• Clay Risen, All Bark, No Bite: The Decline of Germany's Social Democrats: "On September 25, 2009, two days before Germany’s national elections, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) debuted its campaign mascot: the terrier. ... Terriers are wonderful animals and adored by Germans, but they hardly made for a compelling image of political fortitude. Nor, come that Sunday, did the SPD."
• Jonathan Heathcote and Fabrizio Perri, Economic Inequality During Recessions: "In 1992, Sweden experienced a severe recession that caused a dramatic increase in earnings inequality. However, inequality in total household pre-tax income and in disposable income (which includes taxes) barely moved. Compared to Sweden, the government in the US plays a smaller role, and taxes and transfers only partially offset widening earnings inequality in recessions. In particular, inequality in total household income [in the United States] increased during the recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s."
• Alexander Gelber and Joshua Mitchell, Work in the Home and the Market: Understanding Single Women's Choices: "... our finding that the increase in market work corresponds largely to a decrease in housework suggests that public policies affecting labour force incentives may largely shift people from one productive activity to another. In a world of ideal data, we would also be able to observe the intensity with which they perform home and market work, and how much they value what they produce. Nonetheless, since the policy reforms we examine were motivated in part by decreasing the “unproductive” activity of “idle” single mothers, it is notable that the policies seem to have shifted individuals from work at home to work in the market."
• Edward Glaeser, Success of the Left in Europe, The Right in US: "Over decades, the success of the left in Europe and the right in the United States has led to wildly different beliefs about the nature of poverty and success. We found that 60 percent of Americans thought that the poor were lazy, while only 26 percent of European share that view. Fifty four percent of Europeans think luck determines income; only 30 percent of Americans concur. These differences don’t reflect economic reality. The American poor work longer hours than their European counterparts. They instead reflect the long-run ability of politics to shape public opinion. Institutions, like proportional representation, that empower the left do a good job of explaining which nations have opinions associated with the left, like the view that chance determines success."
  

• David Cutler and Others, Explaining the Rise in Educational Gradiants: "The long-standing inverse relationship between education and mortality strengthened substantially later in the 20th century. This paper examines the reasons for this increase. We show that behavioral risk factors are not of primary importance. Smoking has declined more for the better educated, but not enough to explain the trend. Obesity has risen at similar rates across education groups, and control of blood pressure and cholesterol has increased fairly uniformly as well. Rather, our results show that the mortality returns to risk factors, and conditional on risk factors, the return to education, have grown over time."
• Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Traveling with the Dog: Greyhound and American Journeys: ".... bus travel remains a visible and viable working-class space. It is not ghettoized; it is public. In no sense off limits, it is in plain view. The Greyhound dog leaping across the skyline is a working-class flag. Praise the common man. If I keep going in this vein, I will end by suggesting that the resolution of all our political problems rests in a new itinerary for senators and congresspeople: let them ride the buses. But I risk giving the company too much credit. Greyhound hasn’t been a friend to its employees. The company has been the focus of two famous union strikes—in 1983 and in the early 1990s, both characterized by intense levels of acrimony, bitterness, and physical violence. During the upheaval of the 1990s, Greyhound called in nonunion bus drivers; in Redding, California, a picketing striker was killed by a bus driven by a strikebreaker. Greyhound eventually prevailed and effectively broke the bus drivers’ union. The striker’s death isn’t commemorated in any Greyhound station, as far as I know, giving the story the tragic air of the battles waged against the Wobblies in the early twentieth century. Ask the defeated strikers if the dog belongs on a working-class flag. Still, though the company is no self-conscious respecter of worker rights, the terminals remain community parks of the working class, with management, employees, and patrons trapped in a slightly abusive relationship."
• Joyce Foundation, New Tools in the Advocacy Toolkit: Microtargeting, Netroots Mobilization and e-advocacy: "Historically, policy advocates have effectively pressed their causes using compelling research, good ideas, and the right relationships. However, in the past few years, sophisticated issue advocates have increasingly begun to identify and mobilize supporters through a whole new suite of new media-anchored strategies and tactics, including microtargeting, social networking, and e-advocacy."
  

• Andrew Hahn, The Indianapolis Private Industry Council’s Cash Voucher Program for Disadvantaged Youth: "A promising six-year effort in Indianapolis made cash vouchers for emergency or compelling expenses available to participating community-based organizations (CBOs) and social service agencies to help their young adult clients pursue employment, education, and training goals. Since its inception, the Indianapolis Private Industry Council’s (IPIC) voucher program, with support from the Lilly Endowment, has provided over 2,400 young adults in its Youth Employment Service (YES) program with bill paying assistance. ... The IPIC initiative in Indianapolis has shown significant success in helping low-income youth succeed in school, job training, and work."
• Department of Labor, Secretary Hilda Solis Presents DOL Budget Request for FY2011: "Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis today, through a national online discussion with stakeholder groups, the general public and the news media, outlined the president's fiscal year (FY) 2011 budget request for the U.S. Department of Labor, which is built around the vision of "good jobs for everyone." ... Secretary Solis defines "good jobs" as those that: Can support a family by increasing incomes. Offer fair compensation. Narrow the wage gap. Allow for work-life flexibility. Promote safe and healthy workplaces. Give workers a voice. Foster fair working conditions in the global marketplace. Are sustainable and innovative, such as green jobs, providing opportunities to acquire the skills and knowledge for the jobs of the future. Help restore the middle class. ..."
• Kaiser Health News, Medicaid Beats Private Insurance When it Comes to Prevention: "Sen. Lamar Alexander – as well as other conservative lawmakers – characterized Medicaid as a "medical ghetto" during Senate floor speeches on the health overhaul debate last year, American Medical News reports. But, the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health contradicts that common perception. "Based on nearly 92,000 interviews, it found that in 36 states, children in Medicaid and CHIP were as likely or more likely than privately insured kids to have had at least one preventive health care visit over a 12-month period.""
• Wingham Rowan, Could Online Marketplaces Tackle Poverty?: "'National e-markets' would be safe, convenient, accessible Internet marketplaces with ultra-low overheads. The private sector alone cannot create these marketplaces, but they could quickly be realised using the same model that created the National Lottery. Recommendations include: Government should not fund, design, build or operate such marketplaces, but it could: provide a regulatory framework and access to validation procedures; divert public spending to local communities through the new markets, which could encourage the private sector to create regulated markets in return for a small cut of each transaction."
  

• Crooked Timber, Civil Unions and Straight Marriage [Via Arthur Goldhammer]: "Arthur Goldhammer’s excellent blog on French politics and society points to this article on the French pact civil de solidarité – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight) ... The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship."
• Stumbling and Mumbling, Going to the Dogs Under Brown: "Gordon Brown’s vision for the country is a desperately feeble one: 'A fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfil their dreams whether that's owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business.' Is this a society for humans, or for dogs? Dogs can work hard and obey rules, and be thrown a few bones as a reward. There’s so much missing from this, not least: who makes the rules, and how? Isn’t a “fair society” one in which people get more power over their lives? What’s shocking here is the contrast between this and the ideals leftists had 150 years ago. Back then, John Stuart Mill deplored the “struggling to get on…the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels“ as a “disagreeable symptom” of a passing phase of society. Brown, by contrast, seems to glorify such grubby materialism. And Marx thought a rich society - and Britain today is surely richer than even Marx envisaged - would be able to offer its members self-actualization and freedom. Brown, however, can do no better than a mediocre human resources manager seeking to entrench capitalist alienation: turn up on time, do what bosses tell you, and you‘ll get a little pay rise. ... There’s something, though, that depresses me even more than the narrowness and lack of ambition of Brown’s words. It’s that they might actually appeal to voters."
• Frank Rich, What Could You Live Without?: "Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house. “We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”"
• Kevin Drum, The Vicious Cycle of Stagnant Wages: "Here's my capsule view of the great financial meltdown of 2008: For the past couple of decades, the benefits of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the rich. But the middle class still wanted to prosper, so the rich loaned them money to continually improve their lifestyles. That worked for a while. And then it didn't. This is a fairly idiosycratic view, and obviously not the whole story. And although plenty of economists have condemned growing income inequality and years of middle class wage stagnation, none of them (as far as I know1) have explicitly given it a share of the blame for the economic collapse of 2008. But via Mike Konczal, I finally have a credentialed ally. Take it away, Raghuram Rajan: 'In a new book he is working on, entitled “Fault Lines,” Rajan argues that the initial causes of the breakdown were stagnant wages and rising inequality. With the purchasing power of many middle-class households lagging behind the cost of living, there was an urgent demand for credit. The financial industry, with encouragement from the government, responded by supplying home-equity loans, subprime mortgages, and auto loans....The side effects of unrestrained credit growth turned out to be devastating-a possibility that most economists had failed to consider.'"
  

So I hear a new jobs bill could be in the works. It would of course be great to have more funding for job creation, but I wonder if this next round could improve on the last stimulus's approach to doing economic development. One possibility would be to include funding to build up capacity to administer ARRA funds for economic development more effectively. Beefed-up administration could improve the stimulus's effectiveness in three ways.

The first is funding for outreach and marketing. A bewildering array of opportunities have been made available for businesses, workers, and consumers. People don't know what the're eligible for. Local governments, under pressure from budget cuts and new demands, often do not have the capacity or will to reach out to them. This can have a particularly harmful effect on low-income communities and small-to-medium sized businesses, both of which have historically had difficulty accessing benefits and services. They'll only be further cut-off if something isn't done to improve outreach.

There's also solid evidence that outreach matters. An evaluation of California enterprise zones found that areas that did marketing and outreach had more job creation than areas that did not. The evaluation was just written up in the latest issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. It has a subscription wall, but here's a summary of their key findings:

Zones vary in their demographic and economic conditions. They also vary because local zone management is responsible for marketing and outreach, coordinating other incentives, and other economic development activities in the zones, and zone administrators make different choices about which of these activities they engage in and choose to emphasize. The evidence suggests that the enterprise zone program has a more favorable effect on employment in zones that have a lower share of manufacturing and in zones where managers report doing more marketing and outreach activities; as it turns out, this latter result has some parallels to findings from earlier literature on heterogeneity in the effects of enterprise zones (discussed below).

Another administrative need is for greater planning. Locals need sector-focused plans and the capacity to execute them to get the most out of their ARRA funding. ARRA itself is very complex and there's a risk that traditional policy silos will prevent locals from integrating related programs, like the many initiatives targeting sectors in the "green" economy. Further, governments need to coordinate the ARRA-funded development initiatives with local programs and conditions. Research needs to be done on the needs and priorities of local businesses. Each local and regional economy has its own strengths and weaknesses. Administrators need to know what local conditions are like to develop an effective plan.

Finally, programs need to be evaluated. At the very least there should be funding to solicit input and feedback. This will not only improve program design but could provide more convincing evidence that stimulus programs are working.

Fundamentally, the next stimulus should set-aside funding to build up capacity at the local level. In exchange the Obama administration should find greater job creation and better evidence of the impact the stimulus is having in particular places. It's also worth recalling that the New Deal-era programs weren't just a series of isolated public works projects. They were coordinated and managed by new governing bodies like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Maritime Commission. The same kind of vision needs to be supplied to restore job growth today.

• E.J. Dionne, Symposium: Intellectuals and their America: "In a democracy, political engagement is an act of patriotism, a declaration of faith in the judgment of one’s fellow citizens and thus, ultimately, in one’s nation. Michael Walzer is right that the truly effective social critics are embedded in their societies and operate at least as much out of love as from alienation. And love is usually dominant. In The Company of Critics, Walzer quotes the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik: “A movement that does not honor society’s constant values is not sufficiently mature to undertake the reshaping of that society.” Walzer draws the right conclusion: “Criticism is most powerful . . . when it gives voice to the common complaints of the people or elucidates the values that underlie those complaints.” Note the twin obligations Walzer imposes on the critic: the democratic obligation to voice “common complaints” and the intellectual obligation to elucidate values. The latter can be quite subversive of accepted understandings, exposing as it typically does the ways in which a society ignores or violates the values it claims as its bedrock. Few leaders better embodied the patriotism inherent in embedded criticism than Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both drew on the insistence of the nation’s founding document that all men are created equal to launch social and political movements that revolutionized the country."
• The Guardian, A Pilot's Life: Exhausting Hours for Meagre Wages: "Anyone waiting for their underpants to be checked knows that the glamour went out of flying years ago. But nowhere has the cachet fallen so far as in the US, where pilots on commuter airlines responsible for more than half the country's flights now earn pitifully low salaries for long, unsocial hours. "
• Lee Drutman, What Came First: Conservatism or Status Quo?: "Miriam Matthews, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the Claremont Graduate University, Shana Levin, an associate profess of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Jim Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at Harvard University, have found evidence that both general feelings of threat and specific anxiety about other ethnic groups sometimes do lead individuals to embrace two tenets of political conservatism — support for the status quo and a belief that there is a natural social hierarchy to society. These tenets provide a salve for uncertainties and anxieties by offering a belief system in which there is a strong order to things."
  

• NYTimes, Boulez's Gentler Roar: “I don’t apologize for being on the barricades,” [Boulez] said, recollecting his early days during the late 1940s and early ’50s, when he wrote a notoriously pitiless obituary of Schoenberg, conspicuously booed Stravinsky’s music in Paris in 1945 and declared that any musician who had not experienced, as he infamously put it, “the necessity of dodecaphonic music” was “useless” because he is “irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.” “Like a lion that had been flayed alive,” was Messiaen’s description of the young Mr. Boulez. “You never get results if you aren’t fighting,” Mr. Boulez now says. “I understand better other points of view, although I still may fight against them.” Mr. Barenboim phrased it another way when we talked one recent afternoon: “What makes Pierre a towering modernistic figure is that he has managed in his life to move between revolutionary moments and evolutionary moments. When revolution was necessary, he was there, courageously, to lead it.""
• NY Times, Multicultural Critical Theory. At B School?: ""A decade ago, Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, had an epiphany. The leadership at his son’s elementary school had asked him to meet with its retiring principal to figure out how it could replicate her success. He discovered that the principal thrived by thinking through clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any pre-planned strategy — the same approach taken by the managing partner of a successful international law firm in town. “The ‘Eureka’ moment was when I could draw a data point between a hotshot, investment bank-oriented star lawyer and an elementary school principal,” Mr. Martin recalls. “I thought: ‘Holy smokes. In completely different situations, these people are thinking in very similar ways, and there may be something special about this pattern of thinking.’” That insight led Mr. Martin to begin advocating what was then a radical idea in business education: that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting. More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.""
• MDRC, Testing Transitional Jobs and Pre-Employment Services in Philadelphia: "The evaluation uses a rigorous design in which nearly 2,000 long-term and potential long-term welfare (TANF) recipients were assigned at random to TWC [transitional jobs] or STEP [pre-employment services], or to a control group that did not participate in either program. The research team is following all three groups over time using surveys and administrative data. Results for the first 18 months show that: The TWC program group members had significantly higher employment rates and earnings than the control group members, but the difference faded after the first year of follow-up. When earnings from transitional jobs and unsubsidized jobs are combined, the TWC group earned about $1,000 (26 percent) more than the control group, on average, and received significantly less welfare assistance. The earnings gains and welfare reductions largely offset one another, however, leaving the two groups with about the same total income. Recipients who were assigned to the STEP program did not work or earn more, or receive less welfare, than the control group. The results may have been affected by the fact that many people who were assigned to STEP did not participate in the program for long periods."
  

There's been an interesting back-and-forth between Ryan Avent and Alec MacGillis over urban development-guru Richard Florida. Defending Florida, Avent most clearly explains his thinking in this section of his first response to MacGillis's American Prospect article criticizing Florida.

But what makes a successful clump changes over time. The economics that underpinned the older manufacturing economy supported clumps that don’t necessarily make economic sense today. With declines in transportation and communication costs, it became affordable to move plants away from expensive city land, and that’s precisely what many businesses did. In cities that were also home to a substantial knowledge economy sector, this ultimately proved to be a boon. By outsourcing their manufacturing (and later, their back office) components, firms could reduce the overhead on the offices of those who still needed to be in the city, improving margins (and making more room in the city for others who needed to be there, thus increasing the return to everyone of being in the city).

The result is a world where the key to urban success is a critical mass of workers with high levels of what economists like to call human capital. And because there are returns to scale at work, there is an element of the zero sum here. Or to put it another way, the world where every big city has its own fair share of talent is not a stable equilibrium; it will decay into a world with haves and have nots. And indeed, that’s what we have seen in recent decades. Educational levels in cities one hundred years ago strongly predict educational levels in cities today. And cities with high shares of college graduates have absorbed more than their share of new college graduates in recent decades.

The main problem with this argument is that it fails to account for the role of foreign competition. Transportation and communication breakthroughs not only enabled companies to disperse their operations all over the world; they enabled foreign companies to import cheaply and compete with U.S.-produced goods. Starting in the 1960s, U.S. manufacturers lost substantial market share in a variety of goods to foreign competitors, and many economists attribute the economic stagnation of the 1970s to the inability of U.S. industries to compete with foreign companies. In the 1980s, with the aid of deregulated markets, companies were able to return to profitability only through mergers and extensive outsourcing to low-wage countries.

Human capital levels are important, but the bigger issue is why they are important. Of course, the rise of high-tech clusters and Richard Florida's creative enclaves are part of the story. But so is the role of the global dispersion of production, which has given rise to new forms of agglomeration. Global production networks need to be coordinated, and these jobs typically require high levels of education and specialized knowledge, and therefore are subject to agglomeration in a few select cities, creating jobs in business and financial services. While this process has helped revive some American cities, it also creates a need for a massive industry engaged in speculative finance.

The financial crisis has shown just how unstable this arrangement is, and perhaps it has also demonstrated that the returns to this system of production are declining. After all, at some point, industry will drive labor costs as low as they will go.

Finally, the increasing importance of human capital does not necessarily mean that high-wage manufacturing in America is dead. One option is to take a "clusters" approach to regional development, which the Brookings Institutions' Metropolitan Policy Program is promoting. Others include adjusting the terms of trade, spreading best practices and innovations through manufacturing extension programs, reducing workforce shortages and upgrading existing workforce skills.

• Aaron M. Renn, Will Anyone Stand Up For American Industry?: "There's a positive reinforcement cycle at work. The less we manufacture, the less we can manufacture. We slowly lose the skills, the facilities, the institutions, and the culture that enable a robust manufacturing economy to thrive. Eventually, we won't be able to recover. Maybe we won't even want to. The less we make, the less we want to make. As we become unmoored from our agro-industrial roots, we fail to see them as central to our national identity and frequently treat them with hostility. As Douglas and Wildavsky put it in Risk and Culture (1982): A larger proportion of the population of working age was disengaged from the production process than had been before. The economic boom and educational boom together produced a cohort of articulate, critical people with no commitment to commerce and industry. Increasingly, Americans have no personal experience with industry, and even no family experience with it. What was once common is just another niche, much like military service has become. This means most people have little familiarity or affection for industry, agriculture, or energy production. Many, especially urban dwellers, view most productive industry as a negative, as a source of blight where once others saw jobs and a strong tax base.
• Harold Meyerson, Without a movement, progressives can't aid Obama's agenda: "In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda."
• John Judis, Barack Obama, You Remind Me of Herbert Hoover: "Most economic commentators have focused on the “financial crisis” and ignored or downplayed the crisis in the productive core. In the broadest terms, this crisis goes back to the 1970s when the U.S. began to lose market share--and in some cases entire industries like consumer electronics--to European and Asian competitors. It abated somewhat in the 1990s with the emergence of new computer/telecommunications/internet industries, but it became acute again in the early 2000s with the dotcom-telecom bust, which underlay the recession of 2001-2. There was a brief uptick in private non-residential investment in 2005-6, but according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it began to decline in 2007 and has continued to do so. In the third quarter of this year, at the same time that economists were trumpeting the recession’s end, investment in non-residential structures fell 19.8 percent and in industrial equipment 4.8 percent from the previous quarter."
• NY Times, For Working Families Party in New York, Power Brings Challenges: "Bill de Blasio, New York City’s new public advocate, is a lifelong Democrat and a likely future mayoral contender. But ask him to name the most innovative political force in the state, and he points to the Working Families Party. “On the issues they care about, from minimum wage to tenant issues to development, they are absolutely definitional — they can set the debate at the city and the state level,” Mr. de Blasio said." .... Since its founding in 1998, the Working Families Party has accumulated a handsome pile of scalps, and prodded and sometimes dragged Democrats to the left. This year it successfully championed a so-called millionaire’s tax and a bill to train workers and weatherize houses — and its troops helped push Mr. de Blasio to victory. Its ambitions, too, remain outsize: Leaders have seeded chapters across the nation. “They are the only state party that’s a full-time party with ideas,” said Ed Ott, former political director of the Central Labor Council. “You call the Democratic Party in between an election, and it’s a ghost town.”"
  

• James Galbraith, Who Are These Economists, Anyway?: "In the present crisis, the vapor trails of fraud and corruption are everywhere: from the terms of the original mortgages, to the appraisals of the houses on which they were based, to the ratings of the securities issued against those mortgages, to gross negligence of the regulators, to the notion that the risks could be laid off by credit default swaps, a substitute for insurance that lacked the critical ingredient of a traditional insurance policy, namely loss reserves. None of this was foreseen by mainstream economists, who generally find crime a topic beneath their dignity. In unraveling all this now, it is worth remembering that the resolution of the savings and loan scandal saw over a thousand industry insiders convicted and imprisoned. Plainly, the intersection of economics and criminology remains a vital field for research going forward."
• Miller-McCune, The Revolution Will be Mapped: "The Kirwan Institute at Ohio State University engages in "opportunity mapping," which begins with the assumption that opportunities for high-quality housing, employment, education, health care and other key indicators should be distributed equally throughout a given metropolitan area. Kirwan maps identify disparities in the distribution of opportunities, which in turn provides direction for policymakers to correct those disparities. In a similar vein, the Los Angeles-based Advancement Project takes a solution-oriented approach with its mapping initiative, the Healthy City Project. An interactive, online compendium of demographic, economic and health data for Los Angeles County, Healthy City also pinpoints the location of services for referral purposes and lets users create maps to identify concerns in their own neighborhoods. Developed in collaboration with an innovative GIS lab at UCLA, the Healthy City platform is so advanced that stakeholders often consult with project staff to inform policy debates and decisions."
• Dean Baker, Samuelson Wrong on Scarcity: "The most painful aspect of the economic crisis is that the pain is unnecessary. Ordinarily we think of the economy being limited by the supply of available resources, land, labor, and capital. We can't all have huge houses with servants. In a world where the economy is limited by supply, pain is understandable, even if not acceptable. To give one person more means taking something away from someone else. But, that is not the situation the U.S. or world economy faces today. We don't have 15 million unemployed because of scarcity. We have 15 million people unemployed because of a lack of demand. This is exactly the same problem that the country faced in the depression. All we had to do then to get people employed was to spend money, which we eventually did in very large amounts to fight World War II. That is what we need to do now to end the enormous pain caused by this downturn. Unfortunately, there is a lack of political will to undertake the necessary spending in part because of political hacks running around complaining about deficits. This is why it is especially painful to see Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson refer to the "scarcity" in which today's youth are being raised. In fact, they are being raised in a period of unprecedented abundance. It only looks like scarcity because the country's economic policy is so awful."