• Erik Eckholm, Trying to Explain a Drop in Infant Mortality: "Here in Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, the implausible has happened: the rate of infant deaths among blacks plummeted between the 1990s and the current decade, from an average of 19 deaths per thousand births to, in recent years, fewer than 5. The steep decline, reaching parity with whites, is particularly intriguing, experts say, because obstetrical services for low-income women in the county have not changed that much. ... Without a simple medical explanation, health officials say, the decline appears to support the theory that links infant mortality to the well-being of mothers from the time they were in the womb themselves, including physical and mental health; personal behaviors; exposure to stresses, like racism; and their social ties."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Feed Me Hip-Hop and I Start Trembling: "In my memoir, I talk about a buddy who, whenever he was about to get jumped, use to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend. It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that whenever I hear society mocking the mask which young black boys don in urban America. We manufacture the conditions, and then rail at kids for creating a code of survival in response. In my time, hip-hop was an art-form based on that code. If you were a kid living in a city, and thus acclimated to the rules of that city, if you spent time trying to understand which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends, in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in other words, you lived with the threat of random violence, then hip-hop was the language of your life. "
• Paul Rosenberg, Shadow of Food Insecurity Looms: "... by every relevant measure, those states that voted for Obama did a better job of ensuring that families were food secure, that they lived without fear of going hungry. In braod terms, this is very good indication of what it means to vote Democratic at the presidential level. It is not that McCain voters are heartless. Nothing said about such large groups of people can reflect necessarily on any individual. But the group pattern is unmistakable. Now what is needed is national-level policies that reflect this underlying reality. Food insecurity is incompatible with the purpose proclaimed in the Preamble of the Constitution. It is, quite simply, un-American. It's time to call for its abolition--and more importantly, time to institute policies that will bring that about."
  

• A.O. Scott, 'Precious' and 'The Blind Side,' Two Routes From Poverty: "And this is a critique that might extend to “The Blind Side” as well. Both movies tell stories that suggest a way out of poverty, brutality and domestic calamity for certain lucky individuals while saying very little about how those conditions might be changed. For all their differences, they ultimately occupy a common ground that is both optimistic and, at the same time, curiously defeatist. Both locate the problems facing their main characters in the failure of families — of mothers in particular — and find solutions in better families, substitute mothers (Ms. Rain and Leigh Anne), whose selflessness and loyalty exorcise the biological monsters who have been left behind. The fact that “The Blind Side” is based on a true story lends credibility to this sentimental idea."
• Kate Christensen, Midday Malaise: "Free for All picks up the threads of the crucial question Michael Pollan posed in The Omnivore's Dilemma: What to do about the problem of food in America? Pollan came up with some brilliantly commonsensical answers, most famously the dictum "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He attempted to address the nation's harsh class inequities by suggesting that ecologically conscious and enlightened nutritional habits—such as buying locally from small organic farms, forgoing processed foods entirely, and choosing a plant-heavy diet—if adopted by those who can afford them, would trickle down to the poor as sustainable agriculture became more prevalent and corporate control of supermarket shelves weakened. Still, I couldn't help feeling he didn't fully address the class issues surrounding food in this country. With refreshing objectivity and straightforwardness, Poppendieck dives into that whole teeming, gnarly mess: poverty, race, class, childhood "diabesity," hunger, bureaucratic roadblocks, and corporate greed. A professor of sociology at Hunter College, she has researched her topic with admirable thoroughness. There are interesting and often moving anecdotes throughout, but she is no zealot; her writing style has little of Pollan's catchy, headlong passion. Her call to action is quiet and restrained: "We need a new paradigm for school meals," she writes, "one that sees expenditures for school food as investments in the current and future health of our children. It is time to go 'back to the drawing board,' to take a whole new look at the way we feed our children at school." Because Poppendieck relies on the thoughtful synthesis of facts rather than rhetorical flash to make her points, Free for All can be a bit dry and academic, but it richly rewards a close and careful study and, in fact, should be required reading for everyone who eats food, buys food, has kids, or cares about nutrition."
• Scott McLemee, Mutual Aid Society: "In Why We Cooperate, just published by Boston Review Books, Tomasello gives a succinct account of his work with a research team conducting comparative studies of the behavior of human infants and our closest primate relations, especially chimpanzees. Their findings suggest that we are distinguished, as a species, by capacities for empathy, generosity, cooperation, and a sense of fair play. Some of these tendencies are found among the great apes, but not to anything like the degree to which they manifest themselves in children from very early in their development. These distinctive capacities form the bedrock of our capacity to accumulate, over time, not just wealth but complex behavior."
  

One of the themes that will hopefully emerge from this week's dramatic protests at UC Berkeley is that student know how commodified higher education has become, and they don't like it. Today about 40 or so students occupied a school building all day, before being escorted out this evening. The SF Chronicle reports that outside the building, protesters were chanting, "We're tired, we're cold, UC Berkeley won't be sold."

But higher education has already been sold. Since 1983, college and university expenses have risen at a rate that exceeds inflation by more than 25 percent. Professor salaries make up the largest share of expenses, and in constant dollars, they have grown tremendously at both private and public universities.

Faculty salaries at private schools have grown the most, but both public and private school faculty this year were earning the most they have ever been paid since 1967. In public schools, the average professor earned $99,640 in 1967, declining to a low of $81,418 in 1982, then rising to $115,509 in 2009. Private school salaries have gone up even faster, starting at $107,156 in 1967, bottoming out at $91,778 in 1982, and then hitting $151,403 by 2009. UC Berkeley, trying to compete with private schools, paid its faculty an average of $143,500 last year. (The data here comes from the Commonfund Institute's report on the higher education price index.)

Students here are already worried about the bleak job market we face when we leave school, probably heightening the tension over fees. But even before the recession, the wage premium associated with more schooling was declining. We're paying more for less.

UC President Mark Yudoff says that his biggest fear is "an exodus of faculty." In the modern market that has to be a concern, but it shouldn't be the biggest. How many more students are going to be driven by debt into the private sector instead of working for nonprofits or government? How many more students with technical skills and abilities will go into finance and consulting instead or engineering and computer sciences? Maybe the costs of student tuition are quantifiable, but the price society pays isn't. And the bottom line of public education isn't a star-studded faculty or flashy new buildings. It should be that the public benefits.

People like to protest at UC Berkeley, so it was a matter of time before I got involved in one. Today was my first, and in true Berkeley fashion its purpose was fighting the administration over a large fee increase that was, unfortunately, approved. For my program, a proposed $6,000 "professional development fee" also hangs in the balance.

The folks getting the blame for the rise in student fees include the administration, the governor, the people of California who approved Prop. 13 and its limits on tax increases, and probably somebody else I'm missing. All of them deserve some blame, but they didn't call out the professors, who're supposedly allied with the students against the fee hikes. But rising professor salaries are an important contributor to the runaway inflation in education. Berkeley's full professors got an average salary of $143,500 last school year, up from $108,700 for the 1999-2000 school year, according to the American Association of University Professors. The UCs are public universities, yet their pay scales compare favorably with private schools.

I wonder, is the cost dynamic in higher education all that different from health care? The basic trend there is that health care has gotten more expensive, doctors have become better compensated, and outcomes haven't gotten better at the same pace, especially when you look at regional spending and outcomes. And like health care, fundamentally, the protests at Berkeley and other UCs are about the failure to control costs, and the consequent decision to privatize how it gets paid for. The official response has not been to address the root of the problem but to shift the burden of paying for education to the students and their families, and the student response is generally that somebody else should pay for it. But as far as I can tell there is no coherent understanding of why education has gotten so expensive. That's what needs to be established first- then we should have a discussion about how to pay for it.

• Judith Schwatz, What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy: "Most know Jane Jacobs as the ultimate champion of cities, who stood up against neighborhood demolition and saw a vibrant ballet where others saw urban squalor. But three years since her death — and a year into a downturn marked by bailouts, foreclosures and sky-high unemployment — her economic vision has come into the spotlight. "People in economic policy and development are looking carefully at Jacobs' work," says David Boyle, an author and researcher at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based independent economic think tank. "She's been very influential, but subtly so. People aren't always aware of where the ideas come from. This is true from the right and left."
• Tom Barry, A Death in Texas: "These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned."
• Evan R. Goldstein, Isaiah Berlin, Beyond the Wit: "The first book that Hardy edited, Russian Thinkers (Viking Press), appeared in 1978. It included essays on the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the socialist writer Alexander Herzen, and the novelist Ivan Turgenev. There was also an essay on Leo Tolstoy, titled "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which put some analytical flesh on the bones of the Greek poet Archilochus's maxim that "the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Russian Thinkers rekindled interest in Berlin's once-famous division of thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes. It remains one of the philosopher's most-referenced insights. (Russian Thinkers itself enjoyed a revival in 2007 when the playwright Tom Stoppard cited it as a major influence on his three-part epic The Coast of Utopia.)"
• Peniel E. Joseph, Back in Black: "Gilroy's last and most potent essay includes a cogent riff on Du Bois's central notion of double consciousness: the idea that black Americans possessed a dual vision of American democracy that allowed them to see the world's brutality and hopefulness at once. Du Bois's words proved crucial, Gilroy writes, to the way in which African Americans helped to alter "the world's moral architecture." Gilroy trenchantly lays out the universalist promise of the double-consciousness critique at the same time as he bemoans the failures of the latter-day African-American community to follow through on the more hopeful tenor of Du Bois's insights, offering precious little resistance, in Gilroy's view, to American culture's drift into the crasser reaches of consumer capitalism. For Gilroy, reclaiming Du Bois for today's black activists and intellectuals requires that they update the notion of double consciousness for a more contingent, multicultural age. The challenge ahead for black activists, Gilroy writes, is to "rehabilitate the idea of multiple identities" and simultaneously to assert their own selfhood—a political statement that retains "a capacity to shock" in a white-dominated social order."
  

• Mori Dinauer, Lighting Round: "Liberals are often accused of having a bias against business or being insufficiently pro-free market. I think it would be fair to say that liberals are skeptical about the business community's commitment to anything beyond the bottom line, and to that end have tended to side with labor over business elites. A good example of why this is is captured in this Think Progress which quotes the Inside U.S. Trade business newsletter: 'Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA).'"
• Kaiser Health News, Lawmakers Call for Emergency Sick-Leave Requirement: "Lawmakers are calling for new legislation that would require businesses to provide paid emergency sick-leave because of the swine flu pandemic. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairing a health subcommittee hearing Tuesday, said that requiring businesses with 15 or more employees to offer seven paid days off a year would end a dangerous choice 'between staying healthy and making ends meet.'" Some conservative lawmakers argue, though, "that Democrats are using a public health crisis as momentum for faulty legislation that would harm businesses by inviting abuse by workers. ... There currently is no requirement for businesses of any size to provide paid sick leave""
• David Weigel, Anti-Tax Movement Ponders Two Big Defeats: "Election night was bittersweet for Andrew Moylan. The young government affairs manager of the conservative National Taxpayers Union was watching returns in Asheville, N.C., with fellow attendees of the conservative State Policy Network’s annual meeting. Early in the night, the gubernatorial races in Virginia and then New Jersey went to the Republicans. Moylan, however, was watching the returns on two anti-tax, anti-spending ballot measures in Maine and Washington. Those weren’t turning out so well. ... The numbers broke hard against conservatives and libertarians. The Maine Tax Relief Initiative–Question 4–would have placed new limits on state and local government spending and required voter approval to go over those limits. It failed by 21 points and a margin of more than 100,000 votes. Washington Initiative 1033 would have placed limits on local spending and directed surplus tax revenue back to Washingtonians, as property tax rebates. It failed by 11 points and a similar margin of around 100,000 votes."
  

• David O. Meltzer and Zhuo Chen, The Impact of Minimum Wage Rates on Body Weight in the United States: "Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over 1968-2007 and because minimum wage labor is a major contributor to the cost of food away from home we hypothesized that changes in the minimum wage would be associated with changes in bodyweight over this period. To examine this, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 1984-2006 to test whether variation in the real minimum wage was associated with changes in body mass index (BMI). We also examine whether this association varied by gender, education and income, and used quantile regression to test whether the association varied over the BMI distribution. We also estimate the fraction of the increase in BMI since 1970 attributable to minimum wage declines. We find that a $1 decrease in the real minimum wage was associated with a 0.06 increase in BMI. This relationship was significant across gender and income groups and largest among the highest percentiles of the BMI distribution. Real minimum wage decreases can explain 10% of the change in BMI since 1970. We conclude that the declining real minimum wage rates has contributed to the increasing rate of overweight and obesity in the United States. Studies to clarify the mechanism by which minimum wages may affect obesity might help determine appropriate policy responses."
• John Schmitt and Kris Warner, The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008: "The view that the typical union worker is a white male manufacturing worker may have been correct a quarter of a century ago, but it's not an accurate description of those in today's labor movement."
• Dean Baker, American Wages Out of Line?: "The NYT told readers that wages in the United States are out of line with the rest of the world. The basis for this assertion is that the U.S. has a large trade deficit. The deficit does provide evidence that prices in the U.S. are out of line, but it doesn't necessarily tell us anything about wages. First and most immediately, it suggests that the dollar is over-valued (a point noted in the column). ... It is also possible that U.S. goods are not competitive because profits are too high. The profit share of income had risen over the last three decades, so one could plausibly argue that excess profits are making U.S. goods less competitive. We could also argue that the inefficiency of the sectors of the economy that are protected from foreign competition -- most notably health care -- is driving up the price of U.S. goods and making them uncompetitive. In that story, the problem is not the wages of auto and textile workers, but of doctors and hospital administrators."
• Kaiser Health News, Lawmakers Call for Emergency Sick-Leave Requirement: "Lawmakers are calling for new legislation that would require businesses to provide paid emergency sick-leave because of the swine flu pandemic. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), chairing a health subcommittee hearing Tuesday, said that requiring businesses with 15 or more employees to offer seven paid days off a year would end a dangerous choice 'between staying healthy and making ends meet.'""
  

• Vice President Biden Joins Leading Scholars to Disucss Challenges Facing America's Middle Class in the 21st Century Economy
  
• Paul Krugman, Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!: "... there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you’ve heard, it may be something you’d like to believe, but it just didn’t happen."
• Duncan Green, Why Demanding 'Political Will' is Lazy and Unproductive: "If you consider political capital rather than will, any leader is going to be more likely to back winnable changes than blatantly lost causes. The nitty gritty of advocacy must start with that kind of ‘power analysis’, to establish how to a given demand can be made winnable. That means investing in political literacy, rather than being satisfied with vague exhortations to ‘political will’. The trick is to use this understanding to improve your chances of successful influencing, so we observe mobile phone usage rising exponentially and think how we can use this to drive greater equity or accountability. The role played by political will for NGOs and other social movements reminds me of ‘good governance’, as deployed by governments and international institutions like the World Bank or DFID. They also set out the problem/solution format, but then default to ‘good governance’ as the magic wand that will guarantee implementation – no power, no politics, just good governance. Words that fill a vacuum where political analysis should be."
  

Coming from DC to urban planning school is a difficult transition. People conceptualize social problems very differently. In planning school, people are obsessed with "space"- not the final frontier, but specific places. I didn't know or really care at all about space when I was DC, and I think that is because I did not have to. In DC social problems are addressed with anti-poverty policy for low-income people; for urban planners, its "community development" for low income communities. Planners want to live in a world where the ghetto is a thing of the past. DC wants to cut poverty in half.

Coming to planning school, I assumed that the focus on communities came from a more communal, less individualistic outlook. But that hasn't really been borne out. The most important debate in community development is between "people vs. place" strategies, and both can focus on either groups or individuals. Should policy help people move out of the ghetto to better places? Or should it make the ghetto a better place to live? Traditionally dispersal strategies have promoted individual mobility.

And I've also learned that federal policymakers once took a strong interest in the inner city. Many of the war on poverty programs established direct links between the federal government and low income communities. The theory at the time was that cities and states had neglected these places, and that direct federal intervention was required to improve all sorts of services that neighborhoods weren't getting enough of. Once adequate services were provided, inner-city residents would follow the traditional migrant path of gradually acculturating and then moving out to better neighborhoods. But this link was severed by the Nixon administration, and even under Johnson it created controversy and tremendous political backlash.

What was lost when this link was cut? I initially thought it was an understanding and appreciation of community and the group, but planners are just as able as public policy folks to think in individualistic terms. Probably what I think has been lost is just the ability to see poverty and inequality as spatial phenomenons. Economic and social problems are not the same all over the country; they are not even the same within states or regions. The disparities in social services, housing and infrastructure development that galvanized the War on Poverty remain. Regional and local economic disparities have probably become even worse. Policy needs to be more place-conscious.

Another way to put it: let's take two families who have the same income. One lives in inner-city Detroit, the other in a middle-class suburb. Both may have some things in common, but the environments they live in are undeniably different. The suburban family may have access to good services, transportation, and neighborhood infrastructure. Their economy is stable; their community is fairly tight-knit. But the family with the same income in inner-city Detroit often doesn't have those assets.

How could policy be more place-conscious? I'm now hearing calls for reviving the WPA, but what is the Obama administration's Tennessee Valley Authority? Does it have a strategy for revitalizing the industrial Northeast and Midwest? What is it going to do about California's cratering economy? And is its urban policy agenda anything more than a plan for increased dispersal?

Not according to this new "opportunity" framework that Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill are promoting.

3. Immigrant workers and the offshoring of jobs drive poverty and inequality in the United States.

Although immigration and trade are often blamed, a more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968...

The implication here is that jobs are unimportant. Because taking jobs for granted is a no-brainer. Obviously there's nothing to worry about there, and it doesn't have anything to do with "opportunity." Yep, jobs as far as the eye can see...

I really don't see how this isn't anything but a conservative reframing of the mobility debate. They're pushing conservative policy to address what's seen as a liberal issue. Work requirements, marriage, etc- pretty much heard it all before. It's old wine in a new bottle.