• Michael Walzer, Missing the Movement: "Liberalism is the American version of social democracy, but it lacks a strong working-class base, party discipline, and ideological self-consciousness. None of these are in the offing, but we need to be aware of what we are missing, and we need to begin at least the intellectual work of making up for it. European social democrats are on the defensive right now, but they have a lot to defend. Liberals here are in catch-up mode, and not doing all that well. We know more or less what we have to do, but we haven’t managed to give the American people a brightly colored picture of the country we would like to create. There is a lot of wonkishness on the liberal left, among American social democrats, but not much inspiration. We haven’t found the words and images that set people marching. As an old leftist, I can talk (endlessly) about citizenship, equality, solidarity, and our responsibility to future generations, but someone much younger than I am has to put all this in a language that resonates with young Americans–and describe a "city upon a hill" that may or may not be the same hill that I have been climbing all these years."
• Amy Traub, Obama's High Road Contracting Policy Builds on Chicago's Living Wage Law: Now, Can Chicago Learn from Its Own Success?: "Today, security guards, parking attendants, day laborers, home and health care workers, cashiers, elevator operators, custodial workers, and clerical workers who work for companies that contract with the city of Chicago earn at least $11.03 an hour, a wage that adjusts annually based on the federal poverty guidelines for a family of four. When the law was passed in 1998, it raised wages for covered employees by more than $2.00 an hour, providing a substantial boost to some of the city's lowest paid workers and their families. The problem is that too few workers are covered: Chicago taxpayers are continuing to subsidize jobs that pay poverty wages through tax increment financing and other economic development deals. At time of lean budgets, the last thing Chicago can afford to do is forgo revenue in favor of companies that keep their employees poor. Chicago's current living wage debate frequently threatens turns into a referendum about Wal-Mart and its plans to build additional stores in the city. But living wage laws tap into a principle that goes beyond any one company: if the public is supporting a private business, whether through contracting or subsidies, that company should be expected to give something back - at minimum by paying its employees enough to afford a basic standard of living. President Obama is working to make the principle into policy at the federal level. Now we'll see if Chicago can build on its own success. "
  

• Robert Reich, The Final Health Care Vote and What it Really Means: "Medicare built on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal notion of government as insurer, with citizens making payments to government, and government paying out benefits. That was the central idea of Social Security, and Medicare piggybacked on Social Security. Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. Eisenhower locked in the tax break for employee health benefits; Nixon pushed prepaid, competing health plans, and urged a requirement that employers cover their employees. Obama applies Nixon’s idea and takes it a step further by requiring all Americans to carry health insurance, and giving subsidies to those who need it."
• Nancy Folbre, The Resentment Zone: Losing Means-Tested Benefits: "Many Tea Party enthusiasts would like to eliminate means-tested benefits altogether. That might make some people feel better. After all, if you’re not getting any benefits, you can’t complain about losing them. And maybe some people, comparing their relative position, look down rather than up. Intensifying the effects of poverty and unemployment could make those who barely escape them feel victorious. But I think many of the disaffected would welcome simpler, universal benefits, like extending Medicare as a choice to everyone or minimizing tuition and fees at public community colleges and universities."
• John Judis, Democrats Discover Their Base: "Health care reform would not have happened without the political skill and tenacity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or without the last minute round of arm twisting by President Barack Obama. But equally important was the energetic public campaign that Obama and liberal and left-wing organizations waged on behalf of it. This campaign altered the chemistry of the debate within Congress and among Democrats. Democrats in Washington had come to understand that it was us versus them, with “them” being Republicans, Tea Partyists, and various business lobbies, but they can now recognize that there is a real “us” out there."
• EJ Dionne, Why Democrats are Fighting for a Republican Plan: "Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing in millions of new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government “takeover” of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance. Republicans always say they are against “socialized medicine.” Not only is this bill nothing like a “single-payer” health system along Canadian or British lines. It doesn’t even include the “public option” that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option -- sadly, from my point of view -- lost out last December. They’ll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn’t, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive."
• I'm very happy that 31 million more people will get health insurance and the federal government will do some serious work to bring costs down. But it would have been better to have a plan based on the social insurance model, like the public option or a Medicare expansion/buy-in.
  

At the end of every episode of Dora the Explorer, which I've been watching quite a bit lately with Beckett, my soon-to-be 3-year old, Dora and Boots dance around singing "We Did It!" and recounting the accomplishments they made to reach their goal. I hope Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are doing the same today. Sure, it would have been nice to have a more progressive bill in the end, but this is still a huge step forward toward accomplishing the decades-long progressive goal of health care for all, and an extraordinary accomplishment.

And, Sunday's NYT piece on the road to resurrecting the bill shows how much it was Obama and Pelosi who made this happen in the end:

Scott Brown, the upstart Republican, had just won his Senate race in Massachusetts, a victory that seemed to doom Mr. Obama’s dream of overhauling the nation’s health care system. The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, once Ms. Pelosi’s right hand man on Capitol Hill, was pushing Mr. Obama to scale back his ambitions and pursue a pared-down bill.

Mr. Obama seemed open to the idea, though it was clearly not his first choice. Ms. Pelosi scoffed.

“Kiddie care,” she called the scaled-down plan, derisively, in private.

In a series of impassioned conversations, over the telephone and in the Oval Office, she conveyed her frustration to the president, according to four people familiar with the talks. If she and Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, were going to stick out their necks for Mr. Obama’s top legislative priority, Ms. Pelosi wanted assurances that the president would too. At the White House, aides to Mr. Obama say, he also wanted assurances; he needed to hear that the leaders could pass his far-reaching plan.

“We’re in the majority,” Ms. Pelosi told the president. “We’ll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we’ve got right now. We can make this work.”

To continue the Dora analogy, we have Newt Gingrich as Swiper the Fox, albeit playing the role with considerably more malevolence than the comical Swiper:

... here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

There is, of course, more work to be done. According to CBO, about 6 percent of the population will remain uninsured:

CBO and JCT estimate that by 2019, the combined effect of enacting H.R. 3590 and the reconciliation proposal would be to reduce the number of nonelderly people who are uninsured by about 32 million, leaving about 23 million nonelderly residents uninsured (about one-third of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). Under the legislation, the share of legal nonelderly residents with insurance coverage would rise from about 83 percent currently to about 94 percent.

But we can deal with that in the next episode of health care reform, for now, we did it!

• Zachary Karabell, Is There Too Much Worry About the Debt?: "Almost everyone seems to think that these mounting debts are a severe threat to American prosperity. But what if the real problem isn't too much debt but too much anxiety about debt? ... though eliminating deficits might seem wise, it could actually be fatal to future prosperity. China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure, while America can hardly repair its bridges. The U.S. has to invest and spend to build a future, to help re-create a workforce, and for now debt is a means to that end — provided Washington shows it can effectively channel that money. ... Worrying about debt is like gaining too much weight and worrying about the size of your clothing. America's indebtedness would be sustainable and even healthy if the underlying economy were vibrant, innovative and strong and if federal and state governments could channel those moneys productively and quickly. The problem isn't how much debt we're carrying today; it's whether the economy of tomorrow will be able to justify it. ...."
• Latoya Peterson, Bridging the Wealth Chasm: "For black women the median wealth (savings and assets minus debit) is only $100, according to a new report. For Hispanic women, it is $120. But the numbers get even worse. For black and Hispanic women ages 36 to 49, the median wealth is $5. For nonwhite women who have never been married, the amount was zero. In the report -- "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future," the Insight Center for Community Economic Development explores the horrifying financial situation faced by women of color. It shows how lower median wages and a lack of intergenerational wealth reserves contribute to the disparity between women of color and everyone else. The difference amounts to "one penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women.""
• The Guardian, Labour to Get Radical with Manifesto: "Labour will pledge an end to the era of extortionate credit in its election manifesto, and is considering big increases in the minimum wage, the introduction of free school meals for all and a reduction in the voting age to 16, Ed Miliband, the cabinet minister responsible for its drafting, reveals today. ... The manifesto will also set out proposals for a new model of banking built round a People's Bank, drawing on the post office network, and a possible cap on credit interest rates."
  

• Justin Wolfers, Hayek Propped Up by Government Intervention: "Sunday’s New York Times reported on attempts by the Texas Board of Education to rewrite the high school curriculum in accordance with its conservative values. .... How do they plan to rewrite high school economics? In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, to the usual list of economists to be studied – economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.... [Citation] data suggests that Hayek just doesn’t belong with Smith, Marx, Keynes, or Friedman. In fact, it seems that despite having enjoyed a much longer period to accumulate citations, he is still much less widely cited than Larry Summers. Sure, Hayek was an insightful economist. But insisting that high schools teach Hayek is a clear statement of ideology, not of economic science. The message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you can’t win in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you up. I don’t think Hayek would approve."
• Harry Moroz, Turning Our Backs on Benign Neglect: "The GAO has just completed its third and final review of the EZ/EC/RC programs, which are awaiting reauthorization. The results are underwhelming. As the programs aged, they came to be dominated by tax incentives rather than grants and financing decreased. Summarizing past results, the GAO notes: 1) An econometric analysis of the eight urban Round I EZs [there were three program rounds] could not determine whether the [improvements in poverty, unemployment, and economic growth] were a response to the program or to other economic conditions; 2) Similarly, interviews and surveys of EZ and EC stakeholders revealed that respondents credited the programs for certain improvements but also noted that external factors, such as changes in the national economy and in welfare policy, may have been associated with the economic changes in designated communities."
  

As my previous post on the Administration's proposed "Supplemental Poverty Measure" implied, I'm not so sure that the proposal is an "excellent first step" toward a better system of measuring economic security and deprivation. I see it as a fundamentally conservative measure, too conservative for my tastes, and one that wouldn't do much to change the national debate about poverty away from its current conservative fixations on having poorly paid workers toil longer hours and marry more.

The statements of proponents of the new measure aren't particularly reassuring in this regard. In an interview on NPR, Becky Blank, the Administration's point person on the measure, was asked whether the new measure would be "better or worse" than the current, deeply flawed poverty measure, and responded that: "it's hard to say one is better or worse." And, in a New York City report on the new measure, Mayor Bloomberg's office explains that the "measure largely confirms widely accepted wisdom about the long-term determinants of poverty reduction" such as "increased work force participation [and] more children growing up in two-parent families."

Hmm, I tend to think poverty has more to do with the long-term decline in good jobs and unionization, the failure to adopt universal health insurance, the decline in the social wage, and the massive increase in inequality over the last few decades that prevented working- and middle-class families from getting their fair share of growth in the economy and productivity. So, a poverty measure that keeps us in "More Toil!, More Marriage!" land is not exactly my cup of tea.

While my critique comes from the left, Robert Rector and Glenn Beck have recently started to pound on the proposal from the far right. Rector, for example, argues that the new measure "will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama’s endless quest to “spread the wealth” because it would "rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American." And Glenn Beck claimed that because the measure would use what he called a "comparative scale" that he would end up being counted as poor under it. His co-host went so far to call the proposed measure "Marxist."

I wish! A Supplemental Marxist Poverty Measure, now that's change we can believe in!

But seriously. The Rector/Beck line of attack raises a important question: as a nation, do we want to have an economy that boosts living standards for low-income, working-class families at roughly the same rate (or ever a greater rate) as living standards for middle-income families? Should a rising economic tide "lift all boats" in some rough proportion, or are we content with an economy that leaves Americans growing increasingly apart rather than together? I'm a lifting-all-boats kind of guy, one who thinks that America is a stronger nation if it grows together rather than apart, and that even the lowest-paid paid workers deserve their fair share of national growth and prosperity.

During the three decades after WWII, we had an economy that lifted all boats, especially those on the bottom and in the middle. But the dark era of Nixon-Reagan-Bush conservatism went in the opposite direction, and left the bottom and the middle behind. It's interesting that it was President Nixon who officially adopted the current federal poverty line and President Reagan who eliminated the Labor Department's Family Living Standards program in 1981. The Nixon poverty line that we currently have only adjusts for inflation, and doesn't keep pace with typical living standards; while the Family Living Standards program zeroed out by Reagan had produced basic family budget standards for more than three decades, ones that kept pace with living standards. It's almost like conservatives don't want to have national standards that keep track of whether working-class families are getting their fair share of the economic growth they are an essential part of. No surprise given what's happened to the living standards of those families since the Nixon-Reagan era began.

Although I look at this issue from a progressive perspective, it's also important to note that centrist and non-nutty conservatives who've studied poverty measurement agree that the only sensible poverty measures in a wealthy economy like ours are ones that are "comparative" in some sense. In their latest book, conservatives Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill explain that "relative poverty is a better measure of individual well-being than absolute poverty, because social context and community norms about what it means to be poor change over time, implying that the poverty line should be adjusted as economic growth makes everyone better off. ..." Haskins is a Republican whose previous gig was guiding the 1996 conservative welfare law through Congress as a staffer to the Gingrich Republicans; Sawhill is a DLC-style conservative Democrat, who sees poverty mostly in conventional "more work effort (regardless of job quality); more marriage" terms. I disagree with them on most everything, but here they're basically right on.

The other person who agrees with me, Haskins, and Sawhill, is Adam Smith—the dead Glaswegian and icon of conservatives everywhere, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776: Book Five, Chapter II, Article Four):

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote [a] disgraceful degree of poverty...”

[emphasis added]

Given his belief that poverty and necessities should be gauged by "the custom of the country" and not some PhD-derived standard of how many potatoes it takes to stay alive, Adam Smith is now, by the whacked-out, Tea-Party standards of Beck/Rector modern-day conservatism, a Marxist propagandist agitating to spread the wealth. Up is down. Day is night. And "Wealth of Nations" is really just "Das Kapital" when you read it closely enough.

In making the case for the supplemental income poverty measure proposed by the Administration last week, Matthew Yglesias, who calls the proposed measure an "excellent first step," explains that:

the official US government measure of poverty is based on a very crude estimate. In the 1960s, the average family spend one third of its income on food. So the way the poverty line works is that it calculates an “emergency food” budget for a family, and then triples the resulting number. Modern-day families, of course, spend much less on food but substantially more on housing, health care, and child care so there’s a need for an updated metric to better account for household spending.

An accompanying graphic in his post notes that food now "amounts to around one-seventh [of the median family budget] as the costs of housing, child care, and health care have all risen disproportionately."

This helps explain why they current federal poverty measure isn’t based on a sound conceptual basis anymore (if it ever was), but it also could be read to imply that the proposed measure does more than it actually does to take into account the costs of housing, health care, and child care, and will inevitably result in thresholds that are substantially higher than the current poverty thresholds.

This isn’t the case. Based on the most recently available Census estimates (from October 2009), under the approach proposed by the Administration the reference poverty threshold for a family of four in 2007 would have been somewhere between $23,500 and $27,744, compared to $21,500 under the current measure. Census has made clear that the proposed measure is "different along some dimensions from any estimates that have been produced to date," so these estimates will change, but they are unlikely to move significantly higher than this range. I think the most reasonable guesstimate right now is that the reference threshold comes out near the high end of that range, but that it will almost certainly remain more than $20,000 below the average nationwide amount that family budgets produced by the Economic Policy Institute and other organizations suggest is needed to "make ends meet" at a basic level (as well as the minimum amount that most Americans say in surveys is needed to make ends meet at a basic level).

Moreover, since the proposed approach would also count benefits like the EITC and food stamps that aren't currently counted, you need to discount higher thresholds somewhat for comparison purposes, especially with groups like low-income children who may receive several thousand dollars a year in those benefits. For example, the average EITC for a family with children was $2,488 in 2007.

While the new approach would subtract amounts parents actually spend out-of-pocket on child care, it wouldn't make any adjustment for parents who need quality child care but can't afford it; the same is likely to be the case for health care (although Census suggests it's open to looking at an adjustment for people who are uninsured and simply can't afford to get the care they need). 

Finally, the supplemental poverty threshold could be lower in some states and regions than even the current federal poverty thresholds (depending on whether and how geographic adjustment is done, an issue discussed below), and for certain groups (such as homeowners without mortgages, who will have their own threshold under the proposed approach).

For these reasons, I think progressives should be cautious about implying that the proposed supplemental poverty measure is really a direct measure of the amount families need to meet basic needs, even the limited set of them included in the measure. It might be better to frame this as an “extremely low” income measure, for example, than as a “low” income measure.

Yglesias also faults the current poverty line for failing to take into account "considerable place-to-place variation in prices, especially in the price of housing." And he links to a CAP release on the proposed measure that includes this argument:

The traditional measure includes no adjustment for geographic disparities in cost of living. This means that two families with the same income—one in Tate County, Mississippi and the other in Seattle, Washington—are considered equally as well off despite the fact that [HUD's] fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $574 per month in the former and $987 per month in the latter.

Here, again, some caution is in order. Rents are certainly higher in Seattle than in Tate County, Mississippi, but what this means for poverty measurement is considerably more complex than this discussion suggests. Whether or not these two families with same incomes should be “considered equally well off” depends on a number of real-world factors, most of which will lead us to conclude that the Mississippi family is objectively worse off as the Seattle family, even holding income equal.

First, there are problems with using HUD's Fair Market Rents to make comparisons like these. The actual typical difference in housing expenditures between the two families may be considerably less than HUD's Fair Market Rent (FMR) figures suggest. Some data suggests that the actual geographic difference in expenditures is less than the FMR differences, and at a 2005 National Academy of Sciences workshop on poverty measurement, HUD staff noted a dozen specific problems with using FMR data for geographic adjustment purposes. For these and other reasons, Commerce is not planning to use FMRs to make the adjustments (the economist Rebecca Blank, now at Census, has previously called them “crude”). Also, there may be systematic differences in housing quality that aren't captured in the data that's available.

Second, as was noted at the 2005 workshop, “rents reflect both amenities and disamenities of a geographic area.” These amenities and disamenities clearly impact how “well off” people are in various ways. So, for example, higher rents in Seattle reflect things like its public transportation system and other beneficial public structures that prosperous progressives communities provide to their citizens as well as greater employment and educational opportunities. These public amenities improve the quality of life for residents of progressive communities. Many if not most of these amenities are not available in conservative, economically depressed, rural counties in the Mississippi Delta.

Finally, considerable other evidence suggests that low-income Mississippians are considerably worse off in economic and social terms than low-income Washingtonians. Despite low rents, Mississippi has the nation’s highest level of food insecurity and hunger (17.4%), while the relatively high-rent Washington has a considerably lower rate of food insecurity (11.1%). Similarly, the Delta region of Mississippi that Tate County is located in scores lower on the American Human Development Index (“a numerical measure of well-being and opportunity made up of health, education, and income indicators”) than any other region of Mississippi, a state which itself scores dead last among the 50 states on the index. Finally, the Congressional District that Tate County is located in, Mississippi’s 1st, ranks 416th out of 436 districts on the American HDI; by comparison, the Congressional District that Seattle is located in, Washington’s 7th, ranks 28th out of 436 districts. You might want to ask yourself, if you were given the same amount of income and the choice of growing up in either Seattle or Tate County, Mississippi, which one would you choose: 28th or 416th?

Related to this is an important question about whether geographic adjustment should be part of any measure that is used for the purpose of a national poverty reduction target. Do we want to bring people in Tate County, Mississippi up to a national standard, or should we set the bar lower for because rents are lower there? I’m strongly in favor of a national standard for Tate County, Mississippi, not a dismal Mississippi one. Similarly, poverty estimates produced by CLASP in November 2009 using Census' own on-line calculator for producing alternative poverty measures found that West Virginia's poverty measure would be lower than Massachusetts' (12.3% vs. 14.2%). I have a hard time believing that the West Virginia social and economic model does a better job of fighting poverty than the Massachusetts one, and other direct measures of deprivation and economic don't support that conclusion. These numbers are likely to change somewhat as Census refines its measure, but they need to change quite a bit to be consistent with what most data tells us about geographic differences in deprivation, and what state-level social and economic policies work best in reducing poverty.

• The Coffee Party USA, Mission: "The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."
• Dean Baker, Missing the Story on Iceland: Can the Bankers Steal Your Kids' Money?: "... the [banking collapse in] Iceland makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day. Therefore when they say want the government to leave things to the market they are lying. They just want to be able to take risks with taxpayers money, without being fettered by regulations limiting the extent of these risks. In short, the finance boys want a free lunch, not a free market."
• Paul Krugman, Debt is a Political Issue: "... if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels."
• Sherry Linkon, Why Working Class Literature Matters: "Working-class literary studies is just getting started. In two decades, the field has moved from excavating the long-buried texts of worker writers from the last three centuries to developing an ever-more complex understanding of the value of class as a critical tool for interpreting literature of all kinds."
• Marion Nestle, Recognize Food Brands, Even 3-Year Olds Do This: "I’m not sure why this would be news to anyone who has taken a toddler to a grocery store, but researchers at the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that very young children recognize food brands, especially McDonald’s. ... It’s good to have the research and the implications are clear: something must be done to put some curbs on food marketing to kids."
• Teryn Norris, To Make Poverty History, Make Clear Energy Cheap: "The United States was a driving force behind the worldwide expansion of prosperity and security in the 20th century. Today, a new American project to make clean energy cheap can alleviate untold human suffering and injustice, develop the world's strongest clean energy industry, and help save the world from climate destabilization. In short, it may be our generation's single greatest opportunity to advance global prosperity in the 21st century and secure the lives of future generations. As Bill Gates put it, "This is the one with the greatest impact.""
  

• John Powell, Tailoring Job Relief to America's Diverse Communities: "In reality, the goal of the civil rights movement, like the goal of a fair recovery, is universal. On most issues, the goal of blacks or Latinos is no different than the goal of whites. What stands apart are the varied needs of each group that must be met to reach these goals, not merely because of race but also because they have different opportunities and structures for advancement."
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2009: "In 2009, 72.6 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. ... Among those paid by the hour, 980,000 earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage in 2009. Nearly 2.6 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 4.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
• Center for Social Inclusion, Broadband in the Mississippi Delta: A 21st Century Racial Justice Issue: "The Broadband in the Mississippi Delta report analyzes broadband availability and economic opportunity in Mississippi and the impact it has on communities of color. With far too little internet access in communities of color, hundreds of thousands are effectively prevented from contributing to the economy."
  

• Crooked Timber, Measuring Justice: "Cambridge has just published a new book, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, which Ingrid and I edited (the idea of doing it was entirely Ingrid’s, I should say, and a brilliant idea it turned out to be). Its a fairly tightly focused collection, for which we invited two kinds of contribution. It opens with a shortened version of Pogge’s essay “Can the Capabilities Approach be Justified?” which many of the contributors refer back to, and the first part continues with a series of chapters considering the relative merits of Rawls’s social primary goods approach and the capabilities approach to the metric of justice; for this we invited contributors whom we believed would defend one or another of these metrics while giving careful criticisms of the rival, plus Dick Arneson whom we believed (rightly) could be relied on to help make progress despite not being associated with either view. For the second part we invited contributors who would think about some specific issue of justice (in health, education, gender, the family, disability) and consider the relative merits of the approaches with respect to that specific issue. We wrote a short analytical introduction which locates the debate in a broader context, and which, we hope, helps guide the reader through the book (the CUP page has a pdf of it, so you can judge for yourselves); the book concludes with a nice, partly autobiographical, essay by Sen engaging with the chapters in the first part of the book."
• Chicago News Cooperative, Environmentalist Prods Fellow Blacks to Join in Her Crusade: "Ms. Davis also preaches do-for-self to go along with her gospel of green. “The move toward eco-friendly development, and the jobs it creates,” she said, “is an opportunity for blacks and other minorities to take more control of their destiny. In that sense, it is a way to move forward for communities that often feel left behind by economic opportunity.” “What we reject is the ‘Help the Negro Industry,’ ” she said. “People coming into our community, thinking they know best, trying to save us. We can save ourselves. “The ‘Help the Negro Industry’ is what allowed billions of dollars to come down for urban renewal, but the urban did not get renewed. We are absolutely committed that urban renewal not be repeated.” Ms. Davis said she believed that minorities must educate and prepare themselves to take advantage of the changing, more environmentally attuned economy. It was just as important, she said, to educate people about the “economics of ecology” as it was to protest the dire environmental conditions in many black and Latino neighborhoods — including accusations by some that “environmental racism” contributes to the problem."
• Sarika Gupta, Reconciliation and Representation: The Share of the Population Represented by the Democratic Majority: "With the debate over health care dragging on, it is becoming increasingly likely that the Senate will pass a bill through the reconciliation process, requiring just a simple majority rather than the super-majority needed to break a filibuster. This paper shows that if this path is taken, senators who represent the vast majority of the nation’s population will have supported the bill. This assessment holds even if several of the senators who have indicated serious reservations end up voting against it."