• Zhenxiang Zhao and Robert Kaestner, Effects of Urban Sprawl on Obesity: "... we examine the effect of changes in population density—urban sprawl—between 1970 and 2000 on BMI and obesity of residents in metropolitan areas in the US. We address the possible endogeneity of population density by using a two-step instrumental variables approach. We exploit the plausibly exogenous variation in population density caused by the expansion of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which largely followed the original 1947 plan for the Interstate Highway System. We find a negative association between population density and obesity and estimates are robust across a wide range of specifications. Estimates indicate that if the average metropolitan area had not experienced the decline in the proportion of population living in dense areas over the last 30 years, the rate of obesity would have been reduced by approximately 13%."
• Anne Power, Learning from City Recovery in Europe and the United States: "... older US 'rust belt' cities, having experienced steeper, longer decline than those in Europe, found it more difficult to recover. They have received less government support and experienced more polarised conditions. Their path to recovery is far less clear, and the impact of economic and environmental problems far starker. Although cities in Europe and the US face urgent pressures – including the need to reduce radically their reliance on fossil fuels – their underused spaces, existing infrastructure, knowledge and skills base, and diverse populations open up new opportunities for urban progress and environmental protection."
• USA Today, Most Teen Parents Not Raised in Poverty or By Single Parents: "A new look at the characteristics of teen parents finds that most aren't from single-parent households nor are they from households in poverty, according to a data analysis released Tuesday. The study by the nonprofit Child Trends for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, shows that of teens who report having a baby or fathering a child: 39% lived with both biological parents; 19% reported living with one biological and one step-parent; 28% lived in families with incomes below the federal poverty line. Those who have had a teen birth are disproportionately more likely to be from single-parent families compared to teens overall, but the study finds more than half of teen parents were themselves from two-parent families."
  

• Mark Nord (USDA), Food Spending Declined and Food Insecurity Increased for Middle-Income and Low-Income Households from 2000 to 2007 : "The combined evidence of declining food spending and increasing food insecurity in middle- and low-income households from 2000 to 2007 points to an increasing number of U.S. households struggling to put adequate food on the table during that period. This occurred during years generally characterized by economic growth. Food-access diffi culties are likely to have been exacerbated by the economic downturn that began in 2008. ....Changes in both food spending and very low food security were greatest in the second-lowest income quintile, in which spending for food declined by 16 percent and the prevalence of very low food security increased by about half. Most households in this income range can be characterized as working households with low income. Incomes of almost all households in the second income quintile are above the poverty line, and one or more adults are employed full time in a large majority of the households. Few households in this income range are eligible for food and nutrition assistance programs."
• Simon Chapple (OECD), Child Well-Being and Sole-Parent Family Structure in the OECD: An Analysis: "The meta-analysis of 122 studies from a cross-section of OECD countries excluding the United States concludes the average negative effect of sole parenthood on child well-being is small, a finding broadly consistent with earlier meta-analyses which were based largely on United States studies. The better the quality of the study, the smaller is the effect size found. ...."
• United Nations Development Programme, [2009] Human Development Report Challenges Common Migration Misconceptions: "Contrary to commonly held beliefs, migrants typically boost economic output and give more than they take. Detailed investigations show that immigration generally increases employment in host communities, does not crowd out locals from the job market and improves rates of investment in new businesses and initiatives. Overall, the impact of migrants on public finances—both national and local—is relatively small, while there is ample evidence of gains in other areas such as social diversity and the capacity for innovation. The authors demonstrate that the gains to people who move can be enormous. Research found that migrants from the poorest countries, on average, experienced a 15-fold increase in income, a doubling of school enrolment rates and a 16-fold reduction in child mortality after moving to a developed country. ....Also released today as part of the 2009 Human Development Report was the latest Human Development Index (HDI), a summary indicator of people’s well-being, combining measures of life expectancy, literacy, school enrolment and GDP per capita. It shows that despite progress in many areas over the last 25 years, the disparities in people’s well-being in rich and poor countries continue to be unacceptably wide."
  

• Mori Dinauer, Lightning Round: "I think Pat Buchanan's shockingly honest lament for white racial superiority has induced others to offer up candid summations of anachronistic world views. How else to explain a Goldman Sachs adviser's remarks that "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all" or an Oklahoma state representative's explanation that in the Sooner State "we have a very strong feeling that women aren’t capable of making reproductive decisions when it comes to terminating a pregnancy."
• Crooked Timber, Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don't Whine. That is All: "The whole idea of contrarianism is that you’re “attacking the conventional wisdom”, you’re “telling people that their most cherished beliefs are wrong”, you’re “turning the world upside down”. In other words, you’re setting out to annoy people. Now opinions may differ on whether this is a laudable thing to do – I think it’s fantastic – but if annoying people is what you’re trying to do, then you can hardly complain when annoying people is what you actually do. If you start a fight, you can hardly be surprised that you’re in a fight. It’s the definition of passive-aggression and really quite unseemly, to set out to provoke people, and then when they react passionately and defensively, to criticise them for not holding to your standards of a calm and rational debate. If Superfreakonomics wanted a calm and rational debate, this chapter would have been called something like: “Geoengineering: Issues in Relative Cost Estimation of SO2 Shielding”, and the book would have sold about five copies."
• Matthew Yglesias, The Wages of High Wages: "It’s common for friends of mine to go visit Philadelphia and then come back outraged by how expensive everything is in DC. This is, however, largely a case of the wages of high wages. Mean annual earnings in the DC metro area are $57,080 a year, way above the national average of $42,270. Philly, by contrast, is close to average at $46,410 while Oklahoma City is well below average at $36,880. The ones who really seem to be losing out on this deal are the New Yorkers, whose beer costs slightly more than DC’s despite somewhat lower wages. What I’d really like to see is the full dataset from Intellaprice, then you could make a “price of beer vs average wages” scatterplot."
  

• Arlie Hochschild, The State of Families, Class and Culture: "If Americans came to this country as restless seekers in search of a new and better life, capitalism made superb use of that impulse. We believe in the new? Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we’ve been doing it faster. The economist Juliet Schor shows in her research on “fast fashion” that we consume and discard dresses, shoes, toys, furniture and cellphones at a quicker pace than we did in the past. Could this “fast-fashion” culture be filtering into our ideas about human connection? On Internet sites and television shows, we watch potential partners searching “through the rack” of dozens of beauties or possible beaus. Some go on “speed dates”; others go to “eye-gazing parties” — two minutes per gaze, 15 gazes — to find that special someone. If advertisers first exploited the “restless spirit” by guiding consumers’ attention to the next new thing, a market spirit now guides our search for the next new love. The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture. It is this that sets us apart from a more stable Europe."
• Kieran Healy, Pissing Off the Other Crowd: "... the best riposte to the “Annoy a Liberal” sticker is simply the same thing with the target swapped out: “Annoy a Conservative: Work. Succeed. Be Happy”. The effect is more or less the same as the original, especially if placed on the back of your Lesbaru. Temporarily suspending my longstanding irritation at divisions of this sort, much of what passes for “Pissing off Conservatives” is really an effort to rebut some ridiculous charge or other, instead of a genuinely symmetrical attempt to piss someone off. Or, as the story has Lyndon Johnson arguing, it’s better to kick off the conversation in a way that forces the other guy to deny that he’s a pig-fucker."
• The New Yorker, Books Briefly Noted, San Tanehaus, "The Death of Conservatism": "What’s the matter with conservatives? They were damaged in the last elections, but, more important, Tanenhaus writes, “on the great issues of the day they are virtually silent.” Silent doesn’t mean quiet: conservatives shout a lot, but what they say signifies almost nothing in terms of the lives of ordinary Americans, to whom they have little to offer, “apart from a plea for their votes.” The problem, essentially, is that, freedom fries notwithstanding, conservatives are too French—alternately Robespierrean and revanchist—looking to transform and undermine rather than to curate and build on tradition. In the “genuine Burkean” sense, they are not conservative at all, and the “modern era’s two true conservative presidents” were Eisenhower and Clinton. Tanenhaus’s case is concise and persuasive. He cautions liberals not to celebrate the current situation: “America needs a serious, rigorous opposition,” and at the moment it has nothing of the sort."
  

• Royal Swedish Academy, Press Release: "Elinor Ostrom has challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, Ostrom concludes that the outcomes are, more often than not, better than predicted by standard theories. She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes."
• David Bollier, Putting People Back in Economics: "Now Professor Ostrom has won the Nobel Prize for Economics, the first woman to be so honored. It is a well-deserved recognition. Professor Ostrom holds a special place in the history of the commons because she has done so much to make it visible in our time — first to academics, and then to many policymakers and now to the general public. Perhaps because she is not an economist, Ostrom was able to see that free-market theories fail to explain many things of economic importance. Perhaps because she is a woman, she was more attentive to the relational aspects of economic activity — the ways in which people interact and negotiate with each other to forge rules and informal social understandings. The social, moral and political, she realized in the 1960s as a graduate student, may hold many important clues for how communities can govern themselves and manage collective resources. It’s not all about economics (as traditionally construed)."
• Jay Walljasper, Tradegy of the Commons R.I.P.: "The Nobel Committee’s choice of Ostrom is significant considering that many winners of the prize since it was initiated in 1968 have been zealous advocates of unrestricted markets, such as Milton Friedman, whose selection helped fuel the rise of market theory as the be-all end-all of economics since the 1980s. Policies based upon this narrow worldview sparked the rise of corporate power and the diminishment of government’s role in protecting the commons. While right-wing thinkers scoffed at the possibility of resources being shared in a way that maintains the common good, arguing that private property is the only practical strategy to prevent this tragedy, Ostrom’s scholarship shows otherwise. “What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved,” she explains."
• Steven Levitt, What This Year's Nobel Prize in Economics Says About the Nobel Prize in Economics: "If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist. She is a political scientist, both by training and her career — one of the most decorated political scientists around. So the fact I have never heard of her reflects badly on me, and it also highlights just how substantial the boundaries between social science disciplines remain."
  

• Pew Research Center, Covering the Great Recession: "The gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business, and reflected the voices and ideas of people in institutions more than those of everyday Americans, according to a new study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Citizens may be the primary victims of the downturn, but they have not been not the primary actors in the media depiction of it."
• Anne Golden, Poverty Debate: Raise the Quality of Life for All: "Supporters of relative measures of poverty argue that these measures must take into account the critical issue of social exclusion. Relative poverty is about inequality in social engagement; falling markedly behind the community average effectively excludes the poor from the normal life of society. The OECD argues that, in order to fully participate in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norm in that community. John Kenneth Galbraith argued many years ago in The Affluent Society that a relative measure of poverty accounts for what the poor cannot have as the minimum necessary for decency — the poor “are degraded…they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as respectable.” Moreover, a relative measure of poverty is not static; what constitutes an acceptable quality of life changes over time. A relative concept of poverty is thus much more closely related to the Conference Board’s goal — to measure and compare the “quality of life” of Canadians — than strict requirements for food and shelter that enable a person to physically survive."
• Duncan Green, Do We Need to Ration Growth, and If So, Who Gets What's Left?: "Spoke at a Quaker conference on the ‘zero growth economy’ at the weekend. Quaker meetings are different: when I finished speaking to an audience of 350 people, there was total hear-a-pin-drop silence. Instead of clapping, people reflect, eyes closed, on what they have just heard. And no, even though it was after lunch, they weren’t asleep (well, most of them) and it wasn’t just me – the next speaker got the same treatment, despite beginning his talk by acting out the train-wreck metaphor, ending with him running into a closed door at full speed and slumping to the ground. The two pigeons flying round the hall just added to the sense that this was not an average meeting. Actually, I really enjoyed it – free from all the rigmarole of applause, the quiet, dignified exchange and moments of shared silence felt respectful, even intimate. Plus Quakers are great readers .... Much of the discussion revolved around the role of believers who are neither lobbyists nor scientists. It came down to changing attitudes and beliefs to prepare the ground for more fundamental shifts : ‘We Quakers are being called to be the midwives of a new style of living and being’ one said. Recalling the history of the Quaker-led abolition of slavery, I wouldn’t bet against them achieving something significant."
• FedThread: "FedThread is a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. FedThread gives you: collaborative annotation: Attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; start a conversation; advanced search: Search the Federal Register (back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields; customized feeds: Turn any search into an RSS or email feed, which will send you any new items that match the search query."
• Matthew Slaugher, Time to Tackle America's Widening Inequality: "... what to do [about widening inequality]? Policymakers have long quibbled over the facts. They have also invoked vague and distant remedies. A better educated US workforce? Upgrading skills is terrific – but it takes generations. It took more than 60 years for the US to boost the college-graduate share of the labour force from 6 per cent in 1945 to 29.8 per cent today – and that entailed government programmes and profound socio-economic changes.... Unemployment insurance was introduced in the 1930s, designed to replace a worker’s income temporarily until rehired by the same company. Today’s unemployment risks are much more involved and workers need a broader safety net. The higher costs of this overhaul can be paid for by raising the FICA cap and/or marginal rate."
• John Holbro, Mindhacks for the Fingertips: "Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?"
  

In yesterday's Grand Forks (ND) Herald: Minnesota Lawmakers Look at Cheap Ways to End Poverty.

Good luck with that.

• Katrina Vanden Heuvel, A Compass for Fair Food: "Over the years, The Nation and I have closely tracked the heroic work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as they have fought to protect agriculture workers in the fields of Florida from exploitation. CIW has exposed cases of slavery and worked with the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute them. It has carried out a Campaign for Fair Food to raise wages and improve working conditions. In short, it has led a movement that recognizes the dignity of the people who harvest the food we eat, and rewards and protects their labor. ... On Friday in Capitol Hill, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis attended a press conference along with representatives of CIW and the world's largest food service company, Compass Group, to announce that the company will pay an extra 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes that it purchases annually, with one cent per pound going directly to the farmworkers. Compass Group purchases over 10 million pounds of tomatoes every year, and serves 6 million meals at over 10,000 locations every day."
• Gretchen Morgenson, The Cost of Saving These Whales: "Because our government wouldn’t dream of calculating the hidden costs associated with the bailout binge — taxpayers might become even angrier than they already are — it is gratifying that the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group in Washington, has taken a stab at the task. .... Using data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Mr. Baker’s study found that the spread between the average cost at smaller banks and at larger institutions widened significantly after March 2008, when the United States government brokered the Bear Stearns rescue."
• GuideStar, 2009 GuidStar Nonprofit Compensation Report Just Published: "Findings reported in the executive summary include: Median compensation of females lagged behind that of males when considering comparable positions at similar organizations. Females held 56 percent of CEO positions at organizations with expenses of $1 million or less but only 36 percent at organizations with expenses of greater than $1 million. These numbers were comparable to 2006. Overall, women held 47 percent of the positions reported upon (an increase of 1 percentage point over 2006) but received only 35 percent of the total compensation."
• MDRC, Can Teacher Training in Classroom Management Make a Difference for Children's Experiences in Preschool?: ".... in survey after survey, teachers consistently emphasize their need for professional development and other supports to help them address children’s behavioral issues. ... The early results reported here are from the Newark demonstration, and they are well-aligned with findings from an earlier study of a similar demonstration, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP). In brief, FOL and CSRP together provide evidence that the intervention: Improved teachers’ ability to effectively support children’s behavior and emotional development; Increased instructional time and created a positive climate for learning in classrooms; Reduced conflictual and acting-out behaviors by children; and Improved children’s ability to focus their attention, to curb their impulsivity, and to show greater engagement in the classroom."
  

• Matthew Yglesias, Grayson Breaks the Rules: "I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t. Instead, progressives talk about our causes in bloodless technocratic terms. .... There’s a semi-legitimate practical reason for this, namely the fact that substantially more people identify as conservatives than identify as liberals. Consequently, progressive politicians are at pains to describe their proposals as essentially pragmatic and non-ideological which doesn’t lend itself to moralism. That all makes sense as far as it goes, but I think there are some real limits to how far it does go. For one thing, it puts you at a permanent kind of rhetorical disadvantage. But for another thing, it’s just very hard to do big things without a certain amount of moralism. In particular, you really can’t talk about the climate change issue in a sensible way without mentioning the irreducible wrongness of residents of a large developed nation endangering the lives and livelihoods of a couple billion people in the developing world with our industrial activities."
• TAPPED, More American than the Hood: "I think Ta-Nehisi makes a larger point about American culture here: "There is a culture to being fat, and putting fresh veggies in the hood isn't enough to counter it. The culture is complicated--and its more American than it is hood. I would encourage people to think about all the negative ways we cope. The upper-class may not be fat, but in my experience, they know their way around the tequila bottle." Ok, but the thing is, most American cultural idiosyncrasies that adversely affect those without the financial resources to mitigate the results are "more American than they are hood," whether it's admiration of violence, sexism, materialism, cutthroat capitalism, or even poor eating habits. The hood just provides a convenient scapegoat, a way for the comfortable to remind themselves how much better they are than "those people." Everything that is hood is more American than hood. It's America without the pretense."
• Nancy Folbre, Valuing Unpaid Work Matters: "The movement of women into paid employment represents one of the most important labor force trends of the last 50 years. But as women increased their hours of paid work, they decreased their hours of unpaid work. While men began doing a bit more housework and child care, they didn’t take up the slack. As a result, the increases in G.D.P. that we have experienced since 1960 probably overstate improvements in our living standards. Sure, our family income went up, but we had to spend a larger portion of that income purchasing food away from home, housekeeping, child care and elder care services that were once provided outside the market. Our public policies continue to define economic welfare — and eligibility for public assistance — entirely in terms of family income. Yet there is a big difference in living standards among families with the same income but different amounts of time to devote to unpaid work."
  

• National Academies Press On-line Store, Swine Flu Microbe Plush Toy: "Soft and cuddly, this H1N1 Microbe is the only virus you'll want to give or receive this season. Made from polyester fiber. Recommended for ages 3 and up."
• New York Times, In Bad Times for Capitalism, Socialists in Europe Suffer: "Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda. Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations. Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said."
• Jonathan Cohn, Line of the Day: Debbie Stabenow: Via Wonkroom comes this back-and-forth at the Senate Finance hearings, between Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, and Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat. The subject is requirements that all insurance policies cover certain benefits. KYL: "I don't need maternity care."STABENOW: "I think your mom probably did." I'm hard-pressed to think of a single exchange that better captures the sensibilities of our two political parties--or the principle of shared risk upon which universal coverage is based."
• Paul Krugman, Crowding In: "Under the kind of conditions we’re now facing, the main determinant of business investment is the state of the economy, as evidenced by the plunge in investment shown in the figure. This, in turn, means that anything that improves the state of the economy, including fiscal stimulus, leads to more investment, and hence raises the economy’s future potential. That is, under current conditions deficit spending doesn’t lead to crowding out [of private investment]— it leads to crowding in. In fact, you could argue that the worst thing we can do for future generations is NOT to run sufficiently large deficits right now. Things won’t always work this way. Eventually we’ll emerge from the liquidity trap, and the normal rules of economic prudence will reassert themselves. But we are not there, or anywhere close to there, right now.