisons have become nothing more than a massive government-run—one might even say “socialist”—job program. To oversimplify, but just a bit, we pay poor unemployed rural whites to guard poor unemployed urban blacks. Prison guards and private prisons advocate for more and more prisoners, literally profiting from human bondage. Such a peculiar institution should be unconscionable."

Henry Farrell, How Equality Affects Redistributive Politics: "Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontussen have a piece on the relationship between inequality and distribution in the new American Political Science Review. There is a lot of debate about whether the level of economic inequality in society leads to greater or lesser distribution – what Lupu and Pontussen suggest is that the structure of inequality (that is – the more particular relationships between different segments in the income distribution, rather than some summary index) is more important. More particularly they argue that if one tries to hold racial and ethnic cleavages constant, the key factor determining redistribution is the income gap between middle income voters and lower income voters. Where this gap is low, middle class people feel some degree of solidarity with the poor and exhibit what Lupu and Pontussen describe as “parochial altruism.” That is, they are more likely to support income redistribution because they feel that the poor are in some sense, ‘like them.’ When the gap is high, middle class people will have a much weaker sense of solidarity with the poor, and hence be less supportive of redistribution. Lupu and Pontussen suggest that the US is an outlier, with weaker solidarity than the structure of US inequality would suggest. They argue that the explanation for this is straightforward – “it is clearly attributable to the high-concentration of racial-ethnic minorities in the bottom of the income distribution.” More bluntly put – middle class Americans feel less solidarity with the very poor because the very poor are more likely to be black."

n + 1 Oscar Preview: "[Jean-Luc] Godard received an “Academy Honorary Award” this year, “for passion, for confrontation, for a new kind of cinema.” While the Academy may be interested in passion and confrontation when giving out honorary awards, it was in no way interested in Godard showing those qualities live on TV. ... Denying the world the potentially coruscating scandal of watching Godard get an Oscar, then saying whatever it is he would have said, is a missed opportunity of the highest order. How bad could it have been, Academy? Even if Godard had excoriated Hollywood, he probably would have thrown in a few good words for Hawks and Hitchcock, for Nick and Sam. Godard himself has been quiet about the whole thing, not even deigning to acknowledge that he received the award. His uncharacteristic silence speaks volumes; Anne-Marie Miéville acknowledged he was annoyed. Will he at least get booed by someone when they read his name, or will it pass by to polite applause and baffled looks? Can we cut to a shot of Megan Fox?"

Paul Adler, Homage to Madison: "The struggle in Madison carries in it possibilities beyond a temporary frustration for the right wing. First, and most obviously, while victory would return labor to an ever less tenable status quo, the alternative is truly terrifying. Any eventual revival of organized labor in the United States will depend on the relative strength of public sector unions as a base of support—progressives cannot afford to lose them. Second, one can at least hope that this struggle will remind the Democratic Party how vital organized labor is and encourage Democrats, particularly at the national level, to support labor as much as it has backed them. Finally, if the struggle in Madison can give renewed confidence to organized labor, that is of great importance in itself. As historian Robert Zieger notes in discussing the heyday of labor militancy—the CIO’s organizing drives of the late 1930s—a sense of momentum and accomplishment are vital in organizing; workers “had to be convinced that the union could be and, more importantly, could remain an assertive presence.” No one I saw or spoke with made any grandiose claims, but many did express hope that Madison could provide a needed shot-in-the-arm for the movement as a whole. As one fifty-nine-year IBEW member told me (and I paraphrase), “I worry about the future of the labor movement being guys like me—old white guys. When I see all these young people here, inspired and involved, you can’t help but feel a little hopeful.”"

Dean Baker, If Progressives Wanted to Win: "In reality, the right uses government all the time to advance its interest by setting rules that redistribute income upward. As long as progressives ignore the rules that are designed to redistribute income upward, they will be left fighting over crumbs. There is no way that government interventions will reverse a rigged market. For some reason, most of the people in the national political debate who consider themselves progressive do not seem to understand this fact. ... The battles that occupy progressives’ energies are almost invariably trivial in their impact relative to these three fulcrums of the economy. In effect, conservatives have managed to gain control of the most important levers of economic activity and left the crumbs for progressives to fight over in the political sphere. It would be very hard to challenge the right’s control over these levers, but the first step is to simply recognize them. Unfortunately, there is little appreciation among progressives of their importance. Instead we get great histrionics over policies that really won’t have very much impact, even if they might be wrong-headed."

Stumbling and Mumbling, Worker Democracy Works: "Here’s some laboratory evidence that workplace democracy raises productivity: 'We report evidence from a real-effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented and worker characteristics.' This is especially impressive because it focuses upon only one channel through which democracy raises productivity, and ignores others - for example that workplace democracy increases workers’ monitoring of co-workers, or increases motivation over longer periods than can be measured in laboratory experiments. One message I take from this is that a government that was serious about wanting to increase the efficiency of the public sector would consider ways of empowering workers."

vox.eu, Inequality, leverage, and crises: "Of the many origins of the global crisis, one that has received comparatively little attention is income inequality. This column provides a theoretical framework for understanding the connection between inequality, leverage and financial crises. It shows how rising inequality in a climate of rising consumption can lead poorer households to increase their leverage, thereby making a crisis more likely. ... Borrowing and higher debt leverage appears to have helped the poor and the middle-class to cope with the erosion of their relative income position by borrowing to maintain higher living standards. Meanwhile, the rich accumulated more and more assets and in particular invested in assets backed by loans to the poor and the middle class. The consequence of having a lower increase in consumption inequality compared to income inequality has therefore been a higher wealth inequality. The increase in debt leverage of the bottom group of the distribution has implications for both the size of the US financial industry and its vulnerability to financial crises. The increase in the reliance on debt for the bottom group and the increase in wealth of the top group generated a higher demand for financial intermediation. Between 1981 and 2008, the US financial sector grew rapidly, with the ratio of private credit to GDP more than doubling from 90% to 210%. The share of the financial industry in GDP doubled as well, from 4% to 8%. As borrowers’ debt leverage increases, the economy becomes gradually more vulnerable to the risk of financial crises. When a crisis eventually materialised in the fall of 2008, it was accompanied by a generalised wave of defaults, with 10% of mortgage loans becoming delinquent, and a sharp output contraction."

Jay Walljasper, Proof that Bikesharing Works in the USA: "For all those who dismissed bike sharing as a woolly-headed European idea that would never work on the mean streets of U.S. cities, the success of the first season of MinneapolisNice Ride bike program will come as a surprise. 700 public bikes hit the streets in June at 65 stations, and they were taken for more than 100,000 rides until put away for the winter in mid-November. 1300 people signed up for an annual membership and 30,000 signed up for a $5 daily pass with the swipe of a credit card. But the numbers that may be more significant for the future of bike sharing are three, two and none. That’s the number of bikes vandalized, the number of bikes stolen and the numbers of injuries reported. This conclusively answers numerous skeptics who thought that sharing bikes would never work here in the individualistic, auto-crazed USA."

Mark Thoma, Cowen: Innovation is Doing Little for Incomes: "The stagnation of income for typical (median) households in recent decades has little to due with stagnating productivity -- productivity has still been rising. It has much more to do with how the gains from rising productivity have been divided up. This is yet another reason why complaints about active government and "income redistribution policies to benefit favored constituencies" ring hollow. When you leave out that a mal-distribution of income already exists, i.e. when your implicit underlying assumption is that the people who did get the growth over the last few decades deserved every penny of it (despite bubbles giving false gains to people at the top, and many other problems), of course you'll oppose redistributive policies. But I tend to think that the gains were not distributed according to changes in productivity -- labor did not get its share -- and government intervention to correct that is appropriate."

Justin Fox, Why Business is Stuck on Income Inequality: "Martin Sorrell, the CEO of advertising and public relations giant WPP, was just at the Sundance Film Festival, where he saw a documentary called The Flaw. The title comes from Alan Greenspan's now-famous admission to a Congressional committee in 2008 — "I have found a flaw in the model that defines how the world works" — and as best I can tell it posits that extreme income inequality was a precipitating factor behind the financial crisis. It certainly left an impression on Sorrell. "Wealthy people invest in financial assets; they create asset bubbles," he said this morning. When wealth is distributed more equally, he went on, you get more sustainable growth. Sorrell is a wealthy man, and he said all this while at the front of the room at one of the opening events of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, one of the world's great gatherings of those near the top of the wealth pyramid. It seemed like a significant moment."

TAPPED, Why Conservatives Ought to Love the Postal Service: "... unlike any private corporation (or any government agency, for that matter), the Postal Service is required by law to prepay health benefits for future retirees, which costs it about $5 billion a year. We've also come to accept that we should only have to pay 44 cents to send a letter, when sending the same letter via FedEx or UPS will cost you about 20 times as much. There's another very important reason the Postal Service loses money, and that is because it has no choice but to service areas that are extremely unprofitable, namely rural areas. In fact, a few hundred million times a year, FedEx and UPS take packages to a post office and pay the USPS to deliver them, because it just isn't profitable for them to send their driver to some far-flung unincorporated area just to drop off a package or two."

Thomas Meaney, Liberty Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss: "Whereas functionalist anthropologists following Bronislaw Malinowski believed the social lives of indigenous peoples were determined by basic needs like sex and hunger, Lévi-Strauss found something close to the opposite in the tribes he encountered: even in the most dire conditions, they were driven above all by an intellectual need to understand the world around them. When Amerindians chose animals for their totems, it was not because they were "good to eat," Lévi-Strauss argued, but because they were "good to think." The Nambikwara were every bit as scientifically minded as the ethnographers who studied them (their mental inventory for honey, for instance, included thirteen different varieties). .... Lévi-Strauss came to consider indigenous myths, as a form of aesthetic creation, superior to the West's precarious investment in more dubious expressions of individual artists, since individual-centered meaning was almost guaranteed to pale in comparison to the power of a myth that had been fashioned by an entire community over time. There may have been no Tolstoy of the Nambikwara, but the culture and language they had made and shared was more fecund than War and Peace.."

Eileen Appelbaum, Decent Wages, Decent Society: "If full employment means jobs for all at decent wages, then we need to be concerned about both re-employing the millions of men who lost jobs in manufacturing and construction and about wages and job quality in the rapidly expanding care-work sectors in which millions of women labor. On the wage front, the decline in unionization means that older ideas of wages as the result of a grand bargain (or great struggle) over the division of productivity gains are no longer relevant. Unions are not the countervailing force they were in the quarter century from 1948 to 1973, able to compel employers—through direct negotiations and the “union threat effect” at non-union companies—to agree to a reasonable division of a growing economic pie. From the point of view of today’s employers, the notion of wages as a means of securing a decent standard of living for Americans is so last century. At a meeting of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Business Economists, I asked the owner of a medium-sized business whether his employees’ wages were rising along with increases in productivity. “I make it. I take it,” he answered. Like most employers—and any manager who has taken a course in human-resource management—he believed that the wage functions to provide workers with an incentive to show up for work and do what managers expect. His workers show up for work—proof that he is paying them fairly."

Lane Kenworthy, Is America Finished with Major Expansions of the Safety Net: "That’s the message from Jim Kessler ... Kessler urges President Obama to say, in his State of the Union address, that “with the passage of health care reform, America’s 85-year quest to weave a strong safety net is now complete.” We have a safety net, but I wouldn’t call it “strong” by 21st-century standards."

Between 2008 and 2009, unemployment increased from 5.8 percent to 9.3 percent, the largest one-year increase on record (which goes back to 1948). Over the same period, the number of Americans without health insurance coverage rose by more than four million—from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009—and low-income people lost insurance at a greater rate than Americans overall. Thus, it isn't surprising that the Census Bureau's official poverty estimates show that the number of people who were impoverished in 2009 increased by 3.74 million, and the poverty rate increased from 13.2 percent in 2008 to 14.3 percent in 2009.

More surprising is an "alternative" poverty estimate Census quietly released earlier this month. This estimate, highlighted today in a New York Times editorial, shows no increase in poverty between 2008 and 2009. Given the record increase in unemployment and huge decline in health insurance coverage, especially among low-income people, could this alternative estimate showing no increase in poverty really be correct?

The short answer is no, but it takes some unbundling of the numbers to understand what's going on. Certain benefits that were expanded in the Recovery Act, particularly food stamps and refundable tax credits, are not currently counted in the official poverty measure. The alternative poverty measure cited by the NYT counts these benefits. Thus, one explanation of the apparent disconnection between unemployment and poverty is that the food stamp and refundable tax credit provisions in the Recovery Act were large enough (and targeted in a way) that prevented any actual increase in poverty.

I'm certainly a fan of the Recovery Act—although as economic stimulus, it was much too small—and I think that the Act's expansions of food stamps and refundable tax credits kept poverty from increasing as much as it would have in their absence. But I don't believe that these expansions kept poverty from increasing at all. As a practical matter, what families lost last year as a result of the massive increase in unemployment and uninsurance was just too large to be completely offset by the Act's food stamp and tax credit expansions.

What the NYT doesn't note in its editorial is that the alternative poverty threshold used by Census to produce the no-increase result appears to be about $233 lower—about 1 percent lower—in 2009 than in 2008. For example, the alternative poverty threshold for a family of four was $24,755 in 2008; the same threshold in 2009 was $24,522. The official threshold also declined, but only by about .36 percent. Thus, at least part of the explanation for the no-increase result using the alternative measure is that it set the poverty "bar" lower in 2009 than it did in 2008.

Why did the value of the alternative poverty line decline at more twice the rate of the official one? The alternative poverty line is tied to the amount that moderate-income households (roughly those at the 33rd percentile) spend on housing, utilities, and food. Thus, during say a housing bubble, when housing prices are outpacing inflation, the alternative poverty line will tend to rise at a faster rate than a line adjusted only for inflation, while during a slump, like the one we're having now, the threshold will tend to fall behind inflation. Whether or not we think this is a conceptually sound way to measure poverty—my own preference is to tie the poverty threshold to a percentage of median income, rather than a subset of consumer spending, and not allow it to decline in nominal dollars—it's worth noting as a factor when explaining otherwise counter-intutitive results like poverty not increasing in a year when unemployment rose at record rate.

A second issue has to do with the alternative measure's treatment of health insurance and medical costs. Unlike housing and food, medical necessities are not included in the threshold of the alternative measure cited by the NYT. Instead, the alternative measure only accounts for medical expenditures that were paid out-of-pocket in 2009.

Thus, if you were one of the 4.4 million people to have lost health insurance in 2009, you may or may not look worse off that year according to the alternative measure. If you were able to afford paying for medical care out of pocket, you'll look worse off, but if couldn't afford necessary care and didn't make any additional out-of-pocket payments, you'll look no worse off. And, if, in fact, you made fewer out-of-pocket payments precisely because you lost health insurance (for example, fewer co-pays for previously covered services), you will actually look better off, even through the value of health services you lost may far exceed those you gained. A related problem is that the people who are able to afford to pay for health care costs out-of-pocket may be more economically secure—because of substantial assets or low housing costs—than the ones who can't afford to pay, even holding income equal.

Interestingly, Census also published some experimental poverty measures that include medical expenses in the poverty thresholds, but these have gotten little attention in the media. Unlike the alternative thresholds that exclude medical needs, the value of these thresholds actually increased between 2008 and 2009. These thresholds show (more accurately, in my view) poverty increasing by between 1.1 and 1.8 million people between 2008 and 2009.

A final issue has to do with how the alternative measure counts refundable tax credits. The Recovery Act increased both the Child Tax Credit and EITC for certain categories of low- and middle-income families for tax years 2009 and 2010. For nearly all of the families benefitting from this increase, the benefits were received as a lump sum in 2010 (after they filed their 2009 tax returns) rather than in 2009. However, the alternative measure used by Census counts these benefits as having been received in 2009. I imagine Census has practical reasons for doing this, but it provides an inaccurate picture of real poverty in 2009. In general, it makes sense to take account of taxes paid and taxes benefits received when measuring poverty, but in this case, the official poverty line's trend between 2008 and 2009 arguably provides the more accurate picture of poverty because it doesn't count an increase in tax credits received in 2010 as having reduced poverty in the previous year.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't note two important things the NYT got right. First, they correctly note that the recent tax cut deal includes a one-year payroll tax cut that "is less helpful to the lowest-income workers than a now-expired tax break in the stimulus", a fact I've noted, but one that hasn't been widely reported by the media. Second, they correctly argue that "reducing federal help now"—the course urged by conservatives—will ensure more poverty later. But these are points that can be made without making the incorrect assertion that there was no increase in poverty in 2009.

Jonny Thakkar, Why Conservatives Should Read Marx: "... bureaucracy was not invented by anti-capitalists. It began with the ancient empires of Egypt, Persia, Rome and China, and it necessarily accompanies most large institutions, from churches to armies to corporations. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’,” Ronald Reagan famously said. He must have led a sheltered existence, but in any case it is worth asking when this has ever happened to anyone. The closest most of us come to opaque, arbitrary and unwieldy bureaucracy is with insurance or telecommunications companies. The scariest nine words might actually be spoken by the faceless operatives of my far from local and earth-sprung health insurer: “I’m going to transfer you to the correct department.”"

Tristram Hunt, Eric Hobsbawm, A Conversation About Marx, Student Riots, the new Left, and the Milibands: "... one of the things I'm trying to show in the book is that the crisis of Marxism is not only the crisis of the revolutionary branch of Marxism but in the social democratic branch too. The new situation in the new globalised economy eventually killed off not only Marxist-Leninism but also social democratic reformism – which was essentially the working class putting pressure on their nation states. But with globalisation, the capacity of the states to respond to this pressure effectively diminished. And so the left retreated to suggest: "Look, the capitalists are doing all right, all we need to do is let them make as much profit and see that we get our share." That worked when part of that share took the form of creating welfare states, but from the 1970s on, this no longer worked and what you had to do then was, in effect, what Blair and Brown did: let them make as much money as possible and hope that enough of it will trickle down to make our people better off. .... The record of Karl Marx, an unarmed prophet inspiring major changes, is undeniable. I'm quite deliberately not saying that there are any equivalent prospects now. What I'm saying now is that the basic problems of the 21st century would require solutions that neither the pure market, nor pure liberal democracy can adequately deal with. And to that extent, a different combination, a different mix of public and private, of state action and control and freedom would have to be worked out. What you will call that, I don't know. But it may well no longer be capitalism, certainly not in the sense in which we have known it in this country and the United States."

Anders Bjorklund and others, What More than Parental Income, Education and Occupation? What Swedish Siblings Get from their Parents: "Sibling correlations are broader measures of the impact of family and community influences on individual outcomes than intergenerational correlations. Estimates of such correlations in income show that more than half of the family and community influences that siblings share are uncorrelated with parental income. We employ a data set with rich family information to explore what factors in addition to traditional measures of parents’ socio-economic status can explain sibling similarity in long-run income. Measures of family structure and social problems account for very little of sibling similarities beyond that already accounted for by income, education and occupation. However, when we add indicators of parental involvement in schoolwork, parenting practices and maternal attitudes, the explanatory power of our variables increases from about one-quarter (using only traditional measures of parents’ socio-economic status) to nearly two-thirds."

Maurice Glasman, The Peer Plotting Labour's New Strategy: "The Glasman creed is that Labour – real, traditional, pre-1945 Labour, as he would put it – is the only party with the values and beliefs that can make the "big society" work. Unlike the Tories, whose vision relies on a volunteer spirit rising up when institutions get off people's backs, he has a different idea – one he says is in some respects "more conservative than the Conservatives". He wants to foster a "Labour big society" based on ideas of "family, faith and the flag" and nurtured through cherished local institutions – everything from churches to post offices, banks, hospitals, schools and football clubs. At the moment the Conservatives have got an idea of a society built on volunteers," he says. "It has got to be much more than that." He cites football clubs as a key example of where local loyalties and spirit can be reinforced – and local banks as institutions that can inspire economic activity – if their governance is reformed. "Football clubs are a form of magic and a form of belonging, of hope, of glory, but fans are just being exploited by venture capitalists from a thousand miles away. It offends against the sacred sense of belonging. Ideally I would like to see the Labour party taking very strong support for mutual ownership of football clubs. I would like to see the endowment of local banks so there is regional capital and regional economies." He reels off long lists of academics and political thinkers, from Aristotle to the lesser-known Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, as influences. The latter, he says, taught him that capitalism, though a force for good if controlled, could also be a menace if not. Labour now had to "rediscover" the need to tame the markets as part of its mission to make individuals feel valuable again. "The logic of capitalism is to turn human beings and their natural environment into commodities," he says. "The logic of democracy, and particularly the Labour movement, is to protect the human status of the person.""

Sacramento Bee, Paid Family Leave Raises Satisfaction without Killing Jobs in California: "California’s landmark Paid Family Leave program didn’t amount to be the costly ‘job-killer’ businesses initially feared and has resulted in significant economic, social and health benefits for both male and female workers, economic and labor researchers found in a study released today. The study by University of California Los Angeles, City University of New York and the Center for Economic and Policy Research is the first study of the state’s Paid Family Leave since the law’s passage in 2002. The program, the benefits of which became available to most working Californians in July 2004, provides eligible employees up to six weeks of wage replacement leave at 55 percent of their usual weekly earnings (with a cap that is adjusted for inflation) when they take time off from work to bond with a new child or to care for a seriously ill relative. Researchers Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman noted that, despite business opposition to the law, most employers they surveyed reported that the program had either a ‘positive effect’ or ‘no noticeable effect’ on productivity, profitability and performance, turnover and morale…"

Dhaval M. Dave and others, Effects of Welfare Reform on Vocational Education and Training: "Exploiting variation in welfare reform across states and over time and using relevant comparison groups, this study estimates the effects of welfare reform on an important source of human capital acquisition among women at risk for relying on welfare: vocational education and training. The results indicate that welfare reform reduced enrollment in full-time vocational education and had no significant effects on part-time vocational education or participation in other types of work-related courses, though there is considerable heterogeneity across states with respect to the strictness of educational policy and the strength of work incentives under welfare reform. In addition, we find heterogeneous effects by prior educational attainment. We find no evidence that the previously-observed negative effects of welfare reform on formal education (including college enrollment), which we replicated in this study, have been offset by increases in vocational education and training."

Mark Greif, Preface to What was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: "Having read these proceedings, responses, and essays many times now, I think I've learned the following: The hipster represents what can happen to middle class whites, particularly, and to all elites, generally, when they focus on the struggles for their own pleasures and luxuries—seeing them as daring and confrontational—rather than asking what makes their sort of people entitled to them, who else suffers for their pleasures, and where their "rebellion" adjoins social struggles that should obligate anyone who hates authority. Or, worse, the hipster is the subcultural type generated by neoliberalism, that infamous tendency of our time to privatize public goods and make an upward redistribution of wealth. Hipster values exalt political reaction, masquerading as rebellion, behind the mask of "vice" (a hipster keyword). Hipster art and thought, where they exist, too often champion repetition and childhood, primitivism and plush animal masks. And hipster anti-authoritarianism bespeaks a ruse by which the middle-class young can forgive themselves for abandoning the claims of counterculture—whether punk, anti-capitalist, anarchist, nerdy, or '60s—while retaining the coolness of subculture. It risks turning future avant-gardes into communities of "early adopters." But I see I'm getting ahead of myself—anyway, its the universal instinctive hatred of hipsters (even among hipsters!) that makes me believe things will be fine, if we could just see things more clearly ...."

We Are All Dead, Why Should We Care About Inequality?: "Christopher Joye doesn’t “think there is anything wrong at all with a rise in income inequality if one assumes that we have equality of opportunity; we are committed to combating extreme poverty; and we are vigilant in protecting those members of the community who are fundamentally and irreversibly damaged through, say, mental or physical disabilities”. This is a common position among small-l liberals of the centre-right, and I see this as a key ideological dividing line between liberals and social democrats. I place myself on the other side of that dividing line: I do care about inequality, and I think Governments should act to reduce inequality above and beyond ensuring a formal equality of opportunity, or ameliorating extreme disadvantage, or protecting people with disabilities. I’d like to address a few of Joye’s points in turn to demonstrate where our reasoning differs (and where our ideology differs, too). As an aside, I’d like to note that the question of how much inequality we should tolerate is an inescapably ideological question, one of moral and political philosophy."

Ken Henry, How Much Inequity Should We Allow?: "For some years I have been concerned about features of the [Australian] tax‑transfer system which cause, contribute to, or fail to redress significant inequities that chronically harm people's lifetime wellbeing. Where I go beyond more traditional frameworks is my concern for wellbeing, not just income, and in a focus on lifetime, not just current circumstances. Some of you would know that I have a deep respect for the writings of Amartya Sen. Sen argues that the true measure of human development is that a person has the 'capabilities' necessary to leading the kind of life they value and have reason to value. Capabilities allow an individual to fully function in society; they are not 'income' and, while they include basic civil rights and political freedoms, they are not limited to 'rights'; they are 'substantive freedoms', including with respect to both processes and opportunities. Thus, its not enough to be concerned with procedural fairness issues if that means ignoring deprivation of substantive opportunity. But neither is it enough to be concerned only with the adequacy of opportunity, since the capability that people have to choose a life they value depends also upon the nature of the processes that bring the opportunities about. Sen points to some capabilities that are close to being absolute — 'to meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated' Others, like the capability to live without shame or to participate in the activities of the community, are relative to community standards. Being computer literate was not necessary to participate in society 30 years ago, but it is now. Sen views poverty as capability deprivation. And, seen in those terms, poverty is clearly intolerable. It is a form of personal injury that should not be abided in any just society. Poverty is something that is of interest to all people concerned with equity. But it's not their only concern. And nor should it be. Yet even in the broader domain of equity considerations, Sen's approach — of focussing on individual capabilities, and the proper role of society in fostering those capabilities — is instructive. I know there is a risk that this highly abbreviated reference to Sen's valuable perspective will confuse rather than enlighten. For where I want to get to today, its enough that you accept that there might be a case for moving beyond a narrow focus on either rights or incomes, or even material wealth, to look at the capabilities that make a direct contribution to long-term wellbeing."