• W. Benjamin Goodman and others, Longitudinal Associations between Maternal Work
  Stress, Negative Work-family Spillover, and Depressive Symptoms: "The current study examined associations over an 18-month period between maternal work stressors, negative work-family spillover, and depressive symptoms in a sample of 414 employed mothers with young children living in six predominantly nonmetropolitan counties in the Eastern United States. Results from a one-group mediation model revealed that a less flexible work environment and greater work pressure predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms, and further, that these associations were mediated by perceptions of negative work-family spillover. Additionally, results from a two-group mediation model suggested that work pressure predicted greater perceptions of spillover only for mothers employed full-time. Findings suggest the need for policies that reduce levels of work stress and help mothers manage their work and family responsibilities."
• UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, Good, Green, Safe Jobs: The Los Angeles Green Retrofit and Workforce Program: "On April 8, 2009, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed an ordinance to the Los Angeles Administrative Code establishing the Green Retrofit and Workforce Program. The Ordinance will lead to green retrofits of more than 1,000 city buildings and a workforce development policy that creates career pathways into good, green, safe jobs, targeting those in low-income neighborhoods."
• J. Hoberman: Made in U.S.A: The Long Goodbye: "Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature, Made in U.S.A, is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s great Breathless to Weekend period (1960–67). For those of us in the United States, however, it is also the least familiar."
  

• About the Demos (UK) Open Left Project: "Open Left is about rediscovering the Left’s idealism, pluralism and appetite for radical ideas. It starts from a belief that the future of the Left requires a new openness for a new era of open politics: Idealism: open about its political values and goals; Pluralism: open about disagreement and debate; Radicalism: open to new ideas and policies. We want to hear views and ideas from across the family of the Left, whether people identify with a political party or not. We welcome debate about political values and goal, and don’t presume to have a monopoly of knowledge about how to bring about effective and enduring change. We are starting by asking an essential but contested question: what does it mean to be on the Left today? We’ve asked a host of leading Left wing thinkers to answer six questions about their political motivations and beliefs. Check out what they said and then contribute your own perspective."
• Polly Toynbee: "Life on the left is a perpetual journey where definitions of social justice shift with the times. Social democrats have no ultimate egalitarian end-game, only the constant pursuit of better, fairer, kinder, more honest, more democratic ways to live together."
• Sunder Katwala: Any successful left is a broad church, not a narrow sect. To be ‘left’ is to be part of a political conversation both about what equality and fairness mean and how we try to bring it about. Each generation of the left needs to engage with perennial questions about our ends and how we translate them into practice: ‘equality of what?’, ‘how much equality is fair?’, ‘how do we narrow the gaps which matter most?’ and ‘how do we persuade people in a democratic society?’ so that we mobilise the movements and coalitions which can make change happen.
• Jon Cruddas, MP: "Along with social democrats and socialists, progressive liberals understand that equal liberty cannot co-exist with high levels of poverty and wide inequalities of wealth. This is because the capacities required to take part in society on an equal basis are socially defined and relative rather than abstract and fixed. Broadly speaking, the left appreciates that the pursuit of meaningful equality of opportunity cannot be detached from considerations of wealth distribution."
  

• Drake Bennett, The Next Conservative Thinkers: "Where, then, will the next big conservative ideas come from? A few young thinkers are offering intriguing new intellectual frameworks for conservative principles. Some are using the tools of social science to give fresh energy to arguments that conservatives have long couched in the language of morality; others are trying to unshackle free-market ideology from the unpopular pro-corporate policies it has engendered. Still others are focused on winning back middle-class voters who thought they liked the idea of small government, but have quickly warmed to the idea of government intervention in tough times. ... Luigi Zingales says it’s time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from. “I’m very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business,” says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business."
• Remarks by the President to the NAACP Centennial Convention: "It was in this America where an Atlanta scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois -- (applause) -- a man of towering intellect and a fierce passion for justice, sparked what became known as the Niagara movement; where reformers united, not by color, but by cause; where an association was born that would, as its charter says, promote equality and eradicate prejudice among citizens of the United States."
• TAPPED, The President and the NAACP: "The dominant storyline from the NAACP speech is "no excuses," because that message makes so many Americans feel as though their obligations to deal with intolerance and bigotry have been met, because it soothes the white guilt of those who would like to prefer not to see black problems as "American problems." But if that's all people took away from the president's speech, they simply weren't listening."
• Chris Dillow, Can Governments Increase Growth?: "... we can be pretty confident that Italy has done worse than the US or UK. But we cannot be at all confident that the US has out-performed Sweden, or vice versa. The opposing poles of mixed capitalism - social democratic Sweden and freer market US - are consistent with similar, maybe indistinguishable, growth rates. Big differences in institutions and policies, then, seem to generate similar growth rates. Which suggests that - at least within the wide parameters set by actually-existing mixed capitalisms - policies (or at least those that have been tried) might not make much difference to trend growth. Perhaps, therefore, we shouldn’t look to national governments to promote long-run growth. Equally, GDP growth should not be the test of the success or failure of policies."
• Paul Krugman, The Six Deadly Hypocrites: "Will the destructive center kill health care reform? It looks all too possible. What’s especially galling is the hypocrisy of their claimed reason for delaying progress — concern about the fiscal burden. After all, in the past most of them have shown no concern at all for the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook."
  

• Real Change News, Interview with Historian Alice O'Connor: "By the poverty paradigm, I’m in part talking about the language or label we use to frame a wide range of problems — deep-seated inequities and extreme insecurities, political, economic and social disenfranchisement — produced by the maldistribution of resources, opportunities and power. More importantly, though, I’m talking about a way of thinking about entrenched and systemic inequality that is very much a legacy of the postwar “affluent society” and especially of the War on Poverty in the 1960s. The poverty paradigm defines “poverty” in terms of the characteristics and behavior of poor people. It is de-contextualized and ahistorical. It is based on appeals to altruism and philanthropy rather than to social/economic justice and shared citizenship rights. It formulates poverty as a “paradox” amidst affluence, rather than as a feature of inequitably distributed affluence. It perpetuates the mythology that poverty can be “fixed” or “ended” without serious political and economic reform — and without the serious, challenging political mobilizations and power struggles real economic reform is going to require."
• John Harriss, Bringing Politics Back into Poverty Analysis: Why Understanding Social Relations Matters More for Policy on Chronic Poverty than Measurement: "Poverty research in international development shares in ‘the idea that scientific knowledge holds the key to solving social problems’ which, according to O’Connor, ‘has long been an article of faith in American liberalism’ (2001: 3). If only – the implicit reasoning runs – ‘we’ can build a good scientific understanding of poverty, then ‘we’ will be able to solve the problem. But the reality is that poverty knowledge is profoundly political, as the contemporary debates over poverty trends in India in the 1990s so clearly show (Deaton and Kozel 2004). The problem is that even in the most sophisticated poverty measurements, long chains of assumptions are necessarily made so that these are always open to question. And the assumptions specialists most readily accept depend on value judgements."
• Press Release, Rep. McDermott Reintroduces Poverty Measure Legislation: "“The independent and objective analysis that NAS conducted to develop a modern [poverty] measurement standard was based on experts and science, not politicians and this gives the recommendations enormous credibility and value, and that’s why I put them at the core of my legislation,” McDermott said. ... “In the end, I want a system that is fair to the people who need help and fair to the people providing it, the taxpayers.""
  

• Jonathan Chait, Ben Nelson Has Some Unusual Friends: "... while I don't doubt that some people oppose a higher tax rate on the rich because they think they'll be rich, is that really a reason to think they would prefer a higher tax on the middle clas instead? It's easy to oppose tax hikes in the abstract, when they're presented as simply a punishment to be imposed upon the rich. Butwhen the issue is that there will be a tax hike and the question is who should pay,why would a middle class person favor a middle-class tax hike on the grounds that they might one day be rich? Are there really people who think, "I'd rather take the hit now, and have less money for my kids' college education, so that one day when I'm really rich I can have a lower tax burden and thus afford two BMW's instead of one"? It's possible such people exist and have shared their thinking with Ben Nelson. On the other hand, perhaps the more likely possibility is that the people who Ben Nelson hears from are already in the top 1% right now."
• Conor Clarke, Get Rid of Polls: "Were it not for three problems, polls would be as harmless as printing baseball scores or Michael Jackson commemorative editions. First, constant polling uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy. There are, of course, lots of ways in which the U.S. might be able to use a little more democracy. (Think the Senate.) But the value of the referendum has its limits. (Think California.) ... Second, many polls are wrong. Which isn't to say that the opinions the American people express in polls are factually incorrect, though that's sometimes true. What I mean is that polls are a terrible indicator of the citizenry's actual preferences. Part of the problem is that many people have a tendency to say one thing ("stated preference") and then do another ("revealed preference"). Another part of the problem is that the public is sometimes simply confused. ... Third, and of perhaps greatest concern: the outcome of one poll can affect future polls and behavior. As behavioral scientists and economists are fond of pointing out--in books like Nudge and Predictably Irrational--popular behavior can snowball. Public-health campaigns emphasizing how few teenagers smoke are more effective in deterring teen smoking than those that emphasize lung cancer or bad breath."
• The Monkey Cage, Should We Get Rid of Polls?: "Clarke is right about this: we are awash in polls. The imperative for journalists and others is to become more discerning interpreters. The imperative for citizens is to become more discerning consumers. When conducted and interpreted intelligently, we learn much more from polls than we would otherwise. And our politics is better for it."
• David Leonhardt, Part-Time Workers Mask Economic Woes: "The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time. Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. "
  

• Philadelphia Inquirer, Universal Health Care Could Boost Economy: "To [MIT economist Jonathan] Gruber, the most important aspect of the entrepreneurship research may be its value in refuting arguments that offering any form of universal health care would harm the U.S. economy. As long as health care is paid for "in a smart way," Gruber said, "it's unambiguous that it's going to be good for the economy.""
• Jason Fletcher and Steven Lehrer, Using Genetic Lotteries within Families to Examine the Causal Impact of Poor Health on Academic Achievement: "While there is a well-established, large positive correlation between mental and physical health and education outcomes, establishing a causal link remains a substantial challenge. Building on findings from the biomedical literature, we exploit specific differences in the genetic code between siblings within the same family to estimate the causal impact of several poor health conditions on academic outcomes. We present evidence of large impacts of poor mental health
  on academic achievement."
• NY Times, Veterans Affairs Faces Surge of Disability Claims: "Mr. Todd, 33, is part of a flood of veterans, young and old, seeking disability compensation from the department for psychological and physical injuries connected to their military service. The backlog of unprocessed claims for those disabilities is now over 400,000, up from 253,000 six years ago, the agency said."
  

• Mike Lux, We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package: "This seems like Framing and Political Strategy 101 to me, but since few other people are talking in this way, let me just lay out a basic idea: all this talk about doing a stimulus package versus not doing a stimulus package is fundamentally besides the point. What we need is a comprehensive policy package that is very simply focused on one thing and one thing only: jobs. I know the policy wonks on Capitol Hill may be confused by that paragraph because, they would say, well, a stimulus program would create jobs. Well, yeah, that is the idea of stimulus. But my point is this: the politics of a second stimulus package are a dead end. The politics of having a debate about a policy package that will create jobs is a helpful thing. Announcing a second stimulus package gets Democrats into a defensive crouch about why the first one failed, and gets us into that same "can we get to 60" dance with Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins that caused the first stimulus bill to be pared back and rendered less effective."
• Len Burman, Why Labor Should Embrace a Cap on Tax-Free Health Benefits: "With union membership shrinking and wages strained, it might sound crazy to argue that labor should voluntarily give up a huge fringe benefit: tax-free health insurance provided by employers. But it should. In the long run, capping the amount of health insurance that employers can provide tax-free would raise workers' wages, partially protect them from layoffs and speed rehiring after a downturn. .... If the cap encourages employers to turn excessive health benefits into wages, unionized companies can better adapt to changing market conditions, helping both unions and workers. And if employers replace Cadillac health plans with Chevy plans, their employees might be able to afford other useful stuff, like Chevy automobiles."
• Daniel Little, Marx's Theory of Political Behavior: "I believe, surprisingly, that there is much in common between Marxism and the rational-choice model of political behavior. (So does Adam Przeworski; Capitalism and Social Democracy.) The rational-choice approach postulates that individuals' political behavior is a calculated attempt to further a given set of individual interests--income, security, prestige, office, etc. One might suppose that such an approach is unavoidably bourgeois, depending upon the materialistic egoism characteristic of market society. However, I maintain that Marx's theory of political behavior, like his theory of capitalist economic behavior, is ultimately grounded in a theory of individual rationality. .... An important finding of much discussion of political mobilization since Marx's time is that a purely economic and materialist account of political motivation leaves out a great deal of contemporary political behavior -- for example, ethnic mobilization, identity politics, and political protest (Teheran today)."
• Jonathan Power, In Search of the Swedish Soul:"'ll never forget asking one group what they thought of marriage in a country where most educated young people (and half go to university) don't get married or bear children until they are well over 30. A young woman gave me a thoughtful answer and so I asked her, "What are you looking for in a husband?" Without batting an eye or pausing for thought, she answered: "Three things. One, he must be good in bed. Two, he must be a good father. Three, when we divorce, he mustn't be bitter." I've tried this story out on all sorts of Swedes, and all ages, and they laugh a bit self-consciously and nod and say, "That's true," or "I'm afraid so." But if my student had been a little fairer she would have added that most Swedish men push the pram, do the nappies, get up in the night and help clean the house. Many, too, take at least six months off to look after the baby while the woman goes back to work."
  

• Jason Fletcher, Cumulative Effects of Job Characteristics on Health: "Our results indicate that individuals who work in jobs with the ‘worst’ conditions experience declines in their health, though this effect varies by demographic group. For example, for non-white men, a one standard deviation increase in cumulative physical demands decreases health by an amount that offsets an increase of two years of schooling or four years of aging. We also find evidence that job characteristics are more detrimental to the health of females and older workers. Finally, we report suggestive evidence that earned income, another job characteristic, partially cushions the health impact of physical demands and harsh environmental conditions for workers. These results are robust to inclusion of occupation fixed effects."
• Understanding Society, Polanyi on the Market: "[Karl] Polanyi's guiding intuition seems correct: human social behavior is influenced by more than simple self-interest, and human institutions are more varied than the vocabulary of the market would suggest. Human deliberativeness and purposiveness goes beyond maximizing rationality; it includes a broad range of "social" motivations and emotions. And a more adequate social psychology requires that we arrive at a better understanding of the motives that underlie cooperation and reciprocity. This is Amartya Sen's central conclusion in “Rational Fools", and it is surely correct: "The purely rational economic man is indeed close to being a social moron”."
• Sherry Linkton, The Future of the Working Class, Part II: "Our economic pessimism is well-earned, and that has significant implications for young adults from working-class and middle-income blue-collar families. The old model of following a parent into the steel mill or auto plant has been a doubtful dream for a couple of decades now, and the current economic crisis makes it even less realistic. ... Securing the future for the working class, much less preserving the promise of upward mobility that has been so central to American culture, requires big thinking and integrated policy. We must connect educational policies (and funding) with policies related to business, employment, wages, health care, and pensions. We must begin to think about the long-term consequences of policies directed at solving current problems. We must also demand that policy makers look beyond business and even beyond the middle class to consider the opportunities and conditions of the working class."
• Conor Friedersdorf, Sarah Palin's Media Mafia: "... even folks like Rush Limbaugh, who occasionally made narrow criticisms of the Bush administration, are invested in blaming America’s woes exclusively on its liberal elite, for merely invoking those words causes the conservative base to rally ever more loyally around its opinion leaders, especially the ones that make liberals angry. This politics of schadenfreude focuses the populist ire of rank-and-file conservatives at the wrong targets. Were the dread New York Times bankrupted tomorrow and the Ivy League dissolved next week, conservatives would still be plagued by a dearth of ideas, an unpopular brand, and atrocious leadership. Hence the biggest reason that famous, influential conservative multimillionaires should be treated like the cultural and political elites they are: It’s the best way to keep them honest."
• Noah Millman, Re-entering the Palin-Drome: "Ross [Douthat's]’ writing about [Sarah] Palin generally, treats her not so much as an actual person so much as a symbol, a personification of a certain type of person. There’s an expression for that: identity politics. It’s a kind of politics that, purportedly, the American right is against, and while I never think that was truly the case (indeed, I’d argue that identity politics are unavoidable, because so much of the motivation for engagement in politics comes from questions of identity), I’m surprised by the degree to which movement conservative politics in this country have become entirely the politics of identity, and the Palin phenomenon is the best evidence thereof. I think Ross should be against this trend, and if he isn’t I’d like to understand better why he isn’t. It strikes me that it is problematic to say the least, both practically and in terms of principle, for the American right to so openly embrace the politics of identity. This is a topic to which I will return at a later date."
  

• Center on Policy Initiatives, Crying Wolf: Stopping Health Care Reform for Over Sixty Years: "For over sixty years medical associations, politicians, the insurance and hospital industries, and conservatives have stood together to impede health care reform. Through their endless repetition of unsubstantiated claims and exaggerated consequences regarding health care legislation, these forces have played on the fears of the American public to preserve the status quo."
• Grist.org, As GOP Politicians Take the School Lunch Debate to New Lows, Perk up with Berry Ice Cream: "... Cynthia Davis, who represents the 19th District of the state Congress in the place we lovingly call Baja Iowa (most of you call it Missouri) ... apparently had the political fortitude—if not aptitude—to pontificate on child hunger. Her complaint was that the state was funding school lunches for kids even during the summer, when school was out, saying in part, “Anyone under 18 can be eligible? Can’t they get a job during the summer by the time they are 16?” She added—and I am not making this up—“Hunger can be a positive motivator.” She goes on to suggest that the kids can work at McDonald’s where they can eat for free during breaks."
• Joseph Stiglitz, America's Socialism for the Rich: "America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance and now to cars, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of longstanding corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection."
• Daniel Gross, New Rest for the Wealthy: "In the interest of understanding our suddenly imperiled passion for private jets and $5,000 handbags, I recently dusted off — literally — one of those classics, Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899."
  

I'll be back on July 8th. Don't forget to declare independence.