Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Thu, 12/17/2009 - 11:26
Ben Bernanke as Public Intellectual: Are you Serious?: "Prospect’s 2009 public intellectuals list contains many crimes against good sense. It was obviously right to include Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, Elizabeth Warren and several others on the list. Nonetheless, the judges have cleaved to the conventional wisdom and nowhere more than when rewarding our failed central bankers. Mervyn King is bad enough, but the real villain included here is the current chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke—the same mistake Time Magazine now seems to have made with their choice for Person of the Year. ... Failing to act on the bubble, and thereby giving us the worst downturn in 70 years, should be sufficient to disqualify Bernanke from any list of public intellectuals. Add to this his failure to place conditions on the life support loans to the banks and misleading Congress on a hugely important issue, and you have a figure who is definitely on the wrong list for this crisis."
Children's Hospital Boston, Insurance Coverage Status Affects Mortality Rate in Pediatric Trauma Patients: "A study led by Heather Rosen, MD, MPH ... found that uninsured children were over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than children who were commercially insured, after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type in an analysis of data from the National Trauma Data Bank. Moreover, publicly-insured children were 1.19 times more likely to die from trauma when compared with commercially-insured children."
Zubin Jelveh, Yes, Inequality Really is Getting a Lot Worse: "Aguiar and Bils find that there is a big discrepancy in the savings rate they derive from the Labor Department's Consumer Expenditure Survey and the better known figure published by the Commerce Department. While the latter figure tells a story of declining savings, the former has savings increasing over the last 30 years to over 20 percent of income -- something which seems quite implausible. The discrepancy is most likely the result of people choosing to give out less information on questionnaires (which the Labor Department relies on). This non-response bias isn't the hardest data shortcoming to correct, but you have to know it's there. The Labor Department didn't address the issue until the 2004 survey, and the uncorrected data seem to be at the heart of the confusion here. Aguiar and Bils created a model to try and correct for the measurement error on the many years of data already collected. They report that, with the adjusted data, consumption inequality most likely grew by about 30 percent between the 1980 to 2007, which is roughly the same as the increase in income inequality over that period."
Marion Nestle, Food and Climate Change: The NYC Summit: "While all of that is going on in Copenhagen, the Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, along with Just Food, organized a food and climate change summit today at my university, NYU. More than one thousand New Yorkers signed up for thirty workshops at the amazing event. Why amazing? Because this summit is about advocacy for a more just and sustainable food system, and right now. ... Does advocacy for a food system that provides healthy food for everyone constitute a social movement? Look around the room at the summit. The answer is an unequivocal YES. Can one New York City Borough show the way. YES."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 21:39
Council Speaker to Unveil Policy on Food for the City: "Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, is to unveil a long-term plan on food policy on Monday, a plan she says goes beyond the issues of trans fats and sugary sodas to address the production, transportation and sales of food in New York City. Her initiative, called FoodWorks New York, is meant to build on the efforts of the Bloomberg’s administration’s food policy coordinator, Benjamin Thomases, whose office improves access to food for low-income New Yorkers. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg first established the food policy coordinator’s office in 2007. “I don’t believe we have ever fully looked at our sources of food from beginning to end, maximized their potential and minimized their negative impact,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview last week. “We’re losing an opportunity for the food we eat, and the money we spend on food, to create jobs and employ New York City residents. ... We’ve had hunger relief efforts, we’ve had pro-nutrition efforts. But we haven’t had a plan that’s pulled it all together, and seen the potential that food has from the moment it is pulled from the ground to the moment it hits the table.”"
Daniel Little, Alleviating Rural Poverty: "What theories and values ought to underlie our best thinking about global economic development? Along with Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom), I believe that the best answer to the ethical question involves giving top priority to the goal of increasing the realization of human capabilities across the whole of society (The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development). We need to put the poor first. However, I also believe that our ability to achieve this goal is highly sensitive to the distributive structures and property systems that exist in poor countries. The property institutions of developing countries have enormous impact on the full human development of the poor. As a result, ethically desirable human development goals are difficult to attain within any social system in which the antecedent property relations are highly stratified and in which political power is largely in the hands of the existing elites."
Tom Jacobs, Stereotypical Images Can Overwhelm a Nuanced Text: "In a troubling corollary to the truism that a picture is worth 1,000 words, a new study suggests stereotypical imagery can largely negate the central point of a lengthy text. ... The scholars concluded that "regardless of the photographers' and/or editors' intent ... the most stereotypical photographs were the ones that ultimately stuck in the viewers' minds." Presumably as a result, "readers exposed to the visual narrative — even when combined with the textual narrative — expressed more stereotypical views of the subjects than those exposed to the text only.""
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 12/07/2009 - 22:45
Duncan Green, Is Growth with Equity Getting Old?: "Growth with Equity has been one of the development industry’s overarching economic narratives for over a decade (Oxfam published ‘Economic Growth with Equity: Lessons from East Asia’ in 1998). OK, it’s better than just ‘Growth’, and where it’s been achieved, it has an unrivalled impact on poverty, but thinking has moved on in a number of areas, and G+E is starting to look distinctly threadbare. I’ve been putting up posts on this blog on different aspects of this, but here’s a synthesis ... 3. The importance of volatility and unpredictability: economic issues are usually discussed in terms of stocks (eg of assets) and flows (e.g. average incomes). However, virtually all serious studies of poor people’s lives show that it is uncertainty and unpredictability that is often the defining, and most dreaded, feature of ‘ill-being’. This has led to increased interest in a range of mechanisms to reduce vulnerability to such sudden shifts, including social protection, enhanced social capital, disaster risk reduction, keeping health and education free at the point of use etc."
Robert Frank, How to Run Up a Deficit, Without Fear: "... there are really only three basic truths that policy makers need to know about deficits: First, it’s actually good to run them during deep economic downturns. Second, whether deficits are bad in the long run depends on how borrowed money is spent. And third, eliminating deficits entirely would not require any painful sacrifices. ... To eliminate deficits, we need additional revenue. The encouraging news is that we could raise more than enough to balance government budgets by replacing our existing tax system with one that taxes activities that cause harm to others. Called Pigovian taxes by economists — after the English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou — such levies create a burden that is more than offset by the reductions they cause in costly side effects of everyday activities."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 12/01/2009 - 12:29
Economic Opportunity Institute, A Tale of Two Recessions: "A new analysis of Washington [State]’s economy reveals that many hallmarks of middle-class life—owning a home, sending the kids to college, having health care, and building a retirement nest egg—have become
increasingly unattainable for local families. .... Even as costs have increased, today’s households and workers have less income than was the norm just a decade ago. Worse yet, most middle-income Washington families hadn’t even dug out of the economic hole created by the last recession before the “Great Recession” of 2008-09.
Gordon Berlin, Workforce Investment Act Reauthorization: Will the Past be Prologue?: " ... this is an extraordinary moment for employment policy. The life course of nearly one of every five would-be workers (comprising the unemployed, the underemployed, the too discouraged to look, and involuntary part-time workers) will be determined in some measure by what we do here today and in the weeks and months that follow, up to and beyond the reauthorization of the WIA."
Nicholas Wade, We May Be Born with an Urge to Help: "... biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help."
Vivian Gornick, The Lost Radical: "Among the most influential of the turn-of-the-century modernists was an Englishman whose life embodies the cultural revolution that characterized his moment. Unlike the names of other modernists that have become iconic—from Sigmund Freud to Emma Goldman to Virginia Woolf—his has long languished in historical obscurity. Now, however, with the publication last year of Sheila Rowbotham’s impressive biography, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, we have a richly informative account of a man whose mind and spirit are, perhaps, even more resonant today than they were during the world-changing time in which he labored to achieve a value system that would place inner liberation firmly at its center. The story of Carpenter’s life is not only a striking tale of social courage, it is also a brilliant example of how modernism itself accumulated in one crucial sensibility."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Sat, 11/28/2009 - 11:21
Matthew Yglesias, The High Price of Scholarship: "The rise of digital technology makes it possible to disseminate ideas for almost no money. That’s something that’s created big problems for a lot of commercial institutions, but it’s been a boon for most non-commercial ones—all kinds of DC think tanks and advocacy organizations, for example, have much broader reach thanks to our ability to cheaply distribute ideas around the world over the internet. But academic publishing seems oddly resistant to this trend. But almost every major university in the world seems to be expending funds on activities that have less social value than nearly-free distribution (public domain books on kindle seem to usually cost about $2) of the results of their scholarship would have. And on a selfish basis, I assume that the kind of people inclined to write books about the history of early modern philosophy are more interested in finding an audience for their work than in making a quick buck—that doesn’t seem like a profit-maximizing sort of field of endeavor."
Tom Jacobs, The Invisible Woman of Color: "A just-published study suggests black women experience "a qualitatively different form of racism" that contributes to them not being "recognized or correctly credited for their contributions." On an unconscious level, African-American females are "treated as interchangeable and indistinguishable from one another," according to University of Kansas psychologists Amanda Sesko and Monica Biernat. ... In [a] second study, participants listened to a recorded conversation among eight college students, and were shown photos of the discussion participants as they spoke. Afterwards, they were asked to match specific statements with photos of the people who spoke them. "Black and white women were more likely to be confused with each other than black and white men," the researchers report. "Participants were more likely to incorrectly attribute statements made by black women to other targets than they were to misattribute white women's, black men's or white men's statements.""
Jonathan Cohn, Health Reform will Make You Rich!: "Well, OK, maybe not rich. But it should mean higher wages, if it includes the tax on expensive health policies. That's according to Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who's been studying this and just released a new memo on the subject. As he did previously, he reverse-engineered numbers from the Joint Committee on Taxation to extrapolate wage growth. His findings? "Worker wages rise by $55 billion by 2019 This amounts to almost $700 per insured household in 2019. Worker wages rise by $234 billion in aggregate over this time period This is also a very progressive wage adjustment. In every year, the share of wage gains accruing to those with incomes below $100,000 is about two-thirds of the total, and the share of wage gains accruing to those with incomes below $200,000 is over 90% of the total.""
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Fri, 11/27/2009 - 10:07
Erik Eckholm, Trying to Explain a Drop in Infant Mortality: "Here in Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, the implausible has happened: the rate of infant deaths among blacks plummeted between the 1990s and the current decade, from an average of 19 deaths per thousand births to, in recent years, fewer than 5. The steep decline, reaching parity with whites, is particularly intriguing, experts say, because obstetrical services for low-income women in the county have not changed that much. ... Without a simple medical explanation, health officials say, the decline appears to support the theory that links infant mortality to the well-being of mothers from the time they were in the womb themselves, including physical and mental health; personal behaviors; exposure to stresses, like racism; and their social ties."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Feed Me Hip-Hop and I Start Trembling: "In my memoir, I talk about a buddy who, whenever he was about to get jumped, use to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend. It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that whenever I hear society mocking the mask which young black boys don in urban America. We manufacture the conditions, and then rail at kids for creating a code of survival in response. In my time, hip-hop was an art-form based on that code. If you were a kid living in a city, and thus acclimated to the rules of that city, if you spent time trying to understand which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends, in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in other words, you lived with the threat of random violence, then hip-hop was the language of your life. "
Paul Rosenberg, Shadow of Food Insecurity Looms: "... by every relevant measure, those states that voted for Obama did a better job of ensuring that families were food secure, that they lived without fear of going hungry. In braod terms, this is very good indication of what it means to vote Democratic at the presidential level. It is not that McCain voters are heartless. Nothing said about such large groups of people can reflect necessarily on any individual. But the group pattern is unmistakable. Now what is needed is national-level policies that reflect this underlying reality. Food insecurity is incompatible with the purpose proclaimed in the Preamble of the Constitution. It is, quite simply, un-American. It's time to call for its abolition--and more importantly, time to institute policies that will bring that about."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Sat, 11/14/2009 - 14:05
Mori Dinauer, Lighting Round: "Liberals are often accused of having a bias against business or being insufficiently pro-free market. I think it would be fair to say that liberals are skeptical about the business community's commitment to anything beyond the bottom line, and to that end have tended to side with labor over business elites. A good example of why this is is captured in this Think Progress which quotes the Inside U.S. Trade business newsletter: 'Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA).'"
Kaiser Health News, Lawmakers Call for Emergency Sick-Leave Requirement: "Lawmakers are calling for new legislation that would require businesses to provide paid emergency sick-leave because of the swine flu pandemic. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairing a health subcommittee hearing Tuesday, said that requiring businesses with 15 or more employees to offer seven paid days off a year would end a dangerous choice 'between staying healthy and making ends meet.'" Some conservative lawmakers argue, though, "that Democrats are using a public health crisis as momentum for faulty legislation that would harm businesses by inviting abuse by workers. ... There currently is no requirement for businesses of any size to provide paid sick leave""
David Weigel, Anti-Tax Movement Ponders Two Big Defeats: "Election night was bittersweet for Andrew Moylan. The young government affairs manager of the conservative National Taxpayers Union was watching returns in Asheville, N.C., with fellow attendees of the conservative State Policy Network’s annual meeting. Early in the night, the gubernatorial races in Virginia and then New Jersey went to the Republicans. Moylan, however, was watching the returns on two anti-tax, anti-spending ballot measures in Maine and Washington. Those weren’t turning out so well. ... The numbers broke hard against conservatives and libertarians. The Maine Tax Relief Initiative–Question 4–would have placed new limits on state and local government spending and required voter approval to go over those limits. It failed by 21 points and a margin of more than 100,000 votes. Washington Initiative 1033 would have placed limits on local spending and directed surplus tax revenue back to Washingtonians, as property tax rebates. It failed by 11 points and a similar margin of around 100,000 votes."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Thu, 11/12/2009 - 10:24
David O. Meltzer and Zhuo Chen, The Impact of Minimum Wage Rates on Body Weight in the United States: "Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over 1968-2007 and because minimum wage labor is a major contributor to the cost of food away from home we hypothesized that changes in the minimum wage would be associated with changes in bodyweight over this period. To examine this, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1984-2006 to test whether variation in the real minimum wage was associated with changes in body mass index (BMI). We also examine whether this association varied by gender, education and income, and used quantile regression to test whether the association varied over the BMI distribution. We also estimate the fraction of the increase in BMI since 1970 attributable to minimum wage declines. We find that a $1 decrease in the real minimum wage was associated with a 0.06 increase in BMI. This relationship was significant across gender and income groups and largest among the highest percentiles of the BMI distribution. Real minimum wage decreases can explain 10% of the change in BMI since 1970. We conclude that the declining real minimum wage rates has contributed to the increasing rate of overweight and obesity in the United States. Studies to clarify the mechanism by which minimum wages may affect obesity might help determine appropriate policy responses."
John Schmitt and Kris Warner, The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008: "The view that the typical union worker is a white male manufacturing worker may have been correct a quarter of a century ago, but it's not an accurate description of those in today's labor movement."
Dean Baker, American Wages Out of Line?: "The NYT told readers that wages in the United States are out of line with the rest of the world. The basis for this assertion is that the U.S. has a large trade deficit. The deficit does provide evidence that prices in the U.S. are out of line, but it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about wages. First and most immediately, it suggests that the dollar is over-valued (a point noted in the column). ... It is also possible that U.S. goods are not competitive because profits are too high. The profit share of income had risen over the last three decades, so one could plausibly argue that excess profits are making U.S. goods less competitive. We could also argue that the inefficiency of the sectors of the economy that are protected from foreign competition -- most notably health care -- is driving up the price of U.S. goods and making them uncompetitive. In that story, the problem is not the wages of auto and textile workers, but of doctors and hospital administrators."
Kaiser Health News, Lawmakers Call for Emergency Sick-Leave Requirement: "Lawmakers are calling for new legislation that would require businesses to provide paid emergency sick-leave because of the swine flu pandemic. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairing a health subcommittee hearing Tuesday, said that requiring businesses with 15 or more employees to offer seven paid days off a year would end a dangerous choice 'between staying healthy and making ends meet.'""
Paul Krugman, Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!: "... there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you’ve heard, it may be something you’d like to believe, but it just didn’t happen."
Duncan Green, Why Demanding 'Political Will' is Lazy and Unproductive: "If you consider political capital rather than will, any leader is going to be more likely to back winnable changes than blatantly lost causes. The nitty gritty of advocacy must start with that kind of ‘power analysis’, to establish how to a given demand can be made winnable. That means investing in political literacy, rather than being satisfied with vague exhortations to ‘political will’. The trick is to use this understanding to improve your chances of successful influencing, so we observe mobile phone usage rising exponentially and think how we can use this to drive greater equity or accountability. The role played by political will for NGOs and other social movements reminds me of ‘good governance’, as deployed by governments and international institutions like the World Bank or DFID. They also set out the problem/solution format, but then default to ‘good governance’ as the magic wand that will guarantee implementation – no power, no politics, just good governance. Words that fill a vacuum where political analysis should be."
Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 15:43
Stephen Jay Gould, from For Want of a Metaphor: "We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress—just find the right facts and all the problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of fact, but weavers of new intellectual structures."
Lionel Trilling, from Preface to the Liberal Imagination: "We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent, who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert. This we will have to do for ourselves. It has for some time appeared to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in the sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time. If liberalism is, as I believe it to be, a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine, then as that large tendency makes itself explicit, certain of its particular expressions are bound to be relatively weaker than others, and some even useless and mistaken. If this is so, then for liberalism to be aware of the weak or wrong expressions of itself would seem to be an advantage to the tendency as a whole."
H.G. Wells, from Letter to James Joyce, Nov. 23, 1928: "My warmest good wishes to you Joyce. I cant [sic] follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong."
