• Amartya Sen, The Economist Manifesto: "One of the striking features of [Adam] Smith's personality is his inclination to be as inclusive as possible, not only locally but also globally. He does acknowledge that we may have special obligations to our neighbours, but the reach of our concern must ultimately transcend that confinement. To this I want to add the understanding that Smith's ethical inclusiveness is matched by a strong inclination to see people everywhere as being essentially similar. There is something quite remarkable in the ease with which Smith rides over barriers of class, gender, race and nationality to see human beings with a presumed equality of potential, and without any innate difference in talents and abilities."
• Richard Settersten and Barbara Ray, What's Going on with Young People Today?: "Although many policy makers in Washington are now focused on programs designed for the early years of a child's life (the critical "zero to three" years), it remains important to offer supports as youth make their way into adulthood. Without discounting the importance of services in infancy and early childhood, we stress that young adults make and take exceedingly consequential decisions and actions that carry strong and cumulative effects—on schooling, work, marriage, and parenthood—over the many decades of life ahead. Only by continuing or increasing investments in young people after the age of eighteen can policy makers implement the supports needed to make the road to adulthood less perilous."
  

• Robert Frank, The Tax that Hides in Your Paycheck: "Economic theory holds that in competitive labor markets, workers are paid the market value of what they produce. In actual markets, pay does rise with productivity, but not by much. The most productive carpenter in a framing crew, for example, might produce twice as much as his least productive colleague, but is rarely paid even 30 percent more. To see the pattern at first hand, consider groups of co-workers who perform similar tasks in your own company. In one case, suppose that your two most productive co-workers leave the job; in the other, suppose that the three least productive leave. Which group’s departure causes a greater loss of value? Most people would answer that losing the top two hurts more. If so, economic theory holds that their combined salaries should be higher than the combined salaries of the bottom three. Yet the typical pattern is the reverse: any three workers in a group performing similar tasks earn substantially more than any other two. In short, the startling fact is that private businesses typically transfer large amounts of income from the most productive to the least productive workers. Because labor contracts are voluntary under United States law, it would be bizarre to object that these transfers violate anyone’s rights. ... in effect, private markets are already applying an implicit progressive tax in the way they pay workers. And, in the process, they serve the interests of everyone in the hierarchy. The alternative would be costly social fragmentation. ... Tax systems that transfer income from rich to poor, thus mimicking the implicit transfers in virtually every private labor contract, reflect the costs and benefits of different rungs on the social ladder. They help make stable, diverse societies possible. Enlightened libertarians believe that the best social institutions mimic the agreements people would have negotiated among themselves, if free exchange had been practical. Private pay patterns suggest that our current tax code meets that test."
• John Quiggin, After the Dead Horses: "... while I don’t see much, if any, benefit in engaging with actually existing conservatism, that doesn’t mean that we should ignore conservative, and libertarian, ideas. You don’t have to be an unqualified admirer of writers like Burke, Popper or Hayek to concede that they made valid criticisms of the progressive ideas of their day, and to seek a better way forward. Some examples of the kind of thing I have in mind: * Popper’s critique of historicism. After thirty years in which teleological claims of inevitable triumph have been the stock in trade of Fukuyama and his epigones, the left should surely have been cured of such ideas, but their centrality is evident in the very use of terms like “progressive”. It’s important to recognise that beneficial change is not an automatic outcome of “progress”; * Burke and his successors on the need for beneficial reform to be “organic”, in the sense that it reflects the actual historical evolution of particular societies, rather than being based on universal truths that are applicable in all times and places; * Hayek on the impossibility of comprehensive planning. No planner can possess all relevant information or account for all possible contingencies. We need institutions that respond to local information and that are robust enough to cope with unconsidered possibilities. In some circumstances, but certainly not all, markets fit the bill. ... equally, we need to reconsider Marxian and other left socialist critiques of social democracy. The central burden of most such critiques is that the welfare-state and similar interventions offer no possibility of transforming society or substantially mitigating the inequality of wealth and power inherent in capitalism. The last time this kind of debate had any relevance beyond setting out the correct viewpoint from which to deplore the advances of the right was back around the 1970s. At that time, there was a serious belief in the possibility of a revolutionary alternative in relation to which social democratic reforms were at best a distraction, at worst a deliberate obstacle. This belief (I assume) has now completely dissipated. So, the standard Marxian critique of the 1970s now amounts to defeatism: social democracy can’t change capitalism and neither can anything else. But radical movements can make space for lots of of different ideas, particularly in relation to organisation and mobilisation, and local ‘bottom-up’ policy initiatives. At least some of the time currently spent on combating the right ought to be devoted to more engagement with these ideas. .... as I’ve said before, the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribalism that threatens to engulf us."
• Mike Lux, Progressive Populism and the Business Community: "I think progressives should be very clear about which business sectors we want to align with and which we want to push against. For myself, I am very clear about sectors I want to downsize, break apart, and diminish in power: the biggest banks need to be broken apart and restrained from gambling recklessly; health insurance companies should have their anti-trust exemption revoked, their competition increased, and their rates and practices far more regulated; pharmaceutical companies' power and profits should be reined in; and oil and coal companies should be downsized and phased out as quickly as possible. Other big industries should be better regulated; kept from harassing their workers when they organize, kept from hurting the environment, kept from producing unsafe products, and kept from growing so big they stifle competition. But in general, we want to encourage healthy and growing industrial, technological, green energy, and construction companies. Progressives should ally themselves to these sectors as long as they keep a decent social contract with their workers and communities. Creating these kinds of alliances can encourage better behavior by these kinds of companies, and build the political power we need to take on corrupt industries and political conservatives."
• J.K. Rowling, The Single Mother's Manifesto: "... I keep having flashbacks to 1997, and not merely because of the most memorable election result in recent times. In January that year, I was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, teaching part-time but living mainly on benefits, in a rented flat. Eleven months later, I was a published author who had secured a lucrative publishing deal in the US, and bought my first ever property: a three-bedroom house with a garden.... I never, ever, expected to find myself in a position where I could understand, from personal experience, the choices and temptations open to a man as rich as Lord Ashcroft. The fact remains that the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize. I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles. A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug."
  

• Inside Higher Ed, No Letup From Washington: "Broad's last few words suggest the key difference between the Obama and Bush White Houses as many college leaders see it: While the Bush administration often seemed to dislike and disparage higher education, the Obama administration will be tough on colleges because its officials value higher education and believe it needs to perform much better, and successfully educate many more students, to drive the American economy."
• Stanley Fish, Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?: "The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.” The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”
• Dani Rodrick, The Return of Industrial Policy: "Nor is America’s embrace of industrial policy a matter of historical interest only. Today the US federal government is the world’s biggest venture capitalist by far. According to The Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Energy (DOE) alone is planning to spend more than $40 billion in loans and grants to encourage private firms to develop green technologies, such as electric cars, new batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. During the first three quarters on 2009, private venture capital firms invested less than $3 billion combined in this sector. The DOE invested $13 billion."
  

• Jonathan Chait, Libertarian Electoral Fantasies: "Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction .... Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. .... Indeed, when libertarians like Wilkinson talk about "libertarian-ish" voters in any context, they're leaning very, very heavily on the "ish." The most thorough breakdown of the electorate is Pew's voter typology survey, last conducted in 2005, which categorizes voters into nine basic groups. The overwhelming finding of this research is that the components of both electoral coalitions are far less libertarian than their parties -- the GOP coalition has a lot of hawkish or socially conservative voters who favor more economic activism, and the Democratic Party has a lot of social conservatives who are skeptical of immigration and gay marriage. The sorting of the parties is one reflection of the massive over-representation of libertarian-ish views among elites. .... Practically speaking, the libertarian vote is non-existent, while the opposite viewpoint—economically liberal and socially conservative, which some call populist—is quite large. This fact tends to get lost in the political discussion because the political discussion is run by elites who are far closer to libertarianism than the public as a whole. (Case in point: Press critic Jay Rosen recently suggested CNN divvy its evening lineup into left/right/libertarian blocs, ignoring the vastly larger populist segment of the electorate.) Populist voters simple lack any intellectual infrastructure whatsoever."
• Noah Millman, Who Closed the Conservative Mind?: "Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment. I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind."
• Streetsblog.org, New Analysis Tracks 40 Years of Changes in How Kids Get to School: "The percentage of U.S. students between ages five and 14 who walk or bike to school has remained stable over the past 15 years but remains three-quarters below where it stood 40 years ago, according to a new analysis of government data by two groups working on the Safe Routes to School (SRtS) program. Crunching numbers from the U.S. DOT's National Household Travel Survey, the National Center for SRtS and the SRtS National Partnership concluded that between 1969 and 2009, school transportation habits essentially flipped -- with auto use rising from 12 percent of the student population to 44 percent, and biking or walking going from a 48-percent popularity rate with kids to just 13 percent."
  

At least 25 miners have died in an explosion at a coal mine in West Virginia. Although the cause of the blast has yet to be determined, the safety record of the company that owns the mine isn't reassuring as these paragraphs from the NYT's story make clear:

For at least six of the last 10 years, federal records indicate, the Upper Big Branch mine has recorded an injury rate worse than the national average for similar operations. The records also show that the mine had 458 violations in 2009, with $897,325 in safety penalties assessed against it, of which it has paid $168,393.

“Massey’s [the company that owns the mine] commitment to safety has long been questioned in the coalfields,” said Tony Oppegard, a lawyer and mine safety advocate from Kentucky.

Those concerns were heightened in 2006 when an internal memo written by Mr. Blankenship [Massey Energy's CEO] became public. In the memo, Mr. Blankenship instructed the company’s underground mine superintendents to place coal production first.

“This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills,” he wrote.

See this FDL post for more on Blankenship.

• NELP and CAPAF, Contracting that Works: A Toolkit for State and Local Government: "Growing numbers of state and local governments are therefore adopting “responsible contracting” reforms to improve the quality of jobs generated by their procurement spending. This report identifies the best practices in government contracting that are allowing state and local governments to significantly raise standards for workers and secure better value for taxpayers."
• Council of Economic Advisers, Work-Life Balance and the Economics of Workplace Flexibility: "Almost one-third of firms cite costs or limited funds as obstacles to implementing
  workplace flexibility arrangements. However, the benefits of adopting such management practices can outweigh the costs by reducing absenteeism, lowering turnover, improving the health of workers, and increasing productivity."
• Garlin Gilchrist II, Abundance-Based Reform: "Abundance-based thinking looks for ways to innovate our way out of challenges. It sees barriers as opportunities to do things in new, better, sustainable ways. It puts no cap on our ability to create change that can meet community needs in ways that reflect our community values."
• NY Times, In Maine, Last Sardine Cannery in the U.S. is Clattering Out: "On April 18, the clanking will cease. The bells and buzzers that regulate the pace of packing will fall silent. The old plant, the last sardine cannery in the United States, is shutting down. ... The packers, all of whom are women, are the heart of the processing plant, largely because they still work the fish with their hands. They are paid by the number of cans they pack and can earn up to $18 or $19 an hour. In the break room off the packing floor, Nancy Harrington, 70, who has worked here for 44 years, said she did not want to retire. “I could work another 10 years,” she said. Her three daughters have worked here, too, and so has her sister."
  

• Leo Hindery, Not 'Loyal Opposition' Within the Democratic Party?: "... it's year two and health care reform is over, over, over. Unless the administration wants to see its most loyal friends become a real loyal opposition, it must take immediate and robust actions to help American workers by: 1) giving the nation that industrial policy; 2) making our trade deals fairer and then more strictly enforcing them; 3) enacting strong and enforceable "Buy American" legislation; 4) adopting 'Roosevelt-Kennedy' style jobs programs in order to get Americans who want to work back to work immediately."
• Darryl Lorenzo Washington, Sex, Race, and Precious: "In general, the hysterical attacks on the movie [Precious] take the same parochial stance as those that would view Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (a classic account of a provincial French girl’s exploitation) as a polemic against French rural life rather than a paean to a young girl’s fortitude and an indictment of all France. Neither incest nor familial dysfunction are racial themes; Precious shows how social illnesses—like medical illnesses—are exacerbated by ignorance and poverty. Precious also shows how the weight of whiteness—an intangible and insidious sense that society is ruled by white privilege—is a double burden upon the black poor. It was a cliché, often repeated during the Obama campaign, that his election would prove to poor black children that they could ascend to the presidency; Precious is a film that looks behind this lovely idea to examine the economic forces and psychological detriments that make it an easier said than done. Precious is, in every sense, a film that pushes the country to eschew self-congratulation. The final moments in which Precious escapes from her wrecked home to begin her life on her own—accompanied by the audience’s near certainty that she will fail—are deeply touching, and Precious is easily one of the most important American films of the last thirty years."
• Breakthrough Institute, A New Look at Government Involvement in Technology Development: "This document therefore presents seven historic case studies of American innovation, ranging from the rise of railroads and commercial flight to more recent developments in personal computing and the Internet. It also presents three shorter case studies spotlighting recent developments in energy technology and two international examples of public-sector support for clean energy development. In each example, government support was critical at one or more stages in the development and deployment of these technologies, many of which Americans now take for granted as constant facets of their everyday lives."
• Rockefeller Institute, A New Paradigm for Economic Development: How Higher Education Institutions Are Working to Revitalize their Regional and State Economies: "Universities and higher education systems across the country are taking leading roles in their states’ economic development efforts — and a report released today by the Rockefeller Institute of Government says this trend seems likely to strengthen as the nation moves into the era of an “innovation economy.” The study found that higher education’s increasingly important role builds on, but goes well beyond, the research strengths of universities — incorporating efforts as wide-ranging as job training, business consulting, housing rehabilitation and even securing seed money for new businesses."
  

Danny Dorling, Should Government Have a Plan B; or, the Inclusion of People in Society?:

The new exclusion is exclusion from the lives, the understanding, and the caring of others. This is not through having to live in abject poverty, but through social norms becoming stretched out along such a wide continuum, as most additional income became awarded to the most affluent, with more of that left to the next most affluent, and so on. The elimination of the worst of early twentieth-century poverty, coupled with the tales of elitists who believed that those who were poorer were inferior, reduced the power of argument of groups that had previously succeeded in bringing down inequalities in resources between families and classes within many affluent societies. It is slowly becoming clear that in countries like Britain poverty did not fall over the course of the last 30 years. Instead, growing financial inequality resulted in large and growing numbers being excluded from the norms of society, and created an expanding and increasingly differentiated social class suffering a new kind of poverty: the new poor, the excluded, the indebted. We may almost all now feel poorer with the economic crash, but many of us felt just as poor before.

The new poor (by various means of counting) constitute at least one-sixth of households in countries like Britain. However, these are very different kinds of households compared with those who lived through immediate post-war poverty. What the poor mostly had in common by the end of the twentieth century were debts they could not easily handle; debts which they could not avoid acquiring; and debts which were almost impossible from which to escape.

• DC Streetsblog, Feds Begin Redefining 'Affordable Housing' to Include Transport Costs: "The process of expanding the federal government's definition of "affordable housing," a stated goal of the Obama administration's sustainable communities effort, began in earnest yesterday with the introduction of a new index that integrates transportation prices into the cost of living for hundreds of metro areas. The Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, assembled by the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), offers details on housing and transport bills for prospective residents of more than 300 metro areas. But the index also aims to give an updated look at the scarcity of affordable housing. Almost seven out of 10 American neighborhoods are considered affordable using the current federal metric -- that housing should cost no more than 30 percent of income. When the CNT added transportation to the mix, however, for a combined metric of 45 percent of income, the number of affordable neighborhoods dropped by 30 percent."
• Vivian Gornick, review of Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?: "Equality. The word itself moved me, made my heart sing. Instinctively, I felt that equality was the key to human comradeship. In fact, I thought that it almost didn’t matter how impoverishing or threatening a circumstance might be, so long as it was experienced equally. ... It was inequality, I was certain, that did the damage; inequality that destroyed one’s innate sense of self-worth. Not all political philosophers agree with me that equality is the word (that is, the concept) to concentrate on. For instance, Harvard professor Michael Sandel, absorbed by the question of how to make a good society, certainly thinks justice is the better word with which to address the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make decisions about “the right thing to do”—either on our own behalf, or on behalf of society."
• Chris Bowers, 16M Low-Income Americans Receiving Public Health Insurance is a Progressive Accomplishment: "You won't find me claiming that the health reforms that passed into law this week are great triumphs over corporate interests. Also, I agree with David Dayen that the student loan reforms that passed into law this week are clearer-cut victory for progressives than the health reform bill. Those reforms they effectively nationalize the student loan industry, by cancelling tens of billions in public subsidies to private student loan companies and replacing them with a student loan public option. However, the claim that there is nothing progressive about the health insurance reforms that passed into law doesn't add up. Because of this legislation, it is estimated that 16,000,000 additional low-income Americans will receive public health insurance than they would have under previous law (CBO report, PDF, page 21). Millions of low-income, uninsured Americans received public health insurance is a straight-up, undeniable progressive victory. Further, by moving much more of the cost of Medicaid to the federal level, the program becomes much more stable, and difficult for right-wing state governments to cut, over the long-term. Yet further, the $11 billion in additional funding, over five years, for Community Health Centers in the legislation will, at current rates of service, provide primary health care to an additional 17.8 million low-income patients a year. (Current funding of $2.5 million a year (PDF, page 6) treats 20.27 million patients, so funding of $4.7 billion annually projects to 38.11 patients)."
• Mark Schmitt, The High Cost of Conservative Intellectual Bankruptcy: "I hold no particular brief for David Frum, the conservative writer who was abruptly ousted as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute last week. ... And yet, Frum's ouster is a sad day not only for conservatism but for political discourse generally....Frum's immediate offense, it seems, was in predicting that the conservative strategy of blind opposition to health reform would be the Republicans' Waterloo, not Obama's. In other words, his heresy was to question the strategy of refusing to engage in the health-reform debate. ... But why should [progressives] care? he answer is that we all benefit from a fully engaged debate. There are a lot of things I respect about conservatism, there are points I'm willing to hear, and I'm willing to adjust my own views of the world in response. I want to see my own ideas tested and challenged, in a vigorous debate with people like Frum, and while I'm confident my ideas will "win," so is he. I'm confident that both ideas will be improved by the interaction."
  

• MDRC, Terms of Engagement: Men of Color Discuss their Experiences in Community College: "Though most of the men initially found their community college to be more welcoming than their high school, they reported negative encounters over time with some faculty and staff. The men explicitly rejected stereotypes based on their race or ethnicity and said that such attitudes did not affect their self-image or behavior. By contrast, norms related to their identity as men — characterized principally by self-reliance — exerted a powerful influence on their ability to engage in college. Whether placing a priority on paid work over school, avoiding making friends on campus, or failing to seek out academic or financial help, these men frequently acted in ways that reinforced their masculine identities, while at times hindering their chances of academic success."
• Mike Davis, Who Will Build the Ark?: "In the context of global environmental emergency, this Constructivist project could be translated into the proposition that the egalitarian aspects of city life consistently provide the best sociological and physical supports for resource conservation and carbon mitigation. Indeed, there is little hope of mitigating greenhouse emissions or adapting human habitats to the Anthropocene unless the movement to control global warming converges with the struggle to raise living standards and abolish world poverty. And in real life, beyond the IPCC’s simplistic scenarios, this means participating in the struggle for democratic control over urban space, capital flows, resource-sheds and large-scale means of production. The inner crisis in environmental politics today is precisely the lack of bold concepts that address the challenges of poverty, energy, biodiversity and climate change within an integrated vision of human progress. At a micro-level, of course, there have been enormous strides in developing alternative technologies and passive-energy housing, but demonstration projects in wealthy communities and rich countries will not save the world. The more affluent, to be sure, can now choose from an abundance of designs for eco-living, but what is the ultimate goal: to allow well-meaning celebrities to brag about their zero-carbon lifestyles or to bring solar energy, toilets, pediatric clinics and mass transit to poor urban communities?"
• Donna Gordon Blankenship, JournalStar: "A third of Americans 14 and older _ about 77 million people _ use public library computers to look for jobs, connect with friends, do their homework and improve their lives, according to a new study released Thursday. It confirms what public libraries have been saying as they compete for public dollars to expand their services and high-speed Internet access: library use by the general public is widespread and not just among poor people. But researchers found that those living below the federal poverty line—families of four with a household income of $22,000 or less—had the highest use of library computers. Among those households, 44 percent reported using public library computers and Internet access during the past year."
• Center on Wisconsin Strategy, Greener Skills, How Credentials Create Value in the Clean Energy Economy: "We believe current excitement about the new energy economy, and concern about national competitiveness, can be leveraged to finally achieve progress on reforming our fractured education and training system. Not only does this country need a far greater investment in workforce development, but skills
  — particularly at the lower end of the labor market — need to be delivered in very different ways. The priorities, as we see them, are more organization into navigable career pathways aligned with demand; curricular modularization and credentialing; and the integration of those social service supports necessary for advancement. Critical to this reform agenda is the development of a national skill credentialing system. "