• NY Times, After a Life in Labor, a Union Leader Retires, Frustrated by the Movement's Troubles: "Ms. Burger has often championed women’s causes. She noted that while women were half the work force, they did far more than half the work because they not only work on the job, but do most of the cooking, cleaning and child-rearing at home. “We have not developed public policies that support working women the way we should,” she said. “When women can be forced to work mandatory overtime when they have children at home and don’t have access to child care, that’s a huge problem. “We’re still lacking a lot of support mechanisms for women,” she added. “We’re the only industrial nation that doesn’t have paid maternity leave. Many businesses haven’t stepped up, so the government needs to.”"
• Le Monde diplomatique, Glasgow's Two Nations: "The World Health Organisation published a report in 2008, revealing that the difference in life expectancy between a child born in the wealthier south or west of Glasgow, and one born in a poor area in the east, was 28 years (1). The report found that some areas of Glasgow had the lowest life expectancy in Europe: 54 for men and 75 for women. Its recommendations included universal access to clean water, food, housing, healthcare and energy; also improvements in education, lifestyle, town planning and working conditions. It should have caused a storm, but it hardly caused a ripple."
• The Independent, White British School Children Hit Worst by Poverty: "Poverty has a far greater influence on the performance of white British pupils at school than any other ethnic group, according to research published today. Figures show a 31 percentage point gap between rich and poor white British pupils obtaining five A* to C grade passes at GCSE compared with just five percentage points for Chinese pupils and seven percentage points for Bangladeshi youngsters. ... White families of high socio-economic status have more resources to be able to invest in education, such as buying tutors for their children, and they might be a bit more savvy about ensuring that their children go to schools with similar pupils and good results," he said."
  

The short answer is no, see:

• David Grusky and Emily Ryo, Did Katrina Recalibrate Attitudes toward Poverty and Inequality?: "We test the popular claim that poverty and inequality were “dirty little secrets” until the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina exposed them to a wider public. If this account were on the mark, it would suggest that the absence of major antipoverty initiatives in the United States is partly attributable to public ignorance and apathy coupled with the narrowly rational decision on the part of policymakers to attend to other issues about which the public evidently cares more. Using the 2004 Maxwell Poll, we find strikingly high levels of awareness and activism on poverty and inequality issues even prior to Katrina, clearly belying the “dirty little secret” account. The follow-up Maxwell Poll, which was administered in 2005 immediately after Katrina, revealed only a slight increase in public awareness of poverty and inequality. The Katrina effect was evidently dampened because (1) the large number of preexisting poverty activists reduced the size of the residual population “at risk” for conversion to antipoverty activism, and (2) the remaining non-activists were ardently opposed to poverty activism and hence unlikely to be receptive to the liberal message coming out of Katrina."
• Danile Hopkins, Flooded Communities, Explaining Local Reactions to the Post-Katrina Migrants: "This paper uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing in part on a new survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the national concern about issues of race and poverty following Katrina, people in communities that took in evacuees became less supportive of spending to help the poor and African Americans. The results suggest a novel hypothesis that threatened responses to newcomers hinge on both local conditions and the coverage of their arrival in the local media.....Those who worked with the evacuees had many kind things to say about them, but as the survey data show, those charitable thoughts did not influence their political views. Instead, to the extent that people’s political views changed, they often responded to news of the evacuees’ generous federal benefits by withdrawing their support for federal spending targeting Blacks and poor people. Or else they responded to portrayals of the evacuees as criminals in Houston. One informant captured this insight when he explained, “heart-warming, good stories–they don’t sell. The stories that sell are the one evacuee who uses a Red Cross [benefit] card in the Galleria, [a local mall].” The newspapers did print positive stories. In Houston, 35% of stories were either about host community accomplishments or evacuee accomplishments, and the figure for Baton Rouge was 42%. Making the best of a tough situation was a common story line. Yet the attitudinal changes were universally negative toward the evacuees, perhaps reflecting the fact that the success stories were not framed in politically relevant ways. No wonder one Houston evacuee told a survey, “the media blame New Orleans people”(Wilson and Stein, 2006, pg.16). This pattern of findings is similar to the “double-edged sword” that Aldrich and Crook (2008) find in their study of post-Katrina trailer locations."
  

• NY Times, New Job Means Lower Wages for Many: "For years, long before the recession began, job growth had become increasingly polarized in this country. High-paid occupations that require significant amounts of education and training grew rapidly alongside low-wage, service-type jobs that do not, according to David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The growth of these low-wage jobs began in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s and began to really take off in the 2000s. Losing out in the shuffle, Dr. Autor said, were jobs that he described as “middle-skill, middle-wage” — entry-level white-collar positions, like office and administrative support work, and certain blue-collar jobs, like assembly line workers and machine operators. The recession appears to have magnified that trend, Dr. Autor wrote in a recent paper, released jointly by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy group, and the Hamilton Project, which has a more centrist reputation. From 2007 to 2009, the paper said, there was relatively little net change in total employment for both high-skill and low-skill occupations, while employment plummeted in so-called middle-skill occupations."
• National Employment Law Project, Where the Jobs Are: "We find that: 1) To date, net job growth in 2010 has not been distributed evenly across the economy. Growth has been concentrated in mid-wage and lower-wage industries. By contrast, higher-wage industries showed weak growth and even net losses. 2) We also find a striking imbalance between the jobs that were lost and the jobs that are growing. Net job losses in 2008-2009 were widely distributed and included significant losses in higher-wage industries; by contrast, net job growth in 2010 has been driven disproportionately by industries with median wages below $15.00 a hour. 3) Common occupations in growth industries include many front-line, non-college degree jobs that often pay low wages and annual earnings. Among industries that grew in 2010, the top three occupations are retail sales persons, cashiers, and food preparation workers; combined, these three occupations numbered almost 10 million jobs in July 2010, with median wages below $10 an hour. This analysis is a first look based on seven months of job growth data, and trends may shift in the months ahead (NELP will be updating this report regularly). But the findings presented here raise an early warning of the possibility of unequal growth that could prove as challenging to hopes for a broadly shared recovery as our current high unemployment rates."
  

• Levy Economics Institute, Why China Has Succeeded—and Why It Will Continue to Do So: "China’s high output growth rates are a result of capital accumulation, export-led growth policies, and industrialization. The authors analyze the evolution of exports since the 1960s, focusing on the sophistication of China’s export basket and the number of products with comparative advantage (diversification). They find that China’s productive structure was already complex in the 1960s, setting the stage for high growth, with comparative advantage in both labor-intensive and sophisticated products. The authors observe that some form of government intervention underlies all successful cases of structural transformation. China’s spectacular performance is the result of industrial policies that allowed the accumulation of product-specific capabilities. Moreover, the country is positioned to continue performing well if policymakers focus more on employment creation and structural transformation targets than on growth targets."
• NY Times, China's Policies Ensure State Enterprises Grow: "As the Chinese government has grown richer — and more worried about sustaining its high-octane growth — it has pumped public money into companies that it expects to upgrade the industrial base and employ more people. The beneficiaries are state-owned interests that many analysts had assumed would gradually wither away in the face of private-sector competition. ... Once eager to learn from the United States, China’s leaders during the financial crisis have reaffirmed their faith in their own more statist approach to economic management, in which private capitalism plays only a supporting role. “The socialist system’s advantages,” Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said in a March address, “enable us to make decisions efficiently, organize effectively and concentrate resources to accomplish large undertakings.”"
  

• Peter Drier and Christopher Martin, How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting: "Using the news controversy over the community group ACORN, we illustrate the way that the media help set the agenda for public debate and frame the way that debate is shaped. Opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals, often working through web sites) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated an anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the Republican presidential campaign repeated the allegations with a more prominent platform, and the mainstream media reported the allegations without investigating their veracity. As a result, the little-known community organization became the subject of great controversy in the 2008 US presidential campaign, and was recognizable by 82 percent of respondents in a national survey. We analyze 2007–2008 coverage of ACORN by 15 major news media organizations and the narrative frames of their 647 stories during that period. Voter fraud was the dominant story frame, with 55 percent of the stories analyzed using it. We demonstrate that the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story. Conversely, local news media, working outside of elite national news media sources to verify the most essential facts of the story, were the least likely to latch onto the “voter fraud” bandwagon."
• Nancy Folbre, Why Girl Jobs Don't Pay: "In recent Economix posts, Uwe Reinhardt argues that health care is different from other things we buy and sell. I agree. And I argue that child care, elder care, education and many social services resemble health care in this respect. They are not commodities that can be efficiently produced by a purely market-based economic system. ... Many of the best-paying girly jobs – the professional jobs in health care and education that highly educated women are rapidly moving into – are heavily subsidized by the public sector. Many of the worst-paying girly jobs – like teaching young children before they enter public kindergarten – pay badly because they get relatively little public support, are poorly regulated and serve families who can’t afford to pay for high-quality services. Women who want to avoid the hazards of girly jobs can move into manly ones like petroleum engineering (the college degree leading to the best salary in 2009). But women have good reason to be more interested in social engineering. We need to figure out how to honor girly values while earning manly pay."
• EconoSpeak, Social Insurance is a Good Idea: "The neoliberal caucus, which includes the Pete Petersons, Alan Simpsons and Paul Ryans of this world, believe in incentives. Each one of us, at every moment, should have an unmistakable incentive to work as much as possible, save as much as possible, and do everything else to promote economic growth. Marginal tax rates should be rock-bottom, and no government program should shield us from the consequences of our failure to accumulate wealth. It is pure social darwinism. Their sworn enemy is social insurance, the idea that the members of a society would want to pool their risks and achieve a bedrock of security. This means opposition to any form of national health insurance, which pools our medical expense risk, Social Security, which pools retirement risk, and unemployment insurance, which pools labor market risk. We should be prepared, they say, to sink or swim on our own and not look to the “nanny state” to take care of us. I think it’s time for the other side, a.k.a. the forces of civilization and progress, to defend social insurance. It is an enormous advance for a society provide economic security to all its citizens. It gives us peace of mind, and it expresses a humane concern for the well-being of all members of the community, something we should not be ashamed to embrace as a moral principle."
  

In 2002, the Bush administration decided that the federal government needed to get in the business of promoting (heterosexual) marriage and proposed a new federal program—the Healthy Marriage Initiative—dedicated to that purpose. In 2005, the Republican-controlled Congress authorized the program and appropriated $500 million for it over five years. Although some conservative libertarians opposed the program, other conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, lobbied strongly for it as part of a conservative approach to welfare reform.

The first rigorous evaluation of a program funded with these dollars has just come out, and shows—surprise, surprise—that it's a failure. Conducted by Mathematica Policy Research, the evaluation assigned 5,000 unmarried couples—ones who were romantically involved and either expecting a baby together or already had a baby younger than three months—to program or control groups in eight U.S. cities. The program group received three services: 1) group sessions on relationship skills; 2) individual support from family coordinators; and 3) assessment and referral to support services. The group sessions were the core of the program—in essence, program participants received roughly 20 hours of "relationship skills education" that control group participants did not. The random-assignment structure of the evaluation allowed the researchers to isolate the effects these services had outcomes including marriage, living together, domestic violence, and relationship quality.

The researchers found that the program had no effect on the likelihood of couples staying together or getting married, and no effect on relationship quality (measured by variables including subjective relationship happiness) or other measured variables. There was some difference in effects by location—one of the eight sites had generally positive effects, while another had generally negative ones (including an increase in domestic violence). The researchers note that the site with positive effects (Oklahoma City) differed from the other ones in that it include already married couples, while the site with the negative effects (Baltimore) served a higher share of couples in less committed and more tenuous relationships than other sites.

There were some reported positive effects for couples in which both partners are African American, but, on closer examination, these turn out to be underwhelming. The program did not increase the share of African American couples who were romantically involved, living together, or married. Of the six statistically significant positive impacts for African Americans, most were related to "relationship quality," only one was significant at the .01 level, and the effects themselves don't look particularly large. For example, the one outcome significant at the .01 level was an increase in the "use of constructive conflict behaviors," which, as measured by a 4-point scale, was 3.22 for the program group compared to 3.14 for the control group. Moreover, the Baltimore site, which had negative results, had the highest share (92%) of African Americans. In sum, I'm pretty skeptical that the overall apparent positive results for African American couples are real rather than random.

The Healthy Marriage Initiative was funded through 2010 with money originally diverted from other more productive uses, including child care assistance and social insurance for low-wage workers. That was a mistake then, and, given these findings, one that shouldn't be repeated going forward.

In a critical commentary on the Obama Administration's proposed supplemental income poverty measure (SIPM), a proposal based almost exclusively on recommendations made by the National Academy of Sciences in the 1990s, Robert Samuelson makes the puzzling claim that "the administration is defining poverty up." As usual, Samuelson gets things precisely wrong, not surprising given that in a commentary that has the chutzpah to close with a call for "political neutrality," Samuelson cites only two sources, both of whom are conservatives at right-wing think tanks. In fact, the official poverty measure has "defined deprivation down" over the last few decades, moving it further and further away from mainstream living standards over time, as well as from majority public opinion of the minimum amount needed to "get along" at a basic level. As I detail in a recent paper, the biggest concern we should have with the SIPM is that it will lock in this defining down of the poverty standard, not that it will "define poverty up."

The extent to which the current poverty measure has defined deprivation down can be seen by comparing the poverty line's movement over time with public opinion on the minimum income families need to make ends meet. For several decades, Gallup has asked adults: "What is the smallest amount of money a family of four (husband, wife, and two children) needs each week to get along in this community?" When it was initially developed, the official poverty line was equal to about 72 percent of the average response to this "minimum get-along" question. By 2007, the poverty line had fallen to 41 percent of the average response to the get-along question (the 2007 poverty line was $21,500; the minimum get-along average was $52,087). If the poverty line had kept pace with public opinion on the minimum get-along amount over time (that is, remained equal to 72 percent of that amount), the poverty line would have been $37,500 in 2007 rather than $21,500.

Samuelson might respond that the American people don't have a very good sense of what it takes to make ends meet. But other concrete evidence suggests otherwise. In a 2008 paper, James Lin and Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), using a fairly standard methodology for computing "basic family budgets", estimated that on average nationwide, working families with two parents and two children need an income of $48,778 to maintain a "safe but modest standard of living," a number quite consistent with public opinion.

If the current poverty measure were an accurate measure of "the amount needed to meet basic needs," as Samuelson asserts, one would expect most people experiencing food insecurity to live below the poverty line. But, in fact, the majority of food-insecure households, roughly two-thirds, live above the federal poverty line. In 2008, some 9.9 million households experiencing food insecurity had incomes above the federal poverty line, compared to 5.54 million with incomes below it. While the gap narrows somewhat when looking only at the most severe form of food insecurity—what the Department of Agriculture calls "very-low food security," but is more typically described as hunger—a majority of households experiencing it also have incomes above the federal poverty line.

In essence, the current federal poverty measure started out as a measure of very low income and ended up as a measure of extremely low income. The reasons for this are far from politically neutral. The beginnings of the shift toward an ideologically conservative approach to measuring poverty date to the late 1960s. As Gordon Fisher notes, in 1968, the Johnson administration prohibited the Social Security Administration from "tak[ing] a very modest step toward raising the poverty thresholds to reflect increases in the general standard of living," a decision that would have increased the poverty threshold by 8 percent in real terms. This decision appears to have been an ad hoc one, driven by the administration's short-term political need to avoid reporting an increase in poverty five years after declaring "war" on it. However, when the Nixon administration adopted the poverty measure as an official statistic in 1969, it formalized the disconnection between poverty and living standards by tying the official measure to the Consumer Price Index, without making any allowance for real increases in living standards. The disconnection was further solidified when the administration failed to act on recommendations made by a federal interagency task force in 1973 to update the measure for changes in living standards.

When the decision to only update the poverty line for inflation was made in 1969 it may not have seemed as consequential as it does in retrospect. At that time, the poverty line wasn't the only federal measure of basic income security. For much of the 20th century, the federal government had also used and published "family budget standards"—similar to ones produced today by various non-governmental organizations and researchers—that better reflected the minimum income needed to "make ends meet" at a basic level. Most notably, the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor operated a Family Budgets Program for some three decades after World War II. The program had its origin in a request Congress made to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine "what it costs a worker's family to live in the large cities of the United States." The Family Budgets program continued to operate through the 1970s. In 1980, an Expert Committee, one similar to a National Academy of Sciences panel, made recommendations for updating the methodology. But instead of adopting those recommendations, the program was eliminated in 1981 during the first year of the Reagan Administration. In essence, between 1969 and 1981, a narrowly conservative conceptualization and measure of poverty as extremely low income had securely taken root and effectively displaced a more mainstream and multifaceted understanding of poverty and basic income security.

It isn't clear yet whether the SIPM will address this problem. Based on the estimates Census has released to date, the SIPM threshold for a family of four might come in two or three thousand dollars above the current poverty threshold. While a poverty threshold in this range would be modestly higher than the poverty threshold, it is still an "extremely-low" income standard rather than the kind of "very-low" income standard that the federal poverty line originally represented, and far from public opinion and concrete budget numbers on what it takes to afford necessities. (It is also important to note that the SIPM thresholds are not directly comparable with the current poverty thresholds because of differences in how the SIPM defines income and treats certain out-of-pocket expenditures. However, taking these differences into account does not change the ultimate conclusion that the SIPM is an extremely low-income measure, in part because many of the changes are offsetting, especially for families with children.)

So, what to do? In his opening paragraph, Samuelson notes that the question "who is poor in America" is "not an easy one to answer" because there's no "conclusive definition of poverty," and that despite "poverty's messiness, we've tended to measure progress by it against a single statistic...." This is one of the few things Samuelson gets right before he goes off on tangents about immigration and cell phones, but he completely fails to draw the obvious implication from it, that is, if poverty is a multifaceted concept, why not use more than one measure to best capture it?

This is exactly what the United Kingdom did earlier this year when they adopted a new official statistical framework for measuring poverty that is composed of four measures. The first two measures are low-income measures set at 60 percent of median disposable income (net of taxes), but adjusted differently over time. The first one is adjusted each year only for inflation (the UK calls this one an absolute poverty measure), the second is adjusted annually for changes in median income (what the UK calls a relative poverty measure). The third measure combines income, using a slightly higher income standard (70 percent of median disposable income), and material deprivation (measured using an eleven-item index of deprivation, with the deprivation indicators all being items that substantial majorities of the UK public view as necessities). Under this "low-income-plus-deprivation" measure, a person is counted as poor if they have both a low income and experienced a severe level of material deprivation as measured by direct indicators. The final measure is of "persistent poverty" and tracks the number of people counted as income poverty (using the "relative" income measure) in 36 out of the prior 48 months.

It would be easy to adopt this kind of tiered poverty measure in the United States, and most of the improvements included in the administration's proposed measure (such as counting various benefits like the EITC and food stamps that aren't currently counted, and subtracting certain expenses that aren't currently subtracted) could be incorporated into the first two tiers of the measure (the ones that measure "relative" and "absolute" income poverty). Instead of setting the initial income poverty thresholds to the somewhat complicated formula proposed by the administration (the 33rd percentile of expenditures on food, housing, and clothing multiplied by 1.2, with various adjustments for housing status and locational differences in housing costs), we should follow the UK's lead and set the thresholds to a percentage of median income, ideally one that is consistent with mainstream public opinion data and other evidence on what it takes to afford necessities. Using income rather than a particular set of consumption expenditures to set the threshold has a number of advantages, including greater transparency and likely public understanding, and more stability over time (median income is less likely to bubble and pop than housing prices).

In developing a deprivation index like that used in the third tier of the UK measure, we shouldn't assume that only certain traditional goods (i.e., food, shelter, clothing, utilities), are necessities of contemporary modern living. Instead, the list of necessities to include in a deprivation index should be developed based on both community and expert input on current social necessities, as well as survey research that asks the working-age American public to identify, from a list of goods and services, those items that are necessities and that no one in the United States should be without today.

This approach would provide a more accurate, balanced, and transparent picture of economic deprivation due to limited resources than the current poverty measure. It would also blunt many of the conservative criticisms of the administration's proposal—because it would include separate "absolute" and "relative" measures, it would be "political neutral" in a way that the current measure is not. Finally, the incorporation of direct indicators of deprivation would provide a more concrete sense of the lived experience of poverty, something that is lacking from income-only indicators.

This term, I took a qualitative methods class where we talked a lot about post-modern ideas (Pretty unusual for a professional degree, right? Not at Berkeley!) Basically, post-modern thinkers deny that we can understand reality. To the post-modern purist, knowledge is nothing but a biased representation of a reality we can never know. The only useful occupation for a knowledge producer is to critique representations of knowledge, demonstrate who they really benefit, and empower marginalized people in the knowledge production process. This is done with qualitative research.

Maybe all knowledge is biased. What do I know? But in class I got really tired of the argument over bias. We need knowledge of the world to make progress, but at school we're caught between the post-modern critics who do not supply knowledge of reality, and the quantitative "scientists" who see universalities and rationality where there isn't any.

The more important debate is not between the post-moderns and the positivists, but between the positivists and the post-positivists, who argue over what methods can best describe reality. My instinct is that qualitative analysis has more uses than it's given credit for. But for qualitative methods to be useful, they must help us describe and analyze reality better than quantitative methods.

I argue that qualitative methods are a good way of describing the particular, as opposed to the universal. Quantitative analysis presuppose some degree of homogeneity. In order to count and aggregate data, you have to reduce reality to its homogeneous elements. Let's say you have you have two apples and two pears. They can only be added together at the most simplistic level of abstraction. They are all fruits, so you have four fruits. But in the process of reduction, you can lose essential facts about reality. They're no longer apples and pears- just fruits. Maybe you have two apples, but one grew in your backyard, and you planted the tree when you were a kid. The whole story of the apple is neglected in a quantitative analysis.

With human beings, the process of reduction becomes even more problematic. Are all people rational utility-maximizers? Are all capitalists cynical appropriators of labor? These are important insights about human nature, but they leave out a lot of what there is to know about people, and they aren't true in all times and places.

The particular is especially important to planners. We work in specific places and at specific times. This makes the problems we deal with different from other places in significant ways, and these differences are difficult to quantify. People in Berkeley, California, are motivated in different ways than people in the rest of the country, they have a far different history, and so on. Qualitative methods make the more "humanist" side of society more visible.

I don't think that means that different places can't learn from each other. But it does mean there's a limit to one-size-fits-all thinking. That's the most important insight the post-modernists have.

Welfare reform in Wisconsin includes a mix of conservative and progressive elements that date to the date to the early 1990s. The progressive elements include a state Earned Income Tax Credit and broad expansions of child care assistance and health insurance for low-income families. The conservative element, which got the most attention nationally, was a radical redesign of its Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The Wisconsin redesign, known as Wisconsin Works or W-2, was fully implemented when the federal government replaced AFDC with the Temporary Assistance program in 1996.

The conservative changes to Temporary Assistance effectively resulted in the near-elimination of means-tested income supplements for unemployed parents. As a result, the number of unemployed, low-income parents receiving income supplements in Wisconsin declined by an extraordinary 87 percent in Wisconsin between 1993 and 1998. It remains depressed even in the current economic downturn. In a recent analysis, Tim Casey of Legal Momentum, found that the number of families receiving Temporary Assistance income supplements in the state increased by only 2.4 percent between December 2007 and March 2009; by comparison, the number of people receiving Food Stamps nationally increased by 20 percent over the same period. Similarly, a recent study by the state agency that administers W-2 found thousands of families without any income aren't participating in it.

Conservative welfare reformers have generally lauded the changes that led to these reductions in the number of Wisconsin families receiving help. For example, political scientist Lawrence Mead, a proponent of a "New Paternalist" approach to social policy, pointing almost exclusively to the reduction in the number of families helped (or as he put it, reductions in "dependency"), has argued that Wisconsin's redesign was the "most radical and, arguably, the most successful in the nation."

The problems with using this sort of low bar to determine success became apparent in 2002 when the NAACP, Legal Action of Wisconsin and other organization filed a complaint with the federal HHS Office of Civil Rights alleging that the state systematically discriminated on the basis of race and disability in administering the program. In 2004, the state's own report found racial disparities in the program's treatment of Latino and African-American parents. Other research has found that many parents who applied for help from the program and could have benefitted from it, were "diverted", that is, effectively denied assistance.

Some progress was made on this front last week when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced they had reached a compliance agreement with the state on modest improvements to the program that should reduce discrimination. The improvements are mostly common-sense ones, like conducting assessments of the potential mental or physical health limitations of parents, and other needs they may have related to employment and training, at the "front-end" of the program when parents are applying for benefits, but they're important nonetheless. As a recent research on poverty and disability by Peiyun She and Gina Livermore has shown, nearly two-thirds of working-age adults who experience consistent income poverty (36 months in a 48-month period) have a disability. (For a synthesis of this and related research, see my paper Half in Ten). Wisconsin still has a long way to go when it comes to providing effective social insurance for low-wage workers who experience unemployment, but the HHS agreement is at least a step forward.

In March, MDRC released its initial evaluation of New York City's Family Reward's demonstration program. Family Rewards provides cash payments to very low-income parents (below 130 percent of the current poverty line) who meet various conditions related to their children's education (including children's school attendance and scoring above a certain level on standardized tests), family health (maintaining health insurance coverage and preventive care), and their own employment and training (full-time work and participating in certain education and training activities). Family Rewards is based on "conditional cash transfer" programs that currently operate in Latin America, particularly Mexico's Oportunidades program.

The headlines from press accounts of the evaluation (NYT: "New York to End Program to Give Cash to the Poor"; AP: "Money for Good Habits Doesn't Change Lives") frame the demonstration as having little impact, but the actual results are more nuanced. Most notably, families enrolled in the program experienced average monthly income gains of $366 compared to families in a control group. Family Rewards payments amounted to about 80 percent of the difference. Families in the demonstration also experienced substantial reductions in various economic hardships and financial strain. They were less likely to have their phone and utilities disconnected or be food insecure, and more likely to report an improved financial situation compared to the previous year.

The results related to children's education, however, were quite limited. There was generally no improvement in the test scores or school attendance of children in the program (although attendance was already quite high). One exception was for a subgroup of high school students: those students who scored at or above proficiency level in the previous year (before entering the program) saw some gains in attendance and likelihood of moving forward to the next grade. One caveat to these results is that they are based on only one year of data. It may be that additional time is needed for the program to have an impact on educational outcomes; we'll know in 2013 when the final longer-term evaluation is released.

What I take away from the evaluation is that providing income supplements to low-income families increases their income and reduces their levels of economic hardship. This may seem like an insignificant point, but remember that conservatives and even many mainstream anti-poverty researchers believe that public income supplements are counter-productive because they have a large "work disincentive" effect unless conditioned explicitly on employment. That wasn't the case here. (Although Family Rewards isn't a clear-cut test since one of the 22 incentives was for maintaining full-time employment.)

The big question with Family Rewards is whether it's a better way to deliver income supplements to low-income families than other alternatives. The Bloomberg administration describes Family Rewards as the "first major conditional cash transfer initiative" implemented in the United States. This is true in a narrow programmatic sense—the program is the first U.S. demonstration directly modeled on the Latin American CCT programs—but it's not really the case in the broader conceptual sense implied by the term conditional cash transfer. Federal and state governments provide all sorts of transfers that are conditioned on meeting various requirements. Federal tax law, for example, provides subsidies conditioned on homeownership (the mortgage interest deduction), on earnings (the Earned Income Tax Credit), and education (the Hope Tax Credit, Lifetime Learning Credit and others).

While Family Rewards shares these programs' conditionality, it's different in other ways: 1) the transfers are not explicitly linked to costs associated with meeting the conditions; 2) the program is limited to very-low income families; 3) it provides a long list of micro-incentives under a single programmatic umbrella administered by a non-profit agency. This approach might make sense in Mexico and other middle- and lower-income countries where existing means-tested social insurance programs are limited or non-existent, but I'm skeptical that it makes much sense in the United States where we already have established structures for delivering means-tested social insurance and conditional transfers.

So, instead of 22 incentives bundled in a single program, I'd opt for focusing on a handful of benefits that could be made progressively universal and are designed to offset specific costs. To a large extent, this would simply mean extending existing benefits to low-income families. For example, the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit offsets the costs of post-secondary education and training for adults, but it's only available if you have federal income tax liability. The Earned Income Tax Credit provides benefits conditioned on earnings, but the benefits are teensy for low-wage workers without children and youth are completely excluded. Both credits should be made more inclusive and progressive. In terms of new benefits, I'd focus on something for youth in the 16-24 age range, a group who are largely ignored by current social policy (and left mainly to the criminal justice and educational systems). One possibility would be a credit for completing high school (in part to explicitly reduce economic pressures to leave school for work) and, after doing so, moving into work or post-secondary educational and training.