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.

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.

• Amartya Sen, The Economist Manifesto: "One of the striking features of [Adam] Smith's personality is his inclination to be as inclusive as possible, not only locally but also globally. He does acknowledge that we may have special obligations to our neighbours, but the reach of our concern must ultimately transcend that confinement. To this I want to add the understanding that Smith's ethical inclusiveness is matched by a strong inclination to see people everywhere as being essentially similar. There is something quite remarkable in the ease with which Smith rides over barriers of class, gender, race and nationality to see human beings with a presumed equality of potential, and without any innate difference in talents and abilities."
• Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray, What's Going on with Young People Today?: "Although many policy makers in Washington are now focused on programs designed for the early years of a child's life (the critical "zero to three" years), it remains important to offer supports as youth make their way into adulthood. Without discounting the importance of services in infancy and early childhood, we stress that young adults make and take exceedingly consequential decisions and actions that carry strong and cumulative effects—on schooling, work, marriage, and parenthood—over the many decades of life ahead. Only by continuing or increasing investments in young people after the age of eighteen can policy makers implement the supports needed to make the road to adulthood less perilous."
  

• Robert Frank, The Tax that Hides in Your Paycheck: "Economic theory holds that in competitive labor markets, workers are paid the market value of what they produce. In actual markets, pay does rise with productivity, but not by much. The most productive carpenter in a framing crew, for example, might produce twice as much as his least productive colleague, but is rarely paid even 30 percent more. To see the pattern at first hand, consider groups of co-workers who perform similar tasks in your own company. In one case, suppose that your two most productive co-workers leave the job; in the other, suppose that the three least productive leave. Which group’s departure causes a greater loss of value? Most people would answer that losing the top two hurts more. If so, economic theory holds that their combined salaries should be higher than the combined salaries of the bottom three. Yet the typical pattern is the reverse: any three workers in a group performing similar tasks earn substantially more than any other two. In short, the startling fact is that private businesses typically transfer large amounts of income from the most productive to the least productive workers. Because labor contracts are voluntary under United States law, it would be bizarre to object that these transfers violate anyone’s rights. ... in effect, private markets are already applying an implicit progressive tax in the way they pay workers. And, in the process, they serve the interests of everyone in the hierarchy. The alternative would be costly social fragmentation. ... Tax systems that transfer income from rich to poor, thus mimicking the implicit transfers in virtually every private labor contract, reflect the costs and benefits of different rungs on the social ladder. They help make stable, diverse societies possible. Enlightened libertarians believe that the best social institutions mimic the agreements people would have negotiated among themselves, if free exchange had been practical. Private pay patterns suggest that our current tax code meets that test."
• John Quiggin, After the Dead Horses: "... while I don’t see much, if any, benefit in engaging with actually existing conservatism, that doesn’t mean that we should ignore conservative, and libertarian, ideas. You don’t have to be an unqualified admirer of writers like Burke, Popper or Hayek to concede that they made valid criticisms of the progressive ideas of their day, and to seek a better way forward. Some examples of the kind of thing I have in mind: * Popper’s critique of historicism. After thirty years in which teleological claims of inevitable triumph have been the stock in trade of Fukuyama and his epigones, the left should surely have been cured of such ideas, but their centrality is evident in the very use of terms like “progressive”. It’s important to recognise that beneficial change is not an automatic outcome of “progress”; * Burke and his successors on the need for beneficial reform to be “organic”, in the sense that it reflects the actual historical evolution of particular societies, rather than being based on universal truths that are applicable in all times and places; * Hayek on the impossibility of comprehensive planning. No planner can possess all relevant information or account for all possible contingencies. We need institutions that respond to local information and that are robust enough to cope with unconsidered possibilities. In some circumstances, but certainly not all, markets fit the bill. ... equally, we need to reconsider Marxian and other left socialist critiques of social democracy. The central burden of most such critiques is that the welfare-state and similar interventions offer no possibility of transforming society or substantially mitigating the inequality of wealth and power inherent in capitalism. The last time this kind of debate had any relevance beyond setting out the correct viewpoint from which to deplore the advances of the right was back around the 1970s. At that time, there was a serious belief in the possibility of a revolutionary alternative in relation to which social democratic reforms were at best a distraction, at worst a deliberate obstacle. This belief (I assume) has now completely dissipated. So, the standard Marxian critique of the 1970s now amounts to defeatism: social democracy can’t change capitalism and neither can anything else. But radical movements can make space for lots of of different ideas, particularly in relation to organisation and mobilisation, and local ‘bottom-up’ policy initiatives. At least some of the time currently spent on combating the right ought to be devoted to more engagement with these ideas. .... as I’ve said before, the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribalism that threatens to engulf us."
• Mike Lux, Progressive Populism and the Business Community: "I think progressives should be very clear about which business sectors we want to align with and which we want to push against. For myself, I am very clear about sectors I want to downsize, break apart, and diminish in power: the biggest banks need to be broken apart and restrained from gambling recklessly; health insurance companies should have their anti-trust exemption revoked, their competition increased, and their rates and practices far more regulated; pharmaceutical companies' power and profits should be reined in; and oil and coal companies should be downsized and phased out as quickly as possible. Other big industries should be better regulated; kept from harassing their workers when they organize, kept from hurting the environment, kept from producing unsafe products, and kept from growing so big they stifle competition. But in general, we want to encourage healthy and growing industrial, technological, green energy, and construction companies. Progressives should ally themselves to these sectors as long as they keep a decent social contract with their workers and communities. Creating these kinds of alliances can encourage better behavior by these kinds of companies, and build the political power we need to take on corrupt industries and political conservatives."
• J.K. Rowling, The Single Mother's Manifesto: "... I keep having flashbacks to 1997, and not merely because of the most memorable election result in recent times. In January that year, I was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, teaching part-time but living mainly on benefits, in a rented flat. Eleven months later, I was a published author who had secured a lucrative publishing deal in the US, and bought my first ever property: a three-bedroom house with a garden.... I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize. I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles. A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug."
  

• Jonathan Chait, Libertarian Electoral Fantasies: "Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction .... Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. .... Indeed, when libertarians like Wilkinson talk about "libertarian-ish" voters in any context, they're leaning very, very heavily on the "ish." The most thorough breakdown of the electorate is Pew's voter typology survey, last conducted in 2005, which categorizes voters into nine basic groups. The overwhelming finding of this research is that the components of both electoral coalitions are far less libertarian than their parties -- the GOP coalition has a lot of hawkish or socially conservative voters who favor more economic activism, and the Democratic Party has a lot of social conservatives who are skeptical of immigration and gay marriage. The sorting of the parties is one reflection of the massive over-representation of libertarian-ish views among elites. .... Practically speaking, the libertarian vote is non-existent, while the opposite viewpoint—economically liberal and socially conservative, which some call populist—is quite large. This fact tends to get lost in the political discussion because the political discussion is run by elites who are far closer to libertarianism than the public as a whole. (Case in point: Press critic Jay Rosen recently suggested CNN divvy its evening lineup into left/right/libertarian blocs, ignoring the vastly larger populist segment of the electorate.) Populist voters simple lack any intellectual infrastructure whatsoever."
• Noah Millman, Who Closed the Conservative Mind?: "Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment. I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind."
• Streetsblog.org, New Analysis Tracks 40 Years of Changes in How Kids Get to School: "The percentage of U.S. students between ages five and 14 who walk or bike to school has remained stable over the past 15 years but remains three-quarters below where it stood 40 years ago, according to a new analysis of government data by two groups working on the Safe Routes to School (SRtS) program. Crunching numbers from the U.S. DOT's National Household Travel Survey, the National Center for SRtS and the SRtS National Partnership concluded that between 1969 and 2009, school transportation habits essentially flipped -- with auto use rising from 12 percent of the student population to 44 percent, and biking or walking going from a 48-percent popularity rate with kids to just 13 percent."
  

At least 25 miners have died in an explosion at a coal mine in West Virginia. Although the cause of the blast has yet to be determined, the safety record of the company that owns the mine isn't reassuring as these paragraphs from the NYT's story make clear:

For at least six of the last 10 years, federal records indicate, the Upper Big Branch mine has recorded an injury rate worse than the national average for similar operations. The records also show that the mine had 458 violations in 2009, with $897,325 in safety penalties assessed against it, of which it has paid $168,393.

“Massey’s [the company that owns the mine] commitment to safety has long been questioned in the coalfields,” said Tony Oppegard, a lawyer and mine safety advocate from Kentucky.

Those concerns were heightened in 2006 when an internal memo written by Mr. Blankenship [Massey Energy's CEO] became public. In the memo, Mr. Blankenship instructed the company’s underground mine superintendents to place coal production first.

“This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills,” he wrote.

See this FDL post for more on Blankenship.

• NELP and CAPAF, Contracting that Works: A Toolkit for State and Local Government: "Growing numbers of state and local governments are therefore adopting “responsible contracting” reforms to improve the quality of jobs generated by their procurement spending. This report identifies the best practices in government contracting that are allowing state and local governments to significantly raise standards for workers and secure better value for taxpayers."
• Council of Economic Advisers, Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility: "Almost one-third of firms cite costs or limited funds as obstacles to implementing
  workplace flexibility arrangements. However, the benefits of adopting such management practices can outweigh the costs by reducing absenteeism, lowering turnover, improving the health of workers, and increasing productivity."
• Garlin Gilchrist II, Abundance-Based Reform: "Abundance-based thinking looks for ways to innovate our way out of challenges. It sees barriers as opportunities to do things in new, better, sustainable ways. It puts no cap on our ability to create change that can meet community needs in ways that reflect our community values."
• NY Times, In Maine, Last Sardine Cannery in the U.S. is Clattering Out: "On April 18, the clanking will cease. The bells and buzzers that regulate the pace of packing will fall silent. The old plant, the last sardine cannery in the United States, is shutting down. ... The packers, all of whom are women, are the heart of the processing plant, largely because they still work the fish with their hands. They are paid by the number of cans they pack and can earn up to $18 or $19 an hour. In the break room off the packing floor, Nancy Harrington, 70, who has worked here for 44 years, said she did not want to retire. “I could work another 10 years,” she said. Her three daughters have worked here, too, and so has her sister."
  

• Leo Hindery, Not 'Loyal Opposition' Within the Democratic Party?: "... it's year two and health care reform is over, over, over. Unless the administration wants to see its most loyal friends become a real loyal opposition, it must take immediate and robust actions to help American workers by: 1) giving the nation that industrial policy; 2) making our trade deals fairer and then more strictly enforcing them; 3) enacting strong and enforceable "Buy American" legislation; 4) adopting 'Roosevelt-Kennedy' style jobs programs in order to get Americans who want to work back to work immediately."
• Darryl Lorenzo Washington, Sex, Race, and Precious: "In general, the hysterical attacks on the movie [Precious] take the same parochial stance as those that would view Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (a classic account of a provincial French girl’s exploitation) as a polemic against French rural life rather than a paean to a young girl’s fortitude and an indictment of all France. Neither incest nor familial dysfunction are racial themes; Precious shows how social illnesses—like medical illnesses—are exacerbated by ignorance and poverty. Precious also shows how the weight of whiteness—an intangible and insidious sense that society is ruled by white privilege—is a double burden upon the black poor. It was a cliché, often repeated during the Obama campaign, that his election would prove to poor black children that they could ascend to the presidency; Precious is a film that looks behind this lovely idea to examine the economic forces and psychological detriments that make it an easier said than done. Precious is, in every sense, a film that pushes the country to eschew self-congratulation. The final moments in which Precious escapes from her wrecked home to begin her life on her own—accompanied by the audience’s near certainty that she will fail—are deeply touching, and Precious is easily one of the most important American films of the last thirty years."
• Breakthrough Institute, A New Look at Government Involvement in Technology Development: "This document therefore presents seven historic case studies of American innovation, ranging from the rise of railroads and commercial flight to more recent developments in personal computing and the Internet. It also presents three shorter case studies spotlighting recent developments in energy technology and two international examples of public-sector support for clean energy development. In each example, government support was critical at one or more stages in the development and deployment of these technologies, many of which Americans now take for granted as constant facets of their everyday lives."
• Rockefeller Institute, A New Paradigm for Economic Development: How Higher Education Institutions Are Working to Revitalize their Regional and State Economies: "Universities and higher education systems across the country are taking leading roles in their states’ economic development efforts — and a report released today by the Rockefeller Institute of Government says this trend seems likely to strengthen as the nation moves into the era of an “innovation economy.” The study found that higher education’s increasingly important role builds on, but goes well beyond, the research strengths of universities — incorporating efforts as wide-ranging as job training, business consulting, housing rehabilitation and even securing seed money for new businesses."