Half Changed World

Flexible work and caregiving

I've been at a couple of meetings lately where there's been discussion about flexible work  -- both part-time work, and arrangements where people work full-time, but at flexible hours or locations.  And there's some interesting conversations about whether this discussion should be framed as about caregiving or not.

The arguments against making this a conversation about caregiving are:

• As long as flexible work is seen as a special privilege or accommodation for a limited population, it will be stigmatized -- the mommy track.
• Moreover, special privileges create resentment among those who don't get them -- this is where you hear the stories from childless workers who complain that their colleagues with kids race out the door at 5.30, and assume that they're always available to work late.
• If we truly believe that business should only care what you achieve, not when or where you do it, this should apply to everyone, regardless of the reason they desire flexibility.

Interestingly, I've heard that in the United Kingdom, where there's a right to request flexible working conditions (although the employer is allowed to say no), employers think that it's awkward that the right is limited to parents of young children -- they'd prefer something broader.

The argument on the other side is that we shouldn't be afraid to say that caregiving is important.  In the US, we often treat having children as a sort of expensive hobby -- something that people do for their own pleasure, and that doesn't incur any societal obligations.  If it takes up all their time and money, they should have known what they were getting into.  So, I have real misgivings about going down a path that says that it doesn't matter whether you want time off to care for a child or a sick parent or to train for a triathlon, write a novel, or sleep off your hangover.

I see virtues to both arguments.  What do you think?  Both as to whether you think government should be neutral about caregiving, and which approach is more likely to succeed.

When I look back on all the crap I learned in HS...

Christine tagged me to come up with a list of five classes that I wish they'd taught (or I'd taken) in high school.  Here's my list, in no particular order:

1. An economic history of the United States.  It wasn't until I got to college and took a class on the American Labor Movement that the Jacksonian era and the bank wars made any sense to me.
2. A class in US history that got past World War II.
3. A class in robotics. 
4. A sex ed class that used Cycle Savvy as the text book.
5. Spanish.  I took 6 years of French, but and then a year of college German, but am not fluent in either.  I'd have far more chances to use Spanish.

The most useful classes I've taken (at various levels of schooling) are:

1. Typing.  (6th grade -- on manual typewriters -- I hated every minute of it, and am so glad that they made me take it.)
2. American Government (high school.  Not because of the content, but because the teacher made us write papers that could not be longer than 3 pages, double spaced.)
3. American Labor History (college)
4. Microeconomics (grad school)
5. Statistics (grad school)
6. Group Dynamics (grad school)

The most useless classes I've taken are:

1. Drafting (mandatory at my high school)
2. "Energy shop" (You had to take a shop, and didn't get to choose which one.  The only part I remember is making a wind powered goose ornament)
3. Yiddish (took a term of it in college, mostly because my favorite teacher was teaching it)

I'm not going to tag anyone, but post a comment if you feel like taking this one up.

LED lights

In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to post about the LED lights that we've put into our new kitchen. They're LR6 lights, from Cree Lighting.  If you walked in, you wouldn't notice them -- and that's the point.  They look like standard lights, are even more energy efficient than CFLs, don't contain mercury, and can be dimmed (although they require a digital dimmer). 

So, what's the downside?  Well, for now they're somewhat overpriced.  If they last as long as the company claims (on the order of 20 years), they'll more than pay for themselves, but that assumes that we don't discount the future stream of savings.  And they're fairly new products, so no one really knows that they'll actually last that long.  But we decided they were worth a try.  And they look good enough that we're probably going to use them in our living room as well.

I was more than a bit nervous about buying these without being able to see what they'd look like in practice.  (Amicus Green has them, but as part of a display with a bunch of other lights, so it's hard to see what the light looks like.)  So, if you're in the DC area and you're considering these lights, feel free to email me if you want to come see them.

Tax Day Alert

From my friends at the Coalition for Human Needs:

On Tax Day, we ought to feel that we're paying for a government that helps when a recession hits.

Now we're in a recession.  The President opposes help to the unemployed and others facing hardships.  Some in Congress want to do the right thing - and some are mostly hearing from corporate lobbyists.  Who will prevail?

Call on Monday and Tuesday, April 14-15:  1-800-473-6711*
Tell your Representative and Senators to do more to reverse the recession - by helping those in need.

You can make the difference! Here's how:

Call 1-800-473-6711* toll-free, and ask for each of your U.S. Senators and your Representative; tell them: 

I am a constituent of Rep/Sen ___ and I am calling to urge him/her to do more to reverse the recession.  Economists agree that the best way to boost the economy is to help those in need.  That's why he/she should support extending unemployment insurance, more nutrition and home energy assistance, and aid to states to prevent harmful cuts in health care and other services.   

Economists of all stripes agree that the best way to boost the economy is to put money into the hands of those who will spend it quickly:  low- and moderate-income people.  But if Congress only hears from corporate lobbyists, there will be more deals that ignore the 80,000 who lost jobs and 20,000 who lost their homes last month alone - as well as the millions who are going without because of skyrocketing food and energy prices.

 (For more information: see Towards Shared Recovery, http://www.chn.org/pdf/2008/stimulus4142008.pdf)

At tax time, it's worth remembering that for 2007 millionaires each average more than $114,000 for the tax cuts enacted since 2001. They're doing okay.  But the bottom half of U.S. families have seen their income shrink during the same period, and the recession will make things far worse for those whose incomes are low to middling.  Helping them helps all of us.

Need Help finding your Member's name?

• Find your Rep. at: www.house.gov.
• For your Senators' names go to www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

*This toll-free number is provided courtesy of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization which works for peace and social justice. AFSC welcomes groups to circulate and use the number in support of non-partisan work for budget priorities that fund human needs, not war and without linking the alert to a website that solicits donations or is coordinated and/or publicized with actions used to support or oppose any party or candidate for public office.

**********************

And here's the paper my organization put out.

My father is right

After reading yesterday's post, my dad emailed me to say that he thought the question of whether young adults are better off than their parents depends mostly on what level of education each generation has attained.  Specifically, he argued that a young adult with a college degree is likely to be better off than her parents if she's a first generation college student, but not if her parents also went to college.

Let's look at the possibilities. 

• If your parents went to college, and you went to college, they are probably earning more than you are.  (Obviously, there are exceptions when the parent suffers from a disability, or chose to be a starving artist, or got laid off, or when the kid joined Google or Microsoft at just the right time, but on average, 55 year old college grads earn a lot more than 25 year old college grads.  To be precise, in 2006, the average 25-34 year old with a bachelor's degree in 2006 earned $40,276 and the average 55-64 year old with bachelor's degree earned $50,397. 
• I wasn't convinced that young college graduates were necessarily earning more than their non-graduate parents but I looked up the numbers, and my father is right.  The average 55-64 year old with a high school degree and no college education earned  $29,283 in 2006.  While there are some plumbers and union mechanics who earn good money with just a high school degree, there's not enough of them to affect the median.
• Young high school graduates are also earning less than their HS-grad parents -- the average 25-35 year old with a high school degree and no college earned just $25,0354.
• And, to fill out the options, the HS grad child of college-graduate parents is clearly downwardly mobile.

[Sources PINC-03-part 37 and PINC-03-part 91.  All figures cited are medians.]

My dad's point was that because the fraction of the population going to college has increased so much, a significant portion of college graduates are from families where their parents didn't go to college. And they're doing better than their parents.  At least in terms of income -- they also have more college debt. And, as lots of people commented yesterday, their parents probably own a home that has appreciated significantly since they bought it, while in a lot of the country, homeownership is still out of reach for most young people, even those with good incomes.

Also, check out Figure 4 in this report.

Falling behind (your parents)

In the discussion of Falling Behind, Jennifer commented that people compare themselves not just to what's around them, but also to what their parents when they were little.

It made me wonder if part of the reason that young adults today -- especially those from middle- to upper-class families -- feel like they can't keep up is that their parents waited until they were older, and more established, to have them.  So, you've got 20-somethings comparing their lives to what their 50-something or 60-something parents can afford now, rather than to what their parents were able to afford when they were in their twenties.  As Robert Frank suggests, maybe it's a mistake to learn to tell the difference between good wine and Two Buck Chuck when you're young, when you can't afford the good stuff anyway.

sidebar?

Can you see the sidebar on this blog?  And what URL are you using?  I'm not seeing it on www.halfchangedworld.com, but it's there on elb.typepad.com.  And I don't understand how they could be showing different things.

my letter to Congress

Here's the letter that I just sent to my Senators and Representative:

Dear xxx:

While I am deeply concerned about the current housing and economic situation, I am writing to urge you not to support a massive give-away to the banks and homebuilders who got us into this mess.

In particular, it is outrageous to provide a tax credit to encourage people to buy foreclosed or new homes, thus making it even harder for people who have stayed current on their mortgages to sell their houses.  I also oppose the provisions that would rebate previously paid taxes to those who prospered during the housing boom.

I think the idea of allowing a deduction for housing costs for those who do not itemize their taxes is appealing, but it should be paid for by capping the mortgage interest deduction for houses worth more than $1 million.

As the new jobs numbers show, we are heading into a recession.  Congress should extend unemployment insurance benefits, put more money into WIC and LIHEAP, and temporarily increase the Medicaid match rate to ensure that poor families don't lose their health coverage.  That would help the people who are suffering the most, not the people who created the problems.

Thank you for your consideration.

***

There are some good things in the bill -- some money for community-based actions, some money for financial counseling.  But they're outweighed by the massive giveaway.  I'd rather no bill than this bill.

speeches

I've quoted here before from the speech that Dr. King gave on the eve of his assassination.  It's a stunning speech, made almost unbearable by the clarity of hindsight.  I've included pieces of it in my haggadah for Passover at times, and no one ever seems to manage to get through it without their voice breaking.  Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, you can watch some of it online. 

This 40th anniversary of King's death has a particular resonance, because of the comparison in that final speech between him, and Moses, seeing the promised land, but not making it there himself.  The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years before they made it.  How long will we wander?

***

I was at a meeting last week where we were discussing Obama's speech about race, and someone said that he thought there were echoes in it of Kennedy's speech after King's death.  I hadn't heard it, so I went and found the video online.  Go watch it.  (Warning -- this clip cuts to footage of Kennedy's assassination.)

world news

A few months ago, I received an offer to get the Economist for airline miles.  Since I an unlikely to use them for anything else, I signed up.  The Economist offers two things that I find interesting:

• A very distinct take on US politics, from a point of view that is quite different from either of the US political parties -- very pro-market, but without the social conservativism of the Republicans.
• In depth coverage of world news.

That said, I have to admit that I often find myself skimming past many of the international stories -- oh, there are protests in Albania, who knew?-- but not really caring a whole lot about the details.

The world news story that I'm following most closely right now is the elections in Zimbabwe.  With no official results 4 days after the elections, it's hard to believe that Mugabe's people aren't cooking the books.  (The opposition is claiming that they've won, but the government says that just saying that is an attempted coup.) And today some journalists have been arrested.  I don't have any particular insight into how it's going to turn out, but I'm watching with my fingers crossed.

Why do I care about this story?  Like Becca at Not Quite Sure, I've been there.  For two days, which doesn't make me any sort of an expert.  But I know how desperate people were then for our American dollars, and I just can't wrap my head around what a million-fold inflation since then means.  It's a heartbreaker of a story, and a reminder that much (most?) hunger in the world is political, not (just) the result of natural disasters. (And yes, we all had serious misgivings about our tourist dollars going to support Mugabe's government, but we went anyway.  I don't know if we did net harm or good.)

But I think I'd care about Zimbabwe even if I hadn't been there.  I wrote a report about it in 6th grade, shortly after it achieved independence.  I can't remember many of the details, but I know that I wrote to the embassy asking for information and they sent me a thick envelope with newspapers and other material. At the time, I think I was most intrigued by all the cities whose names were changed.

One concern I have about The Economist as my source for international news is that I don't know enough to know where their biases and blind spots are.  For example, they had a story about Zimbabwe last month, in which they argued confidently that Simba Makoni is "no joke for the incumbent." But it looks like he's a distant third, getting less than 10 percent of the vote from the unofficial figures that have come out so far.   Morgan Tsvangirai is the candidate who appears to be leading.

relocations

In skimming today's Washington Post, I saw a short blurb that says that women's careers are responsible for one-third of corporate relocations, up from 15 percent in 1993.  The study that it's based on appears to be only available for a hefty fee, so I don't know how reliable the data are, but if it's real, that's a fascinating trend.

In reading Pamela Stone's book on Opting Out?, I was struck by how often a choice to be the "trailing spouse" in a relocation was the first (unintentional) step down a path that led to women leaving the workforce.  They assumed that their skills were strong enough that they'd have no trouble finding another job, and that was generally true, but often it wasn't quite as good a job, or they just didn't have the leverage in the new job to insist on the flexibility they wanted.  Or the relocation put stress on their family, and they wanted to take time to help the kids adjust...

The big question I'd want to know is what the breakdown of relocations by gender is among married couples -- my guess is the 32 percent figure includes relocating singles.  If there's really a big growth in the number of men willing to be a trailing spouse, that's a bigger indicator of gender equality than the frequently cited stat that 1/3 of wives earn more than their husbands.