• Zachary Karabell, Is There Too Much Worry About the Debt?: "Almost everyone seems to think that these mounting debts are a severe threat to American prosperity. But what if the real problem isn't too much debt but too much anxiety about debt? ... though eliminating deficits might seem wise, it could actually be fatal to future prosperity. China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, while America can hardly repair its bridges. The U.S. has to invest and spend to build a future, to help re-create a workforce, and for now debt is a means to that end — provided Washington shows it can effectively channel that money. ... Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing. America's indebtedness would be sustainable and even healthy if the underlying economy were vibrant, innovative and strong and if federal and state governments could channel those moneys productively and quickly. The problem isn't how much debt we're carrying today; it's whether the economy of tomorrow will be able to justify it. ...."
• Latoya Peterson, Bridging the Wealth Chasm: "For black women the median wealth (savings and assets minus debit) is only $100, according to a new report. For Hispanic women, it is $120. But the numbers get even worse. For black and Hispanic women ages 36 to 49, the median wealth is $5. For nonwhite women who have never been married, the amount was zero. In the report -- "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future," the Insight Center for Community Economic Development explores the horrifying financial situation faced by women of color. It shows how lower median wages and a lack of intergenerational wealth reserves contribute to the disparity between women of color and everyone else. The difference amounts to "one penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women.""
• The Guardian, Labour to Get Radical with Manifesto: "Labour will pledge an end to the era of extortionate credit in its election manifesto, and is considering big increases in the minimum wage, the introduction of free school meals for all and a reduction in the voting age to 16, Ed Miliband, the cabinet minister responsible for its drafting, reveals today. ... The manifesto will also set out proposals for a new model of banking built round a People's Bank, drawing on the post office network, and a possible cap on credit interest rates."
  

• Justin Wolfers, Hayek Propped Up by Government Intervention: "Sunday’s New York Times reported on attempts by the Texas Board of Education to rewrite the high school curriculum in accordance with its conservative values. .... How do they plan to rewrite high school economics? In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, to the usual list of economists to be studied – economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.... [Citation] data suggests that Hayek just doesn’t belong with Smith, Marx, Keynes, or Friedman. In fact, it seems that despite having enjoyed a much longer period to accumulate citations, he is still much less widely cited than Larry Summers. Sure, Hayek was an insightful economist. But insisting that high schools teach Hayek is a clear statement of ideology, not of economic science. The message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up. I don’t think Hayek would approve."
• Harry Moroz, Turning Our Backs on Benign Neglect: "The GAO has just completed its third and final review of the EZ/EC/RC programs, which are awaiting reauthorization. The results are underwhelming. As the programs aged, they came to be dominated by tax incentives rather than grants and financing decreased. Summarizing past results, the GAO notes: 1) An econometric analysis of the eight urban Round I EZs [there were three program rounds] could not determine whether the [improvements in poverty, unemployment, and economic growth] were a response to the program or to other economic conditions; 2) Similarly, interviews and surveys of EZ and EC stakeholders revealed that respondents credited the programs for certain improvements but also noted that external factors, such as changes in the national economy and in welfare policy, may have been associated with the economic changes in designated communities."
  

As my previous post on the Administration's proposed "Supplemental Poverty Measure" implied, I'm not so sure that the proposal is an "excellent first step" toward a better system of measuring economic security and deprivation. I see it as a fundamentally conservative measure, too conservative for my tastes, and one that wouldn't do much to change the national debate about poverty away from its current conservative fixations on having poorly paid workers toil longer hours and marry more.

The statements of proponents of the new measure aren't particularly reassuring in this regard. In an interview on NPR, Becky Blank, the Administration's point person on the measure, was asked whether the new measure would be "better or worse" than the current, deeply flawed poverty measure, and responded that: "it's hard to say one is better or worse." And, in a New York City report on the new measure, Mayor Bloomberg's office explains that the "measure largely confirms widely accepted wisdom about the long-term determinants of poverty reduction" such as "increased work force participation [and] more children growing up in two-parent families."

Hmm, I tend to think poverty has more to do with the long-term decline in good jobs and unionization, the failure to adopt universal health insurance, the decline in the social wage, and the massive increase in inequality over the last few decades that prevented working- and middle-class families from getting their fair share of growth in the economy and productivity. So, a poverty measure that keeps us in "More Toil!, More Marriage!" land is not exactly my cup of tea.

While my critique comes from the left, Robert Rector and Glenn Beck have recently started to pound on the proposal from the far right. Rector, for example, argues that the new measure "will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama’s endless quest to “spread the wealth” because it would "rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American." And Glenn Beck claimed that because the measure would use what he called a "comparative scale" that he would end up being counted as poor under it. His co-host went so far to call the proposed measure "Marxist."

I wish! A Supplemental Marxist Poverty Measure, now that's change we can believe in!

But seriously. The Rector/Beck line of attack raises a important question: as a nation, do we want to have an economy that boosts living standards for low-income, working-class families at roughly the same rate (or ever a greater rate) as living standards for middle-income families? Should a rising economic tide "lift all boats" in some rough proportion, or are we content with an economy that leaves Americans growing increasingly apart rather than together? I'm a lifting-all-boats kind of guy, one who thinks that America is a stronger nation if it grows together rather than apart, and that even the lowest-paid paid workers deserve their fair share of national growth and prosperity.

During the three decades after WWII, we had an economy that lifted all boats, especially those on the bottom and in the middle. But the dark era of Nixon-Reagan-Bush conservatism went in the opposite direction, and left the bottom and the middle behind. It's interesting that it was President Nixon who officially adopted the current federal poverty line and President Reagan who eliminated the Labor Department's Family Living Standards program in 1981. The Nixon poverty line that we currently have only adjusts for inflation, and doesn't keep pace with typical living standards; while the Family Living Standards program zeroed out by Reagan had produced basic family budget standards for more than three decades, ones that kept pace with living standards. It's almost like conservatives don't want to have national standards that keep track of whether working-class families are getting their fair share of the economic growth they are an essential part of. No surprise given what's happened to the living standards of those families since the Nixon-Reagan era began.

Although I look at this issue from a progressive perspective, it's also important to note that centrist and non-nutty conservatives who've studied poverty measurement agree that the only sensible poverty measures in a wealthy economy like ours are ones that are "comparative" in some sense. In their latest book, conservatives Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill explain that "relative poverty is a better measure of individual well-being than absolute poverty, because social context and community norms about what it means to be poor change over time, implying that the poverty line should be adjusted as economic growth makes everyone better off. ..." Haskins is a Republican whose previous gig was guiding the 1996 conservative welfare law through Congress as a staffer to the Gingrich Republicans; Sawhill is a DLC-style conservative Democrat, who sees poverty mostly in conventional "more work effort (regardless of job quality); more marriage" terms. I disagree with them on most everything, but here they're basically right on.

The other person who agrees with me, Haskins, and Sawhill, is Adam Smith—the dead Glaswegian and icon of conservatives everywhere, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776: Book Five, Chapter II, Article Four):

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote [a] disgraceful degree of poverty...”

[emphasis added]

Given his belief that poverty and necessities should be gauged by "the custom of the country" and not some PhD-derived standard of how many potatoes it takes to stay alive, Adam Smith is now, by the whacked-out, Tea-Party standards of Beck/Rector modern-day conservatism, a Marxist propagandist agitating to spread the wealth. Up is down. Day is night. And "Wealth of Nations" is really just "Das Kapital" when you read it closely enough.

In making the case for the supplemental income poverty measure proposed by the Administration last week, Matthew Yglesias, who calls the proposed measure an "excellent first step," explains that:

the official US government measure of poverty is based on a very crude estimate. In the 1960s, the average family spend one third of its income on food. So the way the poverty line works is that it calculates an “emergency food” budget for a family, and then triples the resulting number. Modern-day families, of course, spend much less on food but substantially more on housing, health care, and child care so there’s a need for an updated metric to better account for household spending.

An accompanying graphic in his post notes that food now "amounts to around one-seventh [of the median family budget] as the costs of housing, child care, and health care have all risen disproportionately."

This helps explain why they current federal poverty measure isn’t based on a sound conceptual basis anymore (if it ever was), but it also could be read to imply that the proposed measure does more than it actually does to take into account the costs of housing, health care, and child care, and will inevitably result in thresholds that are substantially higher than the current poverty thresholds.

This isn’t the case. Based on the most recently available Census estimates (from October 2009), under the approach proposed by the Administration the reference poverty threshold for a family of four in 2007 would have been somewhere between $23,500 and $27,744, compared to $21,500 under the current measure. Census has made clear that the proposed measure is "different along some dimensions from any estimates that have been produced to date," so these estimates will change, but they are unlikely to move significantly higher than this range. I think the most reasonable guesstimate right now is that the reference threshold comes out near the high end of that range, but that it will almost certainly remain more than $20,000 below the average nationwide amount that family budgets produced by the Economic Policy Institute and other organizations suggest is needed to "make ends meet" at a basic level (as well as the minimum amount that most Americans say in surveys is needed to make ends meet at a basic level).

Moreover, since the proposed approach would also count benefits like the EITC and food stamps that aren't currently counted, you need to discount higher thresholds somewhat for comparison purposes, especially with groups like low-income children who may receive several thousand dollars a year in those benefits. For example, the average EITC for a family with children was $2,488 in 2007.

While the new approach would subtract amounts parents actually spend out-of-pocket on child care, it wouldn't make any adjustment for parents who need quality child care but can't afford it; the same is likely to be the case for health care (although Census suggests it's open to looking at an adjustment for people who are uninsured and simply can't afford to get the care they need). 

Finally, the supplemental poverty threshold could be lower in some states and regions than even the current federal poverty thresholds (depending on whether and how geographic adjustment is done, an issue discussed below), and for certain groups (such as homeowners without mortgages, who will have their own threshold under the proposed approach).

For these reasons, I think progressives should be cautious about implying that the proposed supplemental poverty measure is really a direct measure of the amount families need to meet basic needs, even the limited set of them included in the measure. It might be better to frame this as an “extremely low” income measure, for example, than as a “low” income measure.

Yglesias also faults the current poverty line for failing to take into account "considerable place-to-place variation in prices, especially in the price of housing." And he links to a CAP release on the proposed measure that includes this argument:

The traditional measure includes no adjustment for geographic disparities in cost of living. This means that two families with the same income—one in Tate County, Mississippi and the other in Seattle, Washington—are considered equally as well off despite the fact that [HUD's] fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $574 per month in the former and $987 per month in the latter.

Here, again, some caution is in order. Rents are certainly higher in Seattle than in Tate County, Mississippi, but what this means for poverty measurement is considerably more complex than this discussion suggests. Whether or not these two families with same incomes should be “considered equally well off” depends on a number of real-world factors, most of which will lead us to conclude that the Mississippi family is objectively worse off as the Seattle family, even holding income equal.

First, there are problems with using HUD's Fair Market Rents to make comparisons like these. The actual typical difference in housing expenditures between the two families may be considerably less than HUD's Fair Market Rent (FMR) figures suggest. Some data suggests that the actual geographic difference in expenditures is less than the FMR differences, and at a 2005 National Academy of Sciences workshop on poverty measurement, HUD staff noted a dozen specific problems with using FMR data for geographic adjustment purposes. For these and other reasons, Commerce is not planning to use FMRs to make the adjustments (the economist Rebecca Blank, now at Census, has previously called them “crude”). Also, there may be systematic differences in housing quality that aren't captured in the data that's available.

Second, as was noted at the 2005 workshop, “rents reflect both amenities and disamenities of a geographic area.” These amenities and disamenities clearly impact how “well off” people are in various ways. So, for example, higher rents in Seattle reflect things like its public transportation system and other beneficial public structures that prosperous progressives communities provide to their citizens as well as greater employment and educational opportunities. These public amenities improve the quality of life for residents of progressive communities. Many if not most of these amenities are not available in conservative, economically depressed, rural counties in the Mississippi Delta.

Finally, considerable other evidence suggests that low-income Mississippians are considerably worse off in economic and social terms than low-income Washingtonians. Despite low rents, Mississippi has the nation’s highest level of food insecurity and hunger (17.4%), while the relatively high-rent Washington has a considerably lower rate of food insecurity (11.1%). Similarly, the Delta region of Mississippi that Tate County is located in scores lower on the American Human Development Index (“a numerical measure of well-being and opportunity made up of health, education, and income indicators”) than any other region of Mississippi, a state which itself scores dead last among the 50 states on the index. Finally, the Congressional District that Tate County is located in, Mississippi’s 1st, ranks 416th out of 436 districts on the American HDI; by comparison, the Congressional District that Seattle is located in, Washington’s 7th, ranks 28th out of 436 districts. You might want to ask yourself, if you were given the same amount of income and the choice of growing up in either Seattle or Tate County, Mississippi, which one would you choose: 28th or 416th?

Related to this is an important question about whether geographic adjustment should be part of any measure that is used for the purpose of a national poverty reduction target. Do we want to bring people in Tate County, Mississippi up to a national standard, or should we set the bar lower for because rents are lower there? I’m strongly in favor of a national standard for Tate County, Mississippi, not a dismal Mississippi one. Similarly, poverty estimates produced by CLASP in November 2009 using Census' own on-line calculator for producing alternative poverty measures found that West Virginia's poverty measure would be lower than Massachusetts' (12.3% vs. 14.2%). I have a hard time believing that the West Virginia social and economic model does a better job of fighting poverty than the Massachusetts one, and other direct measures of deprivation and economic don't support that conclusion. These numbers are likely to change somewhat as Census refines its measure, but they need to change quite a bit to be consistent with what most data tells us about geographic differences in deprivation, and what state-level social and economic policies work best in reducing poverty.

• The Coffee Party USA, Mission: "The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."
• Dean Baker, Missing the Story on Iceland: Can the Bankers Steal Your Kids' Money?: "... the [banking collapse in] Iceland makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day. Therefore when they say want the government to leave things to the market they are lying. They just want to be able to take risks with taxpayers money, without being fettered by regulations limiting the extent of these risks. In short, the finance boys want a free lunch, not a free market."
• Paul Krugman, Debt is a Political Issue: "... if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels."
• Sherry Linkon, Why Working Class Literature Matters: "Working-class literary studies is just getting started. In two decades, the field has moved from excavating the long-buried texts of worker writers from the last three centuries to developing an ever-more complex understanding of the value of class as a critical tool for interpreting literature of all kinds."
• Marion Nestle, Recognize Food Brands, Even 3-Year Olds Do This: "I’m not sure why this would be news to anyone who has taken a toddler to a grocery store, but researchers at the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that very young children recognize food brands, especially McDonald’s. ... It’s good to have the research and the implications are clear: something must be done to put some curbs on food marketing to kids."
• Teryn Norris, To Make Poverty History, Make Clear Energy Cheap: "The United States was a driving force behind the worldwide expansion of prosperity and security in the 20th century. Today, a new American project to make clean energy cheap can alleviate untold human suffering and injustice, develop the world's strongest clean energy industry, and help save the world from climate destabilization. In short, it may be our generation's single greatest opportunity to advance global prosperity in the 21st century and secure the lives of future generations. As Bill Gates put it, "This is the one with the greatest impact.""
  

• John Powell, Tailoring Job Relief to America's Diverse Communities: "In reality, the goal of the civil rights movement, like the goal of a fair recovery, is universal. On most issues, the goal of blacks or Latinos is no different than the goal of whites. What stands apart are the varied needs of each group that must be met to reach these goals, not merely because of race but also because they have different opportunities and structures for advancement."
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2009: "In 2009, 72.6 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. ... Among those paid by the hour, 980,000 earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage in 2009. Nearly 2.6 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 4.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
• Center for Social Inclusion, Broadband in the Mississippi Delta: A 21st Century Racial Justice Issue: "The Broadband in the Mississippi Delta report analyzes broadband availability and economic opportunity in Mississippi and the impact it has on communities of color. With far too little internet access in communities of color, hundreds of thousands are effectively prevented from contributing to the economy."
  

• Crooked Timber, Measuring Justice: "Cambridge has just published a new book, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, which Ingrid and I edited (the idea of doing it was entirely Ingrid’s, I should say, and a brilliant idea it turned out to be). Its a fairly tightly focused collection, for which we invited two kinds of contribution. It opens with a shortened version of Pogge’s essay “Can the Capabilities Approach be Justified?” which many of the contributors refer back to, and the first part continues with a series of chapters considering the relative merits of Rawls’s social primary goods approach and the capabilities approach to the metric of justice; for this we invited contributors whom we believed would defend one or another of these metrics while giving careful criticisms of the rival, plus Dick Arneson whom we believed (rightly) could be relied on to help make progress despite not being associated with either view. For the second part we invited contributors who would think about some specific issue of justice (in health, education, gender, the family, disability) and consider the relative merits of the approaches with respect to that specific issue. We wrote a short analytical introduction which locates the debate in a broader context, and which, we hope, helps guide the reader through the book (the CUP page has a pdf of it, so you can judge for yourselves); the book concludes with a nice, partly autobiographical, essay by Sen engaging with the chapters in the first part of the book."
• Chicago News Cooperative, Environmentalist Prods Fellow Blacks to Join in Her Crusade: "Ms. Davis also preaches do-for-self to go along with her gospel of green. “The move toward eco-friendly development, and the jobs it creates,” she said, “is an opportunity for blacks and other minorities to take more control of their destiny. In that sense, it is a way to move forward for communities that often feel left behind by economic opportunity.” “What we reject is the ‘Help the Negro Industry,’ ” she said. “People coming into our community, thinking they know best, trying to save us. We can save ourselves. “The ‘Help the Negro Industry’ is what allowed billions of dollars to come down for urban renewal, but the urban did not get renewed. We are absolutely committed that urban renewal not be repeated.” Ms. Davis said she believed that minorities must educate and prepare themselves to take advantage of the changing, more environmentally attuned economy. It was just as important, she said, to educate people about the “economics of ecology” as it was to protest the dire environmental conditions in many black and Latino neighborhoods — including accusations by some that “environmental racism” contributes to the problem."
• Sarika Gupta, Reconciliation and Representation: The Share of the Population Represented by the Democratic Majority: "With the debate over health care dragging on, it is becoming increasingly likely that the Senate will pass a bill through the reconciliation process, requiring just a simple majority rather than the super-majority needed to break a filibuster. This paper shows that if this path is taken, senators who represent the vast majority of the nation’s population will have supported the bill. This assessment holds even if several of the senators who have indicated serious reservations end up voting against it."
  

• Steven Greenhouse, Plan to Seek Use of U.S. Contracts as a Wage Lever: "The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan. By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said. ... One federal official said the proposed policy would encourage procurement officers to favor companies with better compensation packages only if choosing them did not add substantially to contract costs. As an example, he said, if two companies each bid $10 million for a contract, and one had considerably better wages and pensions than the other, that company would be favored."
• Pavan Trivedi, Borough President Stringer Provides a "Blueprint" for the Creation of a Truly Sustainable Food System in NYC : "In response to an increasing global interest in food sustainability, and to the lack of all-inclusive, tangible, local governmental initiatives in the field, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer has released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System.” The first of its kind, it serves as the most comprehensive effort to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food."
• Noah Kazis, Fun Facts About the Sad State of American Parking Policy: "If you haven't checked out the ITDP parking report we covered yesterday, it's a highly readable piece of research, walking you through parking policy's checkered past and potentially brighter future. In addition to describing six cases of innovative parking strategies, the authors draw from a wide-ranging body of evidence about the woeful state of most current parking policy, marshaling revealing facts and figures. We culled some of the ones that leap out the most. ... Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest. In San Francisco, parking requirements have reduced the number of affordable housing units nonprofit developers can build by 20 percent, with each residence costing 20 percent more to build than it would have without parking."
• Jim Sleeper, A Truth that Barely Speaks Its Name: "Alexander Hamilton hoped that "reflection and choice" would grow in what we now call the public sphere, a place that could be noisy but luminous, with constellations of respected seers focusing us on key decisions. Instead we're in outer space, every speaker a shooting star amid whirling swarms of asteroids. Our political universe seems increasingly incoherent and amnesiac, lurching ever more frighteningly toward "accident and force." But something very orderly explains it, too: the taboo against serious criticism of business and finance capital. It keeps Tea Partiers from seeing that corporate 'speech' and corporate welfare are dissolving the public sphere and their freedom. Michael Moore's movie Capitalism tried to show it. But the taboo held. Why?"
  

• Kirwan Institute, Race and Recovery Index: "The Race-Recovery Index, a project of the Kirwan Institute, is designed to measure how all people, but particularly marginalized populations, are faring in the midst of the national recovery efforts. The two primary tools for measurement that will be used on a monthly basis will be the national unemployment figures by race, and the Federal contract procurement of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Additional forms of measurement may eventually be added. ... An overall look at Federal ARRA contracting reveals noticeable inequality. Despite the fact that Women-owned, Latino-owned, and Black-owned businesses account for 28.2%, 6.8%, and 5.2% of all U.S. businesses respectively, as of February 1, 2010 they had only received 2.4%, 1.6%, and 1.1% of the value of Federal ARRA contracts that have been procured (see Table 3)."
• Nebraska Appleseed, Back to School, Back to Work: Winning Strategies for Building Economic Opportunity in Nebraska: "“Nebraska has the opportunity to create policies, pathways, and partnerships that will make sure Nebraska businesses have the skilled workers they need and families have the opportunity to build a better life” states Rebecca Gould, Executive Director of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, “Building education, job training, and work supports opportunities for low-income Nebraskans is key for economic recovery today and state prosperity in the future.”"
• Chris Dillow, Taxis and Taxes: "The best evidence we have on the income elasticity of labour supply - the nearest we’re likely to get to a natural experiment - is consistent with higher taxes actually calling forth greater, not smaller, labour supply. Yes, of course there is a Laffer curve - it‘s just that we might be on the upward-sloping part of it."
• Mark Weisbrot, Independent Latin America Forms Its Own Organization: "Latin America took another historic step forward this week with the creation of a new regional organization of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The United States and Canada were excluded. The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well. For example, Brazil has publicly supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium and opposed further sanctions against the country. Latin America, once under the control of the United States, is increasingly emerging as a power bloc with its own interests and agenda."
• Edward Skidelsky, Words that Think for Us: The Hollowness of Human Capital: "Of the many harms inflicted by economics on the English language, “human capital” is the most grievous. ... The phrase “human capital” is now so thoroughly naturalised that we seldom pause to ponder its implications. What is capital anyway? Capital is not a particular kind of good, but any good viewed in relation to certain interests. A donkey is capital to the wood-carrier. A derelict church is capital to the restaurant entrepreneur. Capital, in short, is wealth viewed not as an end in itself but as a means to more wealth. The phrase “human capital” insinuates that human beings too are to be viewed in this light—as instruments of the productive process. We have all of us attained the status which Aristotle reserved for slaves, that of living tools. What a triumph for the dismal science! Keynes naively supposed that economic growth was for the sake of personal cultivation. His modern successors have put him right: personal cultivation is for the sake of economic growth.’"
  

• Interview of Dan Ariely, How U.S. Feels About Wealth Gap: "Right now the top 20 percent of the people have about 85 percent of the wealth. People think that they only own 68 percent of the wealth, so people underestimate the inequity, but if you ask them what's kind of an ideal world in the Rawls kind of sense that you would actually want to participate in, they say 33 percent. So they say in an ideal world, we want the top 20 percent to own more than 20 percent, we want them to be wealthier, but we want them to own about 33 percent of the wealth. ... The main lesson for me from this whole study is that when we look at the political arena, we kind of have this huge polarization, and yet when we ask people a question that is not tainted by saying Republicans or Democrats -- it's just formed and here are the numbers, and what kind of society do you want to live in -- the answers come out quite close. And for me that's kind of the optimistic outcome of all of this is in fact as a society, I think we're much more similar to each other than the political arena plays out how it looks like."
• Gina Livermore, Work-Oriented Social Security Disability Beneficiaries: "The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs provide income support to working-age individuals (age 18 to 65) deemed unable to engage in substantial gainful activity (SGA) due to a significant and long-lasting health condition. Given these program eligibility criteria, it is not surprising that only about 10 percent of SSI and SSDI beneficiaries are working at any given time. However, many more indicate that their personal goals include work or that they see themselves working in the near future.... In 2004, 40 percent of working-age disability beneficiaries reported having work goals or expectations. Based on the current number of disability program participants, that percentage translates into about 4.5 million individuals"
• Urban Institute, Health Care Spending Under Reform: Less Uncompensated Care and Lower Costs to Small Employers: "In this brief, we estimate that the annual cost of uncompensated health care for the uninsured would decrease from $61 billion to $25 billion under health reform legislation passed in the House. Because the government finances about three-quarters of uncompensated care, up to $27 billion per year could be used to offset the expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to employers and individuals. Overall, employers' net costs would increase by 2.9 percent over the current system, but small employers' net costs would decrease 8 percent due to employer subsidies, the expansion of Medicaid, and exemptions from penalties for not offering insurance."
• NY Times, Phillip Martin, Who Led His Tribe to Wealth, Is Dead at 83: "Phillip Martin, a former chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who guided his tribe from grinding poverty in the red clay hills of east central Mississippi to become proprietor of one of the state’s leading business empires, died Feb. 4 in Jackson, Miss. ... When Chief Martin was first elected in 1979, the Choctaws in Mississippi were still relegated to the hardscrabble existence that had repressed them for generations. In 1831, a year after passage of the federal Indian Removal Act, most of the Choctaws were forced to walk what became known as the Trail of Tears to resettlement in the Oklahoma Territories. Over the decades, those Choctaws who remained in Mississippi eked out livings through sharecropping and unskilled labor. Into the early 1970s unemployment on the reservation stood at nearly 75 percent. Chief Martin changed all that, and the turnaround was all the more remarkable because it was well under way before the rise of tribal casinos after passage of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. “He was truly one of the first and most important leaders in the drive for tribal self-determination,” Joseph Kalt, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, said in an interview. “Chief Martin led this movement in which first the Mississippi Choctaw and then many other Indian nations have said: ‘We’re just going to run everything ourselves. We’re building our own schools, our own police department, our own health program, our own economy.’ ”"