• Matthew Yglesias, Big Mac Index: "Recent blogging about the price of soda reminded me of the Economist’s occasional Big Mac Index feature which purports to offer a quick-and-dirty look at Purchasing Power Parities. Actually looking at the results, however, it seems to me that it’s really telling us more about low-end wages. Big Macs are incredibly expensive in Scandinavia not because the currencies are overvalued but because people in the bottom half of the Scandinavian wage distribution earn more money than people in the bottom half of the US distribution."
• Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis, GDP and Inaccurate Measure of Stark Disparities in United States, Fails to Show Whole Picture in Louisiana: "In 2008, we produced a first-ever American Human Development Report. Using a people-centered methodology developed at the United Nations and used to assess progress in over 160 countries, we created a ranked list of U.S. states in terms of human well-being. The human development index measures health, education, and income - the basic building blocks of a good life - using official U.S. government data. This work represents the only available calculation of life expectancy by congressional district and county. On the index, Mississippi ranked last, and Louisiana was third from the bottom. But averages can hide a lot. A Portrait of Louisiana reveals a distribution of vulnerability and resilience in the region striking in its variation and closely tied to race and place. This follows A Portrait of Mississippi, also produced by the American Human Development Report and launched earlier this year. Though both Mississippi and Louisiana rank poorly on the national list, some groups within these states enjoy some of the highest levels of well-being in the nation. Others experience health, education, and income levels that the rest of the country surpassed thirty, forty, even fifty years ago."
• John C. Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, C. J. Krizan, Mom-and-Pop Meet Big-Box: Complements or Substitutes?: "In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned (a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence on how Big-Boxes’ impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store entry and growth on nearby single unit and local chain stores. We incorporate a rich set of controls for local retail market conditions as well as whether or not the Big-Boxes are in the same sector as the smaller stores. We find a substantial negative impact of Big-Box entry and growth on the employment growth at both single unit and especially smaller chain stores – but only when the Big-Box activity is both in the immediate area and in the same detailed industry."
  

• Gary Synder (National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy Blog), ACORN: A Lesson for All to Learn: "The ACORN story is not only about a few employees using incredibly bad judgment. It is about a sanctimonious belief in the agency’s mission and a tonal denial of the merits of its critic’s allegations. All nonprofits make mistakes and many make big ones. What makes an agency vulnerable is how they address them, despite how politically well connected they are. Whether the ACORN affair is a management fiasco or not, it is a board governance disaster. The ultimate authority of any organization is the board. From all appearances, the ACORN board had a hands-off approach to governance. Some would say it was driven by arrogance. If that is true or not, the ACORN case study is an extraordinary example for other charities on which to reflect---its good as well as its bad---and learn from it."
• Barry Ritholtz, Lessons to Be Learned from Dow 36,000: "Call it the audacity of cluelessness: Let us congratulate James K. Glassman and Kevin Hassett, the authors of the incredibly money losing advice in their book Dow 36,000, on their 10 year anniversary. The book forecast that lofty number would be obtained in 3 to 5 years; it was published precisely 10 years ago today. In the ensuing decade since this book (and I use the term lightly) was published, the Dow is still below where it was 10 years ago, rather than tripling in price. The Nasdaq remains more than 60% below its highs of one decade ago. ... Perhaps the greatest sin in this foolishness is extrapolation — during the peak boom years, stock prices tripled every 7 years. The forecast of Dow 36,000 simply tacked on another 7 year run at a record breaking pace on top of an 18 year bill market. Smart!"
• Mori Dinauer (TAPPED), The Tough Sell for Good Government: "A new Gallup poll has found that 57 percent of Americans think the government is "doing too much," prompting some concern that perhaps Barack Obama has missed his window of opportunity to convince Americans that government can be a positive force in their lives. But this makes it sound like the public just needed to be intellectually persuaded about this. Rather, people need concrete examples of government working for them. In retrospect, it was far easier for Ronald Reagan to convince people that "government is the problem" after the collapse of liberalism in social policy in the late 1960s and 1970s."
• Peter Clarke, After the Fall (The Guardian): "True believers in the virtues of the Anglo-American model were predicting until quite recently that the British and American economies, which had been first into the slump, would likewise be first out of it. Not so, it seems from recent figures. In the United States opponents of the administration are at present torn between saying that the stimulus has not worked and that it was not needed anyway. When the news popped up that France and Germany were actually doing better in the second quarter of 2009, the Wall Street Journal, with its hard line against anything the Obama administration touches, came out as a gleeful cheerleader (or jeerleader) - tant pis for the stimulus! When I last communed with the spirit of Maynard Keynes, he hinted that it was not quite as simple as that."
  

• Joshua Tucker, Are Republicans Now Officially a Southern Party? Plus a Modest Proposal for Reporting Poll Data: "While I am not surprised that the Republican party is more popular in the South than other regions, the starkness of this distinction is beyond what I had expected. Moreover, while I would have expected the Republican party to be unpopular in the Northeast, I did not expect such similar numbers from the West and Midwest. Quite seriously, if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority. For comparison’s sake, here is the vote share received by the Hungarian Coalition - an ethnic minority party - by region in the 2006 Slovak parliamentary election .... I wonder if we’ve hit the point where the mainstream media ought to be reporting support for the president, congress, political parties, etc. not in terms of the country as a whole, but rather by providing two numbers: support in the South and support in the rest of the country excluding the South?"
• Kai Wright, Could Taming the Fury of Poor Whites Lead to a Happy Ending for Populist America?: "Remember way back when [Sen. Jim] Webb, a Democratic senator from Virginia and the voice of Appalachia’s neglected white yeoman, was sniffing around a veep nod? In the midst of that media moment, he hit on an idea we’d do well to dwell upon. “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings,” Webb patiently explained to Pat Buchanan in a May 2008 Morning Joe appearance on MSNBC. “There’s a saying in the Appalachian mountains. … ‘If you're poor and white, you’re out of sight.’” Webb went from there into a bizarre attack on all the nonwhite and nonblack people who he believes have hijacked affirmative action. But his core message is deeply relevant to today’s tumult. Poor whites have always gotten screwed in America, Webb told us, and they’re terribly angry about it. Whoever directs that rage harnesses a powerful political tool. .... Webb wants Democrats to finally free the poor white mind from the grip of its self-defeating fear. “If this cultural group could get at the same table with black America, you could rechange populist American politics,” he told Morning Joe viewers. “Because they have so much in common in terms of what they need out of government.”"
• Deborah Orr, The Monumental Collapse of the Left: "For 12 years Labour [in the UK] believed it could sequester some of the cash that free-markets seemed to be generating, to build the social democracy that the markets eschewed. Instead, that money will be spent, for years to come, on propping up not social democracy, but a failed economic experiment. And the left, as yet, has no credible game plan beyond crisis management. Has the British political left, just like free-market capitalism it tried to harness, untamed, simply collapsed under the great weight of its own unacknowledged contradictions? It's certainly worth asking, at this point, whether economic neo-liberalism and social liberalism, were ever such very different beasts."
  

• Amy Wilkinson, The Entrepreneurial Union: How the Freelancers Union is Modernizing the Labor Movement for Independent Workers: "... unlike traditional unions, the Freelancers Union does not negotiate salaries or organize strikes. It does, however, work with politicians to win better protections for free agents. A recent advocacy triumph for the Freelancers Union came on March 23, 2009, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he would seek a new federal unemployment benefit for freelancers, who make up 15 percent of New York City’s workforce. The Freelancers Union designed the proposed Unemployment Protection Fund, which would require the federal or state governments to match $300 for every $1,000 a Freelancers Union member voluntarily pays into a designated fund. Members could draw upon these funds to pay for college tuition, housing, education, or other needs in case of unemployment. “Freelancers lack any safety net to fall back on during hard times,” Bloomberg said in a speech to the Economic Club of New York. “If a company lays you off , you can collect unemployment. But if you’re a freelancer and you lose all your clients, good luck.” Horowitz’s organization is improving upon old union models by exploiting the power of the Internet. The Freelancers Union provides an online portal of benefits and unites individual members within and across geographies. Through the organization’s Web site, workers can find copywriters, legal advisors, and babysitters in their extended community, creating even more opportunities to meet clients and make money. They can also orchestrate online and offline meetings. Niche communities within the network unite to discuss such topics as mental health, insurance premiums, taxation policy, and résumé writing. The union’s online presence also allows its members to advocate on their own behalf by signing petitions, organizing political events, and joining together to meet politicians."
• Andrew Wilper, Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults: "Lack of health insurance is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year in the United States, more than those caused by kidney disease (n=42,868). The increased risk of death attributable to uninsurance suggests that alternative methods of access to medical care for the insured, such as community health centers, do not provide the protection of private health insurance."
  

• Duncan Green, World Bank Pronounces on Climate Change: "This year’s World Bank flagship publication, the World Development Report 2010, is on climate change – a significant departure from the tradition of devoting turn of the decade WDRs to an overview of poverty. It’s an unabashed bit of climate change advocacy, remorselessly upbeat and optimistic (even when the story it tells suggests rather more gloom is in order) and much like the UN report I blogged on last week, it seeks to square the development – climate change circle: how can we ensure the global response to climate change strengthens, rather than undermines, development?"
• Chris Blattman, Psychology of Poverty and Temptation: "Abhijit Banerjee presented a new paper here yesterday, written with MIT colleague Sendhil Mullainathan. They look at a number of seemingly unusual behaviors by the very poor–from exorbitant rates of short-term borrowing to the low take-up of small, high-return investments. Impatience cannot explain the patterns, they say. The impatience approach also requires the poor think differently than the rest of the population. Another view: we’re all impulsive and impatient in the same way, but over a narrow range of goods that are quickly and cheaply satisfied. If you’re poor, these temptations are a big fraction of your income. If you’re even somewhat wealthy, they are not. Temptations are declining in income. The paper runs through half a dozen perplexing patterns of behavior, and shows that these simple assumptions can explain a great deal."
• Joseph Stiglitz, The Great GDP Swindle: "Statistical frameworks are intended to summarise what is going on in our complex society in a few easily interpretable numbers. It should have been obvious that one couldn't reduce everything to a single number, GDP. The report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress will, one hopes, lead to a better understanding of the uses, and abuses, of that statistic. The report should also provide guidance for creating a broader set of indicators that more accurately capture both well-being and sustainability; and it should provide impetus for improving the ability of GDP and related statistics to assess the performance of the economy and society. Such reforms will help us direct our efforts (and resources) in ways that lead to improvement in both."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Get Your Weight Up. Not Your Hate Up: "I think if we can't request that our allies not employ people who would aid and abet a prostitution scheme, if that's too onerous, than we are in trouble. I think it's very hard to defend, not simply the criminality of the ACORN workers in Baltimore (le sigh) and Washington, but their rank stupidity. Conservative activists have been after ACORN for over a year now. Bertha Lewis notes that activists tried the same stunt several times before they got a bite. In some people's eyes this is exonerating. In my eyes it's more damning. Lewis admits ACORN was aware of the setup, and yet her people still got caught. Twice. I am willing to be wrong on this one, but it's very hard to see how that sort of sloppiness aids poor people or progressives."
  

• E.J. Dionne, Liberalism Lost and Found: "Liberalism is always in need of a communitarian correction, and it has survived precisely because its advocates have usually understood this. Liberalism succeeds when it reconciles interest group politics with a politics of the common good. It fails when its purpose is defined entirely by the specific goals of its constituent parts. Liberalism triumphs when it champions a healthy individualism that also recognizes the need and desire of individuals for attachments to communities and to their civic obligations. It loses ground when it allows the right to do all the talking about family, neighborhood, religion, and patriotism. Liberalism’s emphasis on liberty and equality sometimes shortchanges the importance of building a community in which each of us is prepared to come to the defense of the liberty of all of us–and in which all of us are prepared to vindicate each other’s calls for justice. Without fraternity, liberty and equality are in jeopardy. I thus have more sympathy for the communitarian critique of liberalism offered by the philosopher Michael Sandel than Wolfe does, though I suspect both of us agree with Sandel’s signature assertion: "When politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.""
• AFP, Norway Opts for Welfare State Security Amid Crisis: "Norway's Labour Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg vowed on Tuesday to improve the country's cherished welfare state and defend jobs, a day after his government secured a narrow re-election victory. "Now we have to act to protect jobs and renew and improve the welfare state," Stoltenberg told reporters." On Monday, his left-wing coalition with junior partners the Socialist Left and Centrists held on to a slim majority in parliament, picking up 86 of the 169 seats. That gives it a two-seat majority in the Storting, or parliament, after voters resisted the temptation presented by the right-wing opposition's promises of tax cuts and privatisations.
• Jon Cruddas, Compass Summer Lecture: "we must seek equality of human dignity and moral worth. In a society based on the principle of fellowship, no group of individuals should be so rich or poor that they are able or forced to live as a class apart. The aim is not to impose uniformity of material condition. It is a society in which differences of wealth and income are contained within limits that allow the individuals to relate to each other in a spirit of mutual regard. This lies behind the thinking of the Compass High Pay Commission - of which you will hear a lot over the coming months. It lies behind the need for greater tax justice where we all contribute fairly. It lies behind the need to close tax havens. A radical overhaul of the system to build a more equal distribution of income and wealth. It lies behind reasons why we should index link benefit levels, pensions and the minimum wage to movements in average incomes. It is why we must intensify efforts to end child poverty. It lies behind support for the Equality Bill. And the need to reconsider a graduate tax. It lies behind the need to defend and redefine a European Social Model under attack in the European Court of Justice. It lies behind why we should have a Fair Employment Clause in all public contracts - to use the power of procurement to challenge race, class and gender inequalities amongst the working poor. It lies behind windfall and transaction taxes and resetting capital gains tax."
  

Today the Census Bureau released a report on the trends in income, including poverty, and health insurance between 2007 and 2008. The report data show a widespread decline in income and private health insurance coverage of families and individuals for the first full calendar year since the recession started in December 2007.

Real median household income fell by 3.6 percent between 2007 and 2008, from $52,163 to $50,303. This one-year decline is roughly equal to the three-year declines that occurred between 1999 and 2002 (a period that included the March 2001 to November 2001 recession), and 1989 to 1991 (a period that included the July 1990 to March 1991 recession). It's also the largest single-year decline in the last 40 years of income data the Census Bureau includes in its report.

Nearly every demographic group and region tracked in the Census report experienced significant income declines, and no group experienced significant income gains. Among the hardest hit were:

• Hispanic households, who experienced a 5.6 percent decline in median income;
• households headed by people between age 45 to 54, who experienced a 5.4 percent decline in median income;
• households headed by immigrants (including naturalized citizens) who experienced a 5.3 percent decline;
• households in the South and Midwest, who experienced declines of 4.9 percent and 4 percent respectively.

The share of individuals aged 15 and over working full-time, year-round declined by 3.3 percentage points for men, from 74.5 percent in 2007 to 71.2 percent in 2008, and 2.2 percent for women, from 61.4 percent to 59.2 percent. The income declines, however, were not solely due to increases in unemployment and hours worked. Among workers who were employed full-time for the entire year, inflation-adjusted earnings fell by 1 percent for men and 1.9 percent for women.

Consistent with the across-the-board declines in income, the percentage of people living below the official poverty threshold ($10,991 in 2008 for a one-person family unit and $21,834 for a two-parent, two-child family) increased from 12.5 percent in 2007 to 13.2 percent in 2008. The number of people experiencing poverty increased by 2.5 million, from 37.3 to 39.8 million.

Increases in poverty were also widespread among the demographic groups and regions tracked in the Census report, statistically significant changes were not quite as widespread as for income. Of particular note:

• Among people age 16 or older who worked during the year, the poverty rate increased by 5.7 percent to 6.4 percent—roughly 1 million workers—accounting for some 40 percent of the 2.5 million more people who experienced poverty in 2008.
• Among families of two or more people, the poverty rate increased from 9.8 percent to 10.3 percent, or 525,000 families. Most of these families (412,000) were married couple families—the smaller increases in poverty rates for female-headed and male-headed households with no spouses present were not statistically significant.
• Among racial and ethnic groups, poverty increased for Asians (from 10.2 to 11.8), Hispanics of any race (from 21.5 to 23.2), and White, not Hispanic (from 8.2 to 8.6).

The number of people with employment-based or other private health insurance coverage declined by 1 million between 2007 and 2008. This was partially offset by increases in public health insurance coverage. Overall, the number of uninsured people increased by 682,000—from 45,657 million to 46,340 million; there was no statistically significant change in the rate of uninsurance (15.4 percent in 2008).

Some groups tracked in the Census report did experience significant declines in coverage rates, including children (a 1.1 percentage point decline) and especially young children (under age 6), who experienced a 1.8 percentage point decline in coverage, and Hispanics (a 1.4 percentage point decline).

Of particular note, households with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 were the only income group to experience a significant decline in coverage (.6 percentage points). A key issue in health care reform is whether to provide subsidies to people with incomes between 300 and 400 percent of the federal poverty threshold, many of whom are within this $50,000 to $75,000 income band.

• Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry's Wisdom: "My Thoreau problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism, which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we're finally beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban eaters and rural food producers, [Wendell] Berry deserves much of the credit for getting it started .... That we are all implicated in farming--that, in Berry's now-famous formulation, "eating is an agricultural act"—is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at the farmers' market, are deep in his debt."
• Daniel Little, Poverty, Growth, and Sustainability: "So here is the key question: are there pathways for increasing the quality of life of the world's poorest 40% that are also compatible with reaching a sustainable global environment? The forthcoming World Bank 2010 World Development Report focuses on climate change, and there should be some important new ideas there about how to combine poverty alleviation and sustainability. These are the hardest problems we face today, and we need some fresh ideas."
• Paul Krugman, A Few Notes on My Magazine Article: "Actually, let me put it this way: the economy is a complex system of interacting individuals — and these individuals themselves are complex systems. Neoclassical economics radically oversimplifies both the individuals and the system — and gets a lot of mileage by doing that; I, for one, am not going to banish maximization-and-equilibrium from my toolbox. But the temptation is always to keep on applying these extreme simplifications, even where the evidence clearly shows that they’re wrong. What economists have to do is learn to resist that temptation. But doing so will, inevitably, lead to a much messier, less pretty view."
• Matt Miller, Lessons for Obama from Ted Kennedy's Noble Flops: "The US economy more than doubled in real terms between 1970 and 2008. Why wasn’t America inclined to devote a portion of this bounty to mend the problems [Ted] Kennedy identified, instead of allowing many of them to worsen? There is no single answer. But one reason was the sense among voters that liberals tended to worry more about the poor than about the struggling middle class. This same sentiment now threatens Mr Obama’s health reform. .... The Democratic argument has failed to emphasise how health reform can deepen the economic security (and improve the health status) of the middle class. Yes, one part of that argument is to ensure that no American in the 21st century goes without coverage. But the liberal instinct – to focus first on the neediest in ways that lead squeezed middle-income voters to conclude liberals want to take their hard-earned money and spend it on someone else – helps explain why Kennedy-style politics never prevailed. Democrats need to frame their goals as inclusive measures to promote security and opportunity in a global economy – improving the life chances of society’s most luckless but also bolstering the security and prospects of America’s vast middle class. This is also the only way to persuade average Americans to pay for such policies, which eventually they must."
  

You'll notice from that last post that Matt Lewis is back from a long hiatus that included travels in Asia and a relocation from Washington, DC to Berkeley for graduate school in urban planning. Welcome back Matt!

• Michael Lind, Can Obama Give 'em Hell Before It's Too Late?: "The two arguments on which the administration has rested the case for healthcare are calculated to appeal to elites, not the general public. One argument holds that it is immoral to allow a substantial minority of Americans, who are disproportionately poor, to lack health insurance. This argument appeals to progressive Democrats in the academic and nonprofit communities for whom politics is a form of charity. The other argument is that healthcare cost inflation will wreck the economy in the future, unless it is brought under control. This argument appeals to the Wall Street donor wing of the party, symbolized by Robert Rubin, whose protégés, including Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag, surround Obama in the White House. But if you are trying to mobilize public support for a sweeping healthcare overhaul, appealing to charity or the concerns of bondholders is not the way to go about it. "Vote your interests!" Harry Truman told Americans in 1948. Most Americans have employer-provided healthcare. They are worried about keeping it if they lose their jobs and about the rising cost of deductibles. Democrats should have sold healthcare reform as establishing a permanent, universal right to affordable healthcare. You also can't fight and win a war without naming your enemies. In the case of healthcare, the enemies of the American people -- if I may be demagogic as well as accurate -- include rent-seeking insurance companies, rent-seeking pharma companies, and overcompensated doctors and hospitals. Last but not least, you need a narrative in which today's campaign is not an isolated technocratic attempt to solve a particular public policy problem, but part of the ongoing story of progressive reform in America."
• James Longenbach, A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens: "Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. After attending Harvard College and New York Law School, he began working in the insurance industry in 1908. He quickly became one of the country's foremost experts in surety law, and in 1934 he was named vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. "The truth is that we may well be entering an insurance era," he wrote in "Insurance and Social Change," published in 1937, the year in which the first Social Security benefits were paid. Surveying the nationalized insurance schemes of Italy, Germany and Britain, Stevens tried to convince his colleagues that the Social Security Administration posed no threat to their business or their personal lives."