Half Changed World

Harlem Miracle?

Last Friday, David Brooks had an op-ed in the New York Times with the headline The Harlem Miracle, discussing an evaluation of the schools run by the Harlem Children's Zone. While lots of people have been excited by the concept of the HCZ -- it's the basis for the "Promise Neighborhoods" idea that Obama talked about in the campaign and included in his budget -- there hasn't been any hard data about effectiveness until now.  Here's the underlying study* which really is quite exciting.

The main findings of the study are:

• For the middle school students, there were really enormous gains in math scores, although they took several years to kick in.  The gains in language arts scores were much more modest.  These findings are based on comparisons between those randomly selected for admission and those who applied but were randomly denied, so they're about as strong as you get.
• The elementary school impacts were stronger on language arts, somewhat smaller on math, but still impressive.  Because few students who applied for the elementary schools were denied admission, these findings are based on a different statistical approach (instrumental variables), which is somewhat less reliable.
• The authors did not find any significant effects on test scores for graduates of either Baby College or Harlem GEMS (the preschool program run by the HCZ).  They also note that the middle school impacts were as strong for kids who lived outside of the Zone as for those who were in it, suggesting that the full community package was not essential to the model.

So, what does this mean?  To start with, it refutes the claims of some that there's nothing you can do to help these kids do better in school and society. (The strong version of this claim is that IQ is genetic and can't be affected by anything you do, the weaker version is the claim that by the time the kids are in middle school it's too late.)

Brooks uses this finding to argue for "an emerging model for low-income students" where "schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values."  The thing to notice here is that Brooks is lumping HCZ and KIPP together.  Both models certainly share some features, including extended school days and years, and very high expectations.

However, if you read Whatever it Takes, one of the main themes is that Geoffrey Canada  (who runs HCZ) was constantly fighting his board, who thought they should just bring KIPP in to run these schools.  Canada felt that KIPP was too focused on rescuing a few students -- and encouragin these students to define themselves in opposition to the neighborhood culture -- whereas he wanted to change the neighborhood culture.  He also fought against explicitly teaching behaviors like making eye contact, arguing that no middle class school does that.  So, I don't know whether Canada gave in on these points, or if Brooks is distorting HCZ to fit his agenda.

But presumably, other people do have a good idea of what exactly is going on the HCZ schools.  Is this model then broadly replicable?  That depends on a bunch of questions:

• Are there enough good teachers out there who are willling to work in low-income neighborhoods, with the kind of hours required, and under intense pressure to achieve good test scores?  (HCZ had extremely high turnover of teachers.)  And are we, as a society, willing to pay enough to recruit teachers to do this?
• Are the kids willing to work as hard they have to to succeed in this model?  To give up afternoons and summers and weekends, and to work harder in school than they ever have before?
• How much of this success is dependent on Canada himself?  His personal charisma is clearly part of what made both teachers and students willing to work so hard.  And his personal story makes him a very convincing messenger for the idea that if you work hard you can succeed, even coming from poverty in Harlem.  No one is going to give up their weekends and summers unless they're convinced that it will make a difference.

* It drives me crazy that the Times never includes links to underlying sources.  But it cracked me up that Judith Warner's blog last week included a linked definition for "muffin top."

Others on this column:

• Laura at 11d.
• GothamSchools
• Thoughts on Education Policy

WBR: Intelligence and How to Get It

As promised, here's a review of Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.  it's the book that Nicholas Kristof's column a couple of weeks ago was based on.  The book jacket describes this book as "the authoritative anti-Bell Curve" and indeed, much of the book is  a full-out attack on the claim that intelligence is primarily determined by genetics and that any attempts to improve outcomes for members of disadvantaged groups are doomed.

To be honest, the "how to get it" part was the least interesting part of the book for me, because it covered ground that I already know about -- Perry Preschool, KIPP, Carol Dweck's work on the "mindset" that effort matters more than inherent ability.  That said, Nisbett does a good job of writing about these issues in a non-technical manner, and I'm hopeful that he will influence public opinion.

The "intelligence" part of the book was far more interesting, because Nisbett is implicitly arguing with both the strong hereditarians who believe that intelligence is overwhelmingly genetic and that environment (including parenting) doesn't matter much, and with the liberals who aren't sure exactly what is meant by "intelligence," and are pretty skeptical that intelligence tests are picking up underlying ability rather than leaning.  The first two chapters (and a more technical appendix) are aimed squarely at these issues, and should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to talk about intelligence.

Nisbett argues that the high estimates for the genetic component of intelligence are overwhelmingly based on twin studies, and especially adoptive studies, and these don't haver nearly as much variation in environments as there exists between families overall.  He also notes that overall IQ levels have risen steadily over time, far too quickly to be accounted for by natural selection (if you look at the raw scores, rather than the normed ones which are forced to have a constant mean of 100).  Addressing the question of racial differences in IQ specifically, he points out that the black-white gap has also decreased significantly in the past decades, and that African-Americans with a higher percentage of European genes do not have higher IQs than African-Americans with fewer European genes.

I'm going to end this review where Nisbett begins the book, on the question of what is intelligence.  Even after reading the book, I find it hard to define.  Nisbett is clear that he believes that schooling does increase intelligence, and that scores on even the most abstract and supposedly culture-free components of the IQ test (such as the Raven progressive matrices*) improve markedly with practice.  So he doesn't agree with the opening quote from Cyril Burt that intelligence is "inborn, all-around intellectual ability.. inherited, not due to teaching or training... uninfluenced by industry or zeal."  But he also thinks it's a real characteristic, distinct from specific knowledge of a subject.  In some ways, he almost seems to define intelligence as that which is measured by IQ tests, which is a strong predictor of academic and career sucess although not the only factor in either (with effort, emotional skills, self-discipline, and motivation being the strongest non-intelligence factors in these).

* For what it's worth, I would have chosen a different answer than the "correct" one on the sample problem given in the book, and still think that my answer is equally plausible.

images of welfare

My organization is in the process of redoing our website, and one of the goals is for the site to wind up less overwhelmingly text, and with some images.  So I've spent the last hour and a half looking on istockphoto, flickr, and google images for ideas for how to show welfare offices that aren't totally stereotypical.

Ok, I'm obsessing now.  I've been trying to figure out what on earth we can use for TANF and income supports that isn't stereotypical.

Here's a NYTimes article on welfare rolls: they used images of a full waiting room, and of a cubicle with files overflowing everywhere:

This Oregon DHS brochure has a mixture of images/

I really like the picture of a welfare rights rally in the bottom right of this web page.

Any suggestions?

universality and targeting

I ran across this LA Times article today, about (formerly) middle-class workers who have lost their jobs and are shocked to discover that their families don't qualify for most public benefit programs.  In many cases it's because with unemployment benefits, their incomes are still too high to qualify for food stamps or cash assistance; in other cases, they would qualify based on income, but have too much assets -- especially cars -- to qualify.

I don't know whether this makes those rejected for benefits more or less supportive of these programs.  I can imagine some people thinking "gee, if I can't live on this, how can people live on far less?" and supporting expansion and other people thinking "well, if these programs won't help me when I really need it, what good are they?" and supporting cuts.

Since the Recovery Act passed, I've been spending a lot of my time at work writing about the temporary assistance (TANF) provisions and trying to convince states to use that money to expand benefits for the neediest families.  It's been a tough sell.  Even though any increases would be 80 percent federally funded, state budgets are so tight that in many cases, they're saying they can't find the 20 percent.  And states are nervous about expanding programs with money that is designed to be temporary, because it's always hard politically to cut services back later.  I'm frustrated, but I get it -- I know how hard it is to sell any expansion of "welfare."

That said, I'm really shocked by how hard it is in some states, including Virginia, to get the unemployment insurance expansions passed.  For those who believe that welfare is bad, but contributory social insurance, like social security, is good, UI should fall on the "good" side of that divide -- it's based on wages and subject to a history of employment. The fact that it's still under fire makes me somewhat more skeptical about the claims that making programs universal will protect them from being attacked as "welfare."

safety nets

I just saw this article about whether the stronger European safety net means that they don't need separate stimulus packages.  I don't really know how much spending is needed to turn their economies around, but would note that less than half of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act could even vaguely be described as safety net spending (and only that much if you include all of the individual tax credits in that category).

But, I think the broader point, that the European programs are far more countercyclical the US programs (meaning that they automatically grow during hard times) is really important.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  The obvious explanation is that their social programs are far more generous than ours in general.  But I think it's equally important -- although not as obvious -- that several of our major programs -- especially Unemployment Insurance, TANF, and Medicaid -- are administered at the state level.   By constitution, most states aren't allowed to run budget deficits, so they're forced to cut services or raise taxes just when people need help the most.

The Federal government often chips in to help states when times are bad, but that requires specific legislative action, which often creates political complications.  There's a program -- the Extended Benefits program -- that is supposed to provide extra unemployment insurance to workers in high unemployment states, but the mechanics of it are so messed up that in practice, Congress always comes in and passes a separate program.  And that often happens well after we're in a recession -- the one good thing about this one is that it got people to pay attention relatively early.  Obama's budget includes language about fixing the Extended Benefit triggers, which made this policy wonk happy.

The Times article that I linked to above mostly focuses on a German program called “Kurzarbeit,” or short-work, which allows firms to cut workers hours instead of laying people off, and the government makes up a portion of the reduced wages.  There's actually a U.S. version of that in some states, called work sharing, although almost no one has heard of it.  It's a good idea.

Summertime and the learning is easy?

I added some clarifications to yesterday's post since I don't think I quite captured Gladwell's point about extreme IQ and achievement.  And I'll take the discussion about why the upper class kids showed more learning gains in the summer over here.

Let's start with the data first.  The data cited is from a study by Karl Alexander, who looked at the reading scores of a cohort of 650 first graders from the Baltimore public school system.  He took advantage of the fact that Baltimore administered the California Achievement Test to the same kids both in June, at the end of the school year, and in September, at the start of the next year.  This let them see what happened over the course of the school year, and what happened in the summer.  Here's a nice summary of the research, from the National Center for Summer Learning.

So, what's going on?  First, as Alexander notes in the summary, we're talking about Baltimore City Public Schools.  So the "upper class" kids are only relatively advantaged -- they tended to have college graduate parents, but to be basically middle class. 

Second, even given that, there's a real difference in what the kids did over the summer.  As Alexander writes:

"I don’t want to break it down into a checklist, but some differences seemed relevant. For example, better-off children were more likely to go to the library over the summertime and take books home. They were more likely to engage in a variety of enrichment experiences such as attending museums, concerts, and field trips. They were more likely to take out-of-town vacations, be involved in organized sports activities, or take lessons, such as swimming or gymnastics lessons. Overall, they had a more expansive realm of experiences."

But there's still the question of why the upper class kids would learn MORE (per month) over the summer than during the school year.  My guess is that they're reading more over the summer when they get to pick what they read than they do during the school year when it's assigned.

Updated:  Sorry, I'm clearly not providing enough detail.  The years when there was the disproportionate amount of learning over the summer were after 3rd and fourth grade:

Learning gains for upper class students in Baltimore

Grade	1	2	3	4	5
Increase during school year	60	39	34	28	23
Increase during summer following	15.4	9.2	14.5	13.4	N/A
Summer/year	4	4	2.3	2

TBR: Outliers

This week's book is Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell.  It's his attempt to look at the environmental and cultural factors that affect why some people succeed and others fail, and to blow apart the idea that individual genius is responsible for success.

It's a quick read (probably took me less than 3 hours front to back) and each section is reasonably entertaining, but it doesn't quite hold together as an overall book or argument.

In particular, the middle section, where he argues that Korean airlines have a terrible safety record because of the cultural pressures for subordinates to defer to their supervisors, seems to have little connection to the rest of the book.  And while it's possible that Gladwell is correct in his claim that the reason that Asian cultures respect hard work is that rice is more work to grow than wheat or corn, he sure doesn't present enough evidence to convince me.

Gladwell is correct that Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun) and Bill Gates were extraordinarily lucky in having the opportunity to program a lot when very few people had access to computers at all.  And there's no doubt that practice is necessary (if not sufficient) for being good at programming.  On the other hand, the reason that Gates is one of the richest men in the world has very little to do with his coding skills. (He didn't write the code for DOS, after all.)

I thought the discussion of the relationship (or lack thereof) between extreme intelligence* and success** was the best part of the book.  In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an early 20th century researcher who identified 1470 highly gifted California elementary school students, and was shocked to learn that only a small fraction of them were particularly successful later in life.  Moreover, there was a huge correlation between economic class and success (not exactly shocking to me, but still sad).  Gladwell cites Lareau and argues that the upper class kids know how to manipulate systems to their advantage, but I'm not convinced --I'm pretty sure that "concerted cultivation" wasn't around in the 1920s.

In the last part of the book, Gladwell returns to the question of education and class, and argues that the intensive school setting of KIPP lets poor kids spend enough time learning to catch up with their middle class peers.   Among other things, he cites the data that shows that much of the growth in the gap between poor and upper class kids during elementary school is not about what happens during the school year, but that the wealthier kids continue to gain over the summer, while the poor kids stagnate, or even slip backwards. I've heard that before, but had never seen the underlying data before -- what struck me the most is that for the upper class kids, they gained about half as much over the 3 month summer vacation as they did over the 9 month school year.  In other words, per month, the upper class kids learned more during vacation than during school. 

*When I initially wrote this post, I omitted the word "extreme" which significantly fails to represent Gladwell's argument.  He cites Arthur Jenson (whom he calls an "IQ fundamentalist") as saying that the four cutoffs that matter for IQ are 50, 75, 105, and 115 -- and that for real world applications, the difference between having an IQ of 115 and 150 or between 150 and 180 is less important.

**Jennifer asked what constituted success.  Here's what Gladwell writes "But few of his [Terman's] geniuses were nationally known figures.  They tended to earn good incomes -- but not that good.  The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a suprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures.  Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses.  His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary school students who went on to be Nobel laureates -- William Shockley and Luis Alvarez -- and rejected them both.  Their IQs weren't high enough... if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same family backgrounds as the Termites -- and dispensed with IQ altogether -- we would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses."

What does the PTA pay for?

I can't find the link now, but last week I heard a story on NPR about a PTA that was buying paper for the teachers to use in the classroom, with money they had been saving for new playground equipment.  The reporter was shocked that this was necessary, but I went to public schools in New York City in the 1970s, and I definitely remember the school running out of paper (for the mimeos!) by late in the term.

Laura at 11d linked to this article about a Long Island school district where parents raised over half a million dollars to preserve school sports and other extracurriculars after the school system's budget was turned down.  Laura wonders if this undermines school equity.  I'm less worried about that situation, where the largess seems to have been spread across the whole district, than the situation you sometimes see where parents raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for specific schools, sometimes hiring extra teachers.  They're willing to do it, because it's still cheaper than private school.

Our school PTA's total annual budget is about $25,000, with the largest fundraisers being sale of Sally Foster giftwrap, a silent auction, and a craft fair.  When the economy gets better, I want to look into putting the big items for the auction online and marketing them outside the school community -- we get some really nice donations, but there's just not enough people in the school who can afford them for them to go for more than the minimum bid.  But we sweat the small stuff too.  We had an election day bakesale, and we collect General Mills box tops.

What do we pay for?  The two biggest expenses are teacher workshops and training, and buses to let each class go on two field trips a year.  We buy some computer equipment for the school (smart boards) and books for the school library.  We bring in visiting authors, and give all the teachers small stipends to cover some of the things they buy for the classroom, which otherwise come out of their pockets.  It's not a ton of money, but it makes life measurably better for the school.

Oh yeah, and we also pay for cheese sandwiches for kids who don't have lunch money.  Unlike in some places, this hasn't been a big deal.  My guess is that it's because slightly more than half of the school qualifies for free or reduced price lunch, so the kids who wind up getting cheese sandwiches aren't particularly poor.  They're either kids whose families are having sudden hard times and haven't gotten the paperwork in, or they're kids who just forgot to bring in lunch money.  We do send a note to the parents, asking them to reimburse the PTA and giving them info on how to apply for school lunches. 

(By contrast, with hindsight, I'm horrified at the memory of the oh-so-progressive elementary school I attended, where only the kids who ate "hot lunch" sat in the cafeteria, and everyone else ate in the auditorium.  The hot lunch was notoriously awful, and I'm sure that everyone who ate it was getting the free lunch.  Sigh.)

What does your PTA pay for?  And do you think it's appropriate?

welfare and the recession

The New York Times ran a front-page story today about the failure of the welfare rolls to increase even as the economy tanks.  It's by Jason DeParle, who covered welfare reform for the Times in the 1990s, and wrote the best book there is on the subject: American Dream, and I think he got it just about right. There are some states with significant percentage increases in their caseloads, to be sure, but the base is so low at this point that the absolute numbers of new cases is pretty small.  And the two states with the highest unemployment rates -- Michigan and Rhode Island -- have experienced large decreases in the number of families receiving welfare.  Frankly, it scares me.

The article is currently #9 on the Times list of most emailed articles, and it received 171 comments on their website before the Times cut it off.  (I didn't know that the Times cut off comments on their articles... I wonder if this is based on a time limit, a number of comments, or a subjective judgment of the quality of the discussion.  Actually, the comments are far more balanced and reasonable than I would have guessed.)

As the article notes, there are some provisions in the recovery bill that provide incentives to states to let more people receive assistance.  So far, they haven't received much attention, and that's probably a good thing politically.  They're pretty small dollars in the scheme of the bill (although I'd have said the same thing about the family planning provisions, and that didn't protect them).  I think it's really key that Ron Haskins, who was the lead Republican staffer for the Ways and Means Committee during welfare reform, was willing to be quoted in the article that he thinks caseloads ought to be rising:

Even some of the program’s staunchest defenders are alarmed.

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

That provides a LOT of political cover to Republicans who don't want to do anything that can be seen as undoing welfare reform.

That said, I don't think it helps things when progressives refer to the bailout as "corporate welfare."  I think the term inherently suggests that welfare is a bad thing.

wow

I spent much of the day immersed in the details of the recovery legislation that's being introduced in the House.  And all I can say is, wow, we're really in a whole new world.

I know, there's still a long way to go between this preliminary bill being introduced and something being signed into law.  (I watched my schoolhouse rock, you know.)  But, for someone who has spent much of my life fighting for incredibly modest incremental improvements, it's just mindboggling to read a bill that in one stroke would do so much.

Just to give one example: you might remember that last fall, I was excited that the Senate tax bill would lower the threshold at which families begin to qualify for the child tax credit to $8,500.  Well, this bill would lower the threshold all the way to $0.  If a family with a child earns $1, they would get a $0.15 tax credit.

This is just totally outside of my zone of experience.  The only time in my life when Democrats have controlled both the Presidency and both houses of Congress was 1993-1994.  And Clinton was so convinced that he needed to bring the budget deficit under control that he famously complained that they had become "Eisenhower Republicans." 

So, wow.

ACORN and housing

In the comments on yesterday's post, Sue asked about the claim "that ACORN had been part of some issues with the subprime mortage crisis."   The short answer is no, not really.  But the full answer is important, so I'm giving it its own post.

Promoting homeownership for low-income families is certainly one of the things that ACORN has worked on over the years.  They've done this both through legislative work, primarily the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and through direct work with families.  Let's look at both of these.

CRA was a response to many banks' historic practice of redlining -- of refusing to make ANY  home loans within certain areas, defined both on the basis of income and of race.  I'm not 100 percent clear on the exact requirements, but the intent was to force banks that wanted things from the government (mostly approvals of mergers and acquisitions) to meet standards with respect to the number (or share?) of loans made in low-income and underserved communities.  And from 1977, when it was passed, to the early 2000s, it caused a slow and steady increase in such loans.

Banks objected to the CRA, because they believed that they couldn't possibly make money by issuing home loans in low-income areas.  But CRA forced them to look at their criteria and do their best to distinguish between moderate-income people who were bad credit risks and ones who were actually pretty good.  This is where the second part of ACORN's work came in.   They did a lot of financial education for their members, and negotiated with deals with banks where they'd provide reduced points, or other lower fees, for people who completed these courses.  The banks benefited because it helped them make loans that met their CRA requirements, and because the people who were willing to complete the courses were in fact better risks than similar people who didn't.  ACORN benefited because these courses were a way to recruit members.  And the low-income people benefited, because they were able to buy homes.

So, what happened in the 2000s?  For one thing, people were convinced that home prices were only going to go up.  So it didn't really matter if people were bad credit risks, because if they defaulted, the banks thought they'd get houses that were worth more than they had loaned.  For another thing, banks had come up with all these fancy ways to resell the mortgages they made, so they believed that they had made the risk go away.  Suddenly, there was a ton of money to be made making loans to poor people.  And lots of institutions rushed in -- including things that weren't "banks" and so weren't subject to CRA.

My sense is that ACORN had pretty mixed feelings about this.  On the plus side, lots of people were able to buy houses.  But on the negative side, they could see that a lot of people were being given crappy high cost loans.  But as a little nonprofit -- and one that made people jump through hoops before helping them get loans -- they had a lot of trouble competing with the sleazy mortgage brokers who were promising people easy loans and low monthly payments.

So, in the sense that banks experience under CRA taught them that it was possible to make loans to low-income people without losing money, I suppose you could argue that it "contributed" to the subprime mess.  But that's like saying if agriculture had never been invented, we wouldn't have to worry about the spread of obesity.

But don't take my word for it.  Here's Ellen Seidman's explanation of why CRA isn't the cause of the subprime mess.  She ran the Office of Thrift Supervision under the Clinton Administration, among other things.

Blog Action Day

This year, the theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty.  Check it out.

poverty and income data

Today's the day that the Census Bureau issued the annual report on poverty, income, and health insurance.  The year-over-year changes from 2006 to 2007 were pretty modest -- a slight growth in median family income, no statistical change in the overall poverty rate.

But the big story is how little most people benefited from the economic growth of the Bush years -- as my colleagues at EPI point out,  median income is still not back up to where it was in 2000.  And I don't think there's anyone who doubts that the income and poverty numbers are going to look significantly worse in 2008.

Moreover, as Cheryl at DemoMemo notes, the only reason that median family income rose from 2006 to 2007 is because of the increased income of household heads aged 55 or older.  And that's because they were more likely to be working.  That's a good thing if it's because they're in better health and able to keep working, not such a good thing if it's because they can't afford to retire.

It's also worth noting that the only reason the number of uninsured fell is because of the increase in coverage under public programs -- Medicaid, SCHIP, and Medicare.  And that's in spite of the Bush Administration's attempts to prevent states from expanding coverage.

Define "rich"

From the interviews with Rick Warren last weekend:

Obama:

Q. Okay. Taxes. This is a real simple question. Define rich. I mean, give me a number. Is it 50,000, 100,000, 200,000? Everybody keeps talking about well, here we're going to tax. How do you define that?

A. You know, if you've got book sales of 25 million and you qualify --

Q. Okay. All right. I'm not asking about me.

A. Look, here is how I think of it. Here is how I think of it and this is reflected in my tax plan. If you are making $150,000 a year or less as a family, then are you middle class or you may be poor. But $150[000] down, you are basically middle class. Obviously it depends on region where you are living.

McCain:

Q Define rich. Everybody talks about, you know, taxing the rich and -- but not the poor, the middle class. At what point -- give me a number, give me a specific number, where do you move from middle class to rich? Is it 100,000, is it 50,000, 200,000? How does anybody know if we don't know what the standards are?

A Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy. I think that rich is -- should be defined by a home, a good job and education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited. I don't want to take any money from the rich. I want everybody to get rich. I don't believe in class warfare or redistribution of the wealth. But I can tell you for example there are small businessmen and women who are working 16 hours a day, seven days a week that some people would classify as, quote, rich, my friends, who want to raise their taxes and raise their payroll taxes…

So I think if you're just talking about income, how about five million. So -- but seriously, I don't think you can -- I don't think, seriously that -- the point is that I'm trying to make here seriously -- and I'm sure that comment will be distorted, but the point is -- the point is -- the point is that we want to keep people's taxes low and increase revenues.

From a recent Pew survey:

2 percent described themselves as "upper class"
19 percent described themselves as "upper-middle class"
53 percent described themselves as "middle class"
19 percent described themselves as "lower-middle class"
6 percent described themselves as "lower class"
1 percent didn't know or refused to answer.

Low-wage workers

I've got several long thoughtful posts that I'd like to write, but I've just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.  So go read the first article in the Washington Post's series on low-wage workers, and then we can discuss.

Are high food prices bad?

Parke at US Food Policy poses the bold question: "Are high food prices unambiguously bad?"

The obvious problem with high food prices is that they mean that people on the edge eat less, and often poorer quality food.  Food is one of the most flexible part of the budget for most people -- in the short term, you can't reduce your rent, but you can skip a few meals, or see if the local food pantry can help you out.  There's a study that shows that poor families eat less in cold winters, when utility bills are especially high.

So what's good about high food prices?  Let's start by thinking about the parallel question for gas.  I don't think that high gas prices are unambiguously bad.  While I worry about the effect on low-income folks, especially in rural areas, I think high gas prices generally send the right economic signals: buy more fuel-efficient cars, use more carpools and mass transit, think about the costs of commuting when you decide where to live.  I'd like to see more of the cost of gas going into funding things like better mass transit, and less going to enrich oil companies and OPEC, but that's a different issue.

So, is there something parallel for food?  Well, a big part of why food in the US is so cheap is that energy has been cheap.  When Michael Pollen says that the US food economy runs on corn, he could just as easily say it runs on oil -- in the form of fuel for tractors and combines, in the form of fertilizer (which is largely made from petroleum), in the form of the fuel for the trucks that move the corn from farm to processing plant to grocery store.  So, it's hard to imagine how food prices could stay as low as they've been in a world of higher energy prices.

It's also likely that the relative costs of different kinds of food will change.  Bananas may be more expensive compared to apples, free range chicken may only cost twice as much as factory farmed chicken, rather than five times as much.  Some things that have been unsustainably cheap will be more expensive, and that might be a good thing.

But, none of this makes the basic problem of low-income people not being able to afford food go away.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been doing a lot of thinking about how to make sure that low-income households are protected in the context of climate change legislation that will increase energy costs -- basically, the idea is that if the government auctions off all carbon permits, rather than assuming that companies are entitled to permits at the left that they currently pollute, it generates enough money to provide generous refunds to low and moderate income households.  I'm not sure what the food equivalent of that is.

Iowa

Someone posted on my neighborhood listserve this morning, wondering "where are the cries for help for the poor people of Iowa? Are they less deserving than the people of Louisiana?"  The question wasn't from someone I know, and maybe I'm misjudging him, but my interpretation of the subtext was "all you people who were so dramatic about Katrina weren't really worried about the people, but looking for a reason to beat up on Bush."

My impression is that the floods in the midwest have caused massive displacement, and overwhelming property loss, but that there's been relatively little loss of life.  Kari Lyderson writes at Rooflines about the contrast between the disasters and suggests a few causes:

1. The local governments are far more functional.
2. Most people displaced in Iowa are staying with friends and family; in New Orleans, many of the affected had no social networks outside of the city.
3. Those from outside helping (FEMA, National Guard, volunteers)  have positive impressions of the people they are helping: "To put it bluntly, law enforcement and volunteers in Iowa were not afraid of or harboring deep-seated hatred toward the people they were trying to help."  I mentioned this idea to someone at work, and she commented that if Iowans break store windows, they'll be seen as "getting needed supplies" not "looting."

That said, I do think it took a ridiculously long time for the East Coast media to figure out that this was a major story.  One of my colleagues is from Iowa, and she was stressing last week when the flooding started.  I hadn't heard the news, so went online to look, and discovered that there wasn't a single mention of the flooding on the Washington Post's website at the time. 

Via Crunchy Granola, I found Boomerific's postings about the flooding.

Some ways to help:

• Red Cross  -- their disaster relief fund is empty and they're borrowing to keep going.
• Union for Reform Judaism disaster relief.

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.

TBR: The Missing Class

Today's book is The Missing Class, by Katherine Newman (author of Chutes and Ladders and No Shame in My Game) and Victor Tan Chen.  By "The Missing Class," the authors mean the not-quite-poor, those with family incomes between 100% and 200% of the poverty line.  And in particular, they focus on the experiences of several New York City families who fall in this category.  They explore the things that help them rise up (mostly getting a better paying job, or adding another wage-earner to the family, homeownership in one case) and the things that drag them down (predatory lending, poor health, legal troubles, divorce and separation).

Although Newman and Chen emphasize repeatedly that these families are not "poor," the book in fact covers much of the same ground as David Shipler's The Working Poor, as many of those families also had income above the official federal poverty level, which pretty much everyone agrees is outdated.   If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with Shipler's book, which covers a greater geographic and social range.  (200 percent of the poverty level is a lot poorer in NYC than in much of the country, and I'd also like to have learned about people who were slipping into the "missing class" from above, as well as those struggling to stay out of poverty.) One of the new contributions of the book is the discussion of No Child Left Behind, and how the combination of overworked, time-deprived parents, mediocre to lousy schools, and high stakes testing comes down hard on the children of the working poor.

My understanding is that the reason Newman and Chen want to draw the distinction between the "missing class" and "poor" people is that they want to draw attention to how these people often fall into the cracks, earning too much to benefit from means-tested public benefit programs.  I agree that's an important policy issue.  But I worry that their discussion creates an impression that the benefits for the poor are more generous than they really are.  And it doesn't acknowledge how much middle income people benefit from government subsidies for employer provided benefits, especially health care, and the mortgage interest deduction.

To ski?

T's dad has been saying that we should take the boys skiing.  In particular, he's suggesting that if D doesn't learn to ski soon, he'll never be "really good."

Cons:

• Skiing is ridiculously expensive, even at the dinky little mid-Atlantic ski areas that have almost no slope.  Between lift ticket and equipment, it gets up close to $100 a day per person.  We think long and hard about spending that kind of money.
• Especially when there's no guarantee that the boys wouldn't try it for 5 minutes and then want to go home.  D still has his training wheels on his bike, because when we take them off, he panics when he picks up any speed and puts his feet down.
• Downhill skiing is never particularly environmentally friendly, and is particularly not-so in the mid-Atlantic, where pretty much everything you ski on is man made.

Pros:

• Skiing is fun.  Downhill skiing is as close to flying as I'm ever likely to get without mechanical assistance.
• T's dad is right that it's easier to learn when you're young, and not as discombobulated by falling down.
• D picked up skating this winter (on an indoor rink) pretty well, and many of the skills are transferable.
• I can imagine that at some point in the boys life, they will have friends who ski, and they may feel deprived/outside/something if they don't know how.  Yes, this is a huge marker of class privilege.  But both T and I did learn to ski as children, and in some real way, I think we both feel slightly guilty at the idea of not passing this opportunity on to our kids.  Especially since we're probably slightly more affluent, not less, than our parents were when we were young.  But -- even setting aside the fact that T grew up in Michigan and could learn to ski on a local hill -- I think skiing just wasn't as crazy expensive a sport at the time.

(Relative) poverty is poison

Paul Krugman's column yesterday is called "poverty is poison" and refers to the growing literature on how poverty harms children's mental development.  He uses this as a starting point to complain that both Obama and Clinton's anti-poverty proposals are "modest in scope and far from central to their campaigns."

I think this is unfair -- as Shawn Fremstad at Inclusion argues, "Calling Clinton's and Obama's anti-poverty initiatives 'modest in scope' only makes sense if one thinks that calling for say, universal health care, has little do with reducing poverty and isn't part of an anti-poverty initiative." And even if you only look at more narrowly defined anti-poverty programs, the Pathways articles I mentioned last week contain proposals that are far from modest.

But that's not really what I want to talk about. Krugman quotes this sentence from the Financial Times article: “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.”

Two things are striking in that sentence:

1)  The "with low social status" part of that sentence suggests that it's relative poverty, not material deprivation, that causes the stunted neural development.  Margy Waller at Inclusion may be unhappy that Krugman's still talking about "poverty," but this point is totally consistent with their overall argument.  (More on this later -- I'm in the middle of reading Robert Frank's Falling Behind, which is all about relative status.)

2) It suggests that stress is the main connection between poverty and poor child outcomes, not lack of educational experiences or the other things we talked about last week.

Unfortunately, the AAAS presentations that this statement is based on don't seem to be available online.  Some of the speakers have other papers available, but they're pretty technical, so it may take a while before I have the energy to work through them.

Payday loans and strange bedfellows

For those of you who don't live in Virginia, the key piece of background information here is that the Virginia House of Delegates is generally controlled by the lunatic right.  These are people who aren't sure that contraception should be legal, who would rather see all of Northern Virginia permanently frozen into gridlock than raise taxes to build roads, who think that preschool for poor kids is a socialist plot.  The Senate is usually more reasonable, even before the Democrats took back control in the last election.

So, I'm more than a little bit shocked to find myself supporting the payday lending reform bill adopted by the House of Delegates, rather than the sham reform being sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw.  It's not a perfect bill --while it theoretically imposes a 36 percent cap on interest rates, it allows for fees to be charged on top of that, which drives the real cost of lending far higher.  But it would be a good start, and would help prevent people from getting caught into an endless cycle of taking out another loan to pay off the first one. 

By contrast, the folks who have been fighting payday loans -- including the AARP, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, Voices for Virginia Children, and the Virginia Poverty Law Center -- say that the Senate bill could be worse than nothing.  It's hard not to conclude that campaign contributions are driving policy. 

As previously discussed here, there's a real need for low-cost small dollar loans for people without great credit.  Even usurious rates can be worthwhile if the choice is losing your job when your car breaks down.  I'm not sure what the best solution is.  But a study from North Carolina -- which banned payday loans a couple of years ago -- shows that low-income people aren't reporting hardship as a result of the ban.

Last time I posted about banking, reader Dave S. posted this link for the Predatory Lending Association.  I assume that anyone who spends a minute on that site will figure out that it's a parody put up by the opponents of payday lending.  By contrast, I'm not sure that it's immediately clear that the folks who were advertising on CNN during the coverage of the Potomac Primary results, with the URL "www.ReformPaydayVA.com" is the payday lending industry.

Pathways

While we're waiting for word from DC and Maryland on the primary results, I wanted to make a plug for the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality's new magazine, Pathways: a magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy.  The first issue features essays on how to end poverty from Edwards, Clinton and Obama (McCain and Romney were invited to participate, but declined).  But I think the rest of the magazine is even better.

• It includes the best summary for a general audience I've read of the evidence on the impact of housing vouchers on economic opportunity.  DeLuca and Rosenbaum explain the differences between the overwhelmingly positive results for the families who received vouchers under Gautreaux, a court-ordered remedy in a desegregation case, and the more mixed results for families who received vouchers under Moving to Opportunity, a random assignment evaluation modeled after Gautreaux, and make some reasonable arguments about the lessons that policymakers should draw.
• Robert Frank (of The Winner Take All Society) explains why inequality is bad for rich people too, and argues for a progressive consumption tax.
• Charles Murray (of the Bell Curve) makes an case largely grounded in Frank's reasoning for why interventions aimed at increasing opportunity for low-income families won't reduce inequality.
• Becky Blank, codirector of the National Poverty Center at UMichigan, reviews the three Democratic candidates' proposals and concludes that they "all have multifaceted and serious anti-poverty plans.  Anyone concerned with poverty issues could happily vote for any of them.  Edwards has made poverty a centerpiece issue for his campaign from the beginning; Clinton has the best early childhood proposals; Obama is the most thoughtful on jobs for disadvantaged youth and urban change and (for my money) the most creative in putting new policy ideas on the table, such as low-cost Internet service in poor neighborhoods.  But all of them understand that the measure of this country is not just the size of its GDP or the wealth of its richest citizens."

The whole magazine is available as .pdfs, and hard copy subscriptions are free.  Check it out.

money, class, parenting

When I blogged about the "privilege meme," I promised a post about the differences, and overlap, between privilege as measured by money and privilege as measured by social class.  I keep postponing that post, because it's a complicated topic and I want to get it right.  But if I wait until I get my thoughts totally sorted out, I'll never get to it. So here goes with some rough thoughts, and hopefully it will at least get the conversation started.

As noted before, the privilege meme included a bunch of questions that are mostly about money -- did your parents own their own home, were you aware of bills, did you have a phone at home, do you have student loans, did you get to travel abroad -- and a bunch of questions that are more about social capital -- did your parents read to you, did they take you to museums, did they attend college.  Some people got very heated about this, arguing that they shouldn't be considered "privileged" even though they were read to, had books, etc, because their family was very poor, and it was just because their parents prioritized education that they had these things.

So, the first thing to lay on the table is that these are in fact two different dimensions of social class, and it's possible to be privileged in one respect but not the other. But, the next thing to point out is that, in practice, there's a great deal of overlap between the two.  I'm thinking of the chapter in David Shipler's The Working Poor about the upper-middle class mother who is impoverished by her divorce and her subsequent choice not to work full-time, so as to be able to spend more time with her children.  She's quite low-income as a result, but is able to leverage her social capital to get her children scholarships at fancy private schools and other middle-class privileges.  Her experiences prove that you don't have to have lots of money to have privilege, but it's also quite clear that she's got a lot of things going for her that the typical low-income single parent doesn't.

There's a couple of different explanations for the overlap between poverty and lack of home-based educational experiences, and depending on which one you think dominates, you come up with very different policy solutions for fixing this (if, in fact, you think there's a need to fix it):

• One school of thought argues that it's really about the money -- if a parent can't afford food, then books are a luxury, and parents who are working 80 hours a week to pay the rent don't have the time to do things like attend parent teacher conferences.  This points towards cash transfer solutions.
• Another explanation is that parental characteristics like lack of English skills or learning disabilities lead to both poor labor market outcomes and to inability to navigate systems (such as libraries or schools) on their children's behalf.  This points towards two-generational approaches, and education aimed at parents.
• A third explanation is that it's cultural.  This has lots of variations, ranging from the stereotypical -- poor parents don't value educational opportunities for their children -- to the sophisticated -- Annette Lareau's work on "accomplishment of natural growth" versus "concerted cultivation."  This points towards lots of tongue-clucking and finger-pointing, and possibly towards conditional cash transfers, which give low-income parents cash incentives for desired behaviors.

And I guess the fourth option is to say that it doesn't matter the explanation, but what we need is better schools and preschools so that even kids whose parents don't provide educational opportunities and support have a chance to get ahead.

Privilege, redux

Via Lauren at Faux Real Tho, I read about this exercise in encouraging students to gain awareness of social class.  As transformed to a meme, it's basically a somewhat more thoughtful version of the "spoiled" meme that we discussed here previously*.

As it's designed by a professor, it doesn't have most of the flaws that made the "spoiled" version so irritating (although as it's aimed at college students, it does have some generation-specific questions that are irrelevant to anyone born before about 1980 (eg. having a cell phone in college)). I didn't actually score myself on it, but it looks like there's only a handful of questions that I'd say no to, and yes, I'm pretty comfortable saying that I'm pretty privileged, both materially and in terms of social capital.**

That said, it's gotten a bunch of scathing responses (as well as some supportive ones).  The authors of the original exercise and other class educators seem to pretty much dismiss their critics as privileged people who want to claim all their success as the result of their hard work, and thus deny the role of privilege/luck in their accomplishments.  And I'm not going to dispute that the "bootstraps" story is one of the strands in the discussions.

But I think they're being overly dismissive of the people who say that the quiz includes too many things that "everyone" has, or things that the truly rich don't have, because they consider it declasse.  Another way of phrasing this criticism is that the scale is designed to distinguish between deep poverty and middle-class backgrounds, but does a lousy job of distinguishing between middle-class and upper-middle-class or rich backgrounds -- going to Europe every summer doesn't get you more points than having saved for years to go once; owning a McMansion in McLean doesn't get you more points than owning a small house in Woodbridge.

And I think that's important, because the big economic story of the past two or three decades hasn't been about the poor falling further behind the middle class, but the rich pulling away from everyone else.  (I'm not going to look for links now, but Paul Krugman's written extensively about this.)  And those rich are very visible, which makes middle-class people are very aware of the ways in which they're not privileged.  So it's not just denial that makes people protest this quiz.

Maybe in the academic context that it was originated, focusing on the privileges experienced by people who don't think of themselves as privileged is useful. (I read an interesting article recently that argued that support services at community colleges designed to help low-income students nonetheless reinforce privilege, because the students who are most disadvantaged, especially in terms of social capital, don't learn about them.)  But in a broader context, especially a political context, it's a pretty lousy strategy to tell people who feel like they're losing ground that they're actually still incredibly privileged by comparison to others.  Even if it's true.

* I'm reaching the stage when more and more often, I red these things and say "didn't we have this conversation already?"  I think that's one of the reasons I've been posting less.

** There's another point I want to make about the distinction and overlap between these two types of privilege, but this is long enough, so I'll save it for another day.

Note that we're now on the second page of comments, so click the >> at the bottom of the page to read the most recent ones.  I don't know how to override this Typepad setting.

 

Hyde: 30 years is enough

In honor of the Roe v. Wade anniversary, I'm highlighting the Hyde- 30 Years is Enough campaign to lift the restrictions on Federal funding of abortion services to poor women who receive health insurance through Medicaid.  Here are some of the reasons I oppose the Hyde amendment restrictions:

• I believe that the ability to control one's reproduction should not be limited on the basis of income.  NNAF says it better than I can:

"We call for full public funding of abortion as a part of comprehensive health care for all, and support for low-income women to care for their children with dignity.  We stand for reproductive justice, a world in which all women have the power and resources necessary to make healthy decisions about their bodies and their families."

• One of the main effects of the Hyde restrictions is to push abortions from the first trimester into the second.  This increases the health risks to the woman, raises the cost of the procedure, and pushes closer to the viability line.

• The logic of the Hyde amendment -- and the related laws that prohibit coverage of abortion for federal employers, military personnel, and their dependents -- is fundamentally flawed.  Supporters argue that even though abortion is legal, people should be able to avoid having their tax dollars support something that they consider immoral.  Well, I can think of a number of things that my tax dollars support that I consider immoral, and I don't get to opt out. 

If you're not poor, a federal employee, or a member of the armed services, these bans don't affect you.  Now.  But if you hope to someday be covered by a public health insurance system, you should be paying attention.

Efficiency and justice

It looks like Congressional leaders and the President are going to be meeting today to hammer out an agreement on the outlines of an economic stimulus package.  If you can possibly send an email or make a call to your representative and Senator this morning, and emphasize that any tax rebate should include everyone who pays payroll taxes, not just those who owe federal income tax, it could make a big difference.

Most people's eyes glaze over when they start to read about the details of the stimulus proposals, so let me try to explain what's going on and why it matters.

The key thing to understand is that this is a case where making sure that the rebate reaches low-income families is both the efficient and the just thing to do.  Liberals spend a lot of time arguing about the value of justice when it conflicts with efficiency, but there's no conflict here, and this point isn't getting enough attention.

• Efficiency:  If people get their rebate checks and stick them in the bank, this doesn't actually stimulate the economy.  It only makes a difference when people spend their money, putting more money into the pocket of the people they're buying from, and so on and so forth.  (This is in fact the argument behind Bush's much maligned response to 9/11, encouraging people to go out and shop...)  And economists overwhelmingly agree that low-income people are more likely to go out and spend the additional money, because they're more likely to have urgent unmet needs.  Upper-income people are more likely to stick the money in the bank.  All the news stories use a big screen TV as the example of what people might buy with the rebate, but upper income people are more likely to already have a big TV.  And especially if they think a recession is coming, it makes sense to build up a bit of a cushion.  (The CBO report is also unequivocal that business tax credits are inefficient stimulus, but the Dems seem to have already folded on that front.)
• Justice: You can make reasonable moral arguments that it makes sense to spread this windfall payment out equally among everyone in the US, or that it makes sense to give more to those who are most in need.  But what the Bush proposal would do is give less to those who are most in need and most to those who don't need it.  Their claim is that they're giving it to "everyone who pays taxes" but that's a lie.  They want to only include people who pay federal income taxes, which totally excludes a huge chunk of low-income families -- who do pay payroll taxes (for Medicare and Social Security), sales taxes, etc.  Moreover, families who are in the 10 percent bracket would only get a partial credit.

This should be a no-brainer.  But the Administration is proving once again that it places knee-jerk opposition to progressive taxation over common sense, and the Democrats in Congress haven't consistently shown the backbone needed to stand up.  So call in this morning and demand a stimulus package that is both just and efficient.

Updated 1/24/2008:  Bush, Pelosi and Boehner announced their agreement today.  The good news is that at least a partial rebate -- $300 -- will go to anyone who earned at least $3000 (unclear what the reference year is, or the phase-in range, or any of that).  The bad news is that as part of the compromise, the House Democrats both accepted business tax credits that none of the economists think will do any good and gave in on demands for extended unemployment insurance and a temporary increase in food stamp benefits.  On the Senate side, the Dems are at least making noises about holding the line on including an extension of unemployment benefits.  So if you're just reading this, and are inclined to make some calls, that's probably the issue to focus on.

Choose your candidate

The Washington Post website has an interactive "choose your candidate" tool that purports to show you which candidate you should be supporting, based on their public statements on a variety of issues, and how important you say these issues are.  I spent some time playing with it, and it mostly demonstrated to me how close the Democratic candidates are on most of the issues that I care about.  If you can parse the differences between what they're all saying on Social Security or immigration, you're doing better than I am.  And while the tool lets you say how much you care about the issue in general, it doesn't have any way for you to indicate how much you care about the differences in the candidates' positions.  I think I gave up on it about halfway through, when it was saying I should be supporting Chris Dodd.

Precisely because the candidates are so close together on policy, the areas where they disagree, even a little, are getting a lot of attention, perhaps excessive.  One of the areas where some differences have shown up is on health care.  Kucinich is the only one standing up for a true single payor system, while Obama has criticized Edwards and Clinton for requiring everyone to get health insurance.  He's dead wrong on this -- both because you really do need to get everyone into the insurance pool in order to avoid people freeloading until they actually get sick, and because the attack on "mandates" is likely to come back and haunt him if he actually gets elected.  (I don't have the energy to go hunting for a full set of links right now, but this has been exhaustively discussed in the wonkosphere. )

So, on one of the few areas of substantive difference, I think Obama's wrong.  But I still think he's my pick.  I'm embarrassed by that.  I'm a self-proclaimed policy wonk.  But he makes me want to believe. 

***

On a related topic, this week you'll see an ad in my sidebar from the fine folks at One.org, who have asked all the candidates about what they'd do to fight international poverty and disease. Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity is a similar exercise focused on domestic poverty.  Check them both out.

Banking

Last summer, I wrote about two social lending sites, one for money and one for stuff.  Borrowme seems to have gone under, without ever building up any steam.  But Prosper seems to still be functioning well, and hasn't been totally swamped by the mortgage meltdown.

When I wrote about it, I hadn't put any of my money into Prosper, but I did so in the fall.  I've now made 36 loans over the course of the past year, all of them for $50.  Two of them have already been repaid (ahead of schedule) and two of them are 3+ months late, and barring a miracle, likely to go into default.  Netting out the defaults, I've made a little more interest than I'd have gotten from the bank, but the difference is probably under $40.  So, not a particularly good return on the time spent reading through loan requests.  Although there's a certain fascination with reading people's stories...  I still think the real potential is for loans among people with 2nd and 3rd degree real life connections, but I see little evidence that's what's happening.

I'm slowly moving almost all of my real banking into the online world.  My main checking account is now at Ebank, which I love because I can take out money from any ATM without a fee.  I'm trying to figure out whether I think it's unethical to keep our savings at Countrywide, which is offering awesome savings rates, presumably because they're desperate for deposits to keep from sinking under all their bad loans.  (Yes, it's FDIC insured.)  But they've got a reputation for being particularly unhelpful to borrowers in trouble.

D has been saying that he wants to save his money for a Nintendo DS.  I'm not thrilled at the idea of a handheld game system, but if he has the willpower to save that kind of money on a $1 a week allowance, we're going to allow it.  I'm trying to convince him to open an account at a nearby bank that offers generous rates on kids' accounts, but he likes having the piles of coins to play with and count.   We need to figure out if they offer safe deposit boxes -- if so, we're going to say goodbye and good riddance to SunTrust.

I was at a conference last week on accounts, assets and access.  It was a real eye-opener for me.  Call me naive, but I hadn't realized how much money banks were making off of poor people on overdraft and late fees.  Now that  it's been pointed out, it seems obvious -- the dollar amounts that low-income people borrow are typically so low that even high interest rates don't amount to much in dollar terms.  The killers are the fees.

Here's an example of a card advertised as available to people with bad credit.  Not bad interest -- only 9.9% APR.  But check out the fees -- $29 set up fee, $95 one-time fee, $48 annual fee, $7 monthly fee.  And if you're in this situation, you probably don't have this cash on hand, so all of these fees are charged to the card when you get it.  So if you get the minimum possible credit limit of $250, your card will come to you with a balance of $179 and available credit of $71.  Oh, and they charge $11 for each autodraft (which actually costs them less to process than a check) and $25 each time they raise your credit limit.

Compared to that, a payday loan with a 100% interest rate doesn't sound like such a bad deal.

cost of living

Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today.  The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan's blog:

"We don't need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in Mississippi - since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the money, don't have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don't ask me to give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any sacrifices. That's what you want."

Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that's what you get for living in California" type comments.

I really don't have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities.  As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income.  But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice.  Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family?  Or do you tax the New York family more?  In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states -- with higher costs of living -- tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back.  This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.

Housecleaners

Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house.  Long time readers may remember that I've written quite a bit about housework before.

I don't think there's anything inherent to housecleaning that makes it less moral to hire someone to vacuum your floors or scrub your toilets than to hire someone to mow your lawn or cook dinner.  And while Jody's points about the lousy pay that most housecleaners get are totally on target, there's a huge swath of the economy that is just as underpaid, but not as visible.  And most of us eat at restaurants without interrogating them as to what the busboys are making.

We don't use a housecleaning service these days (we got a roomba!), but I didn't feel guilty when we did.  My personal moral line is that I won't use one of the big services (e.g. Merry Maids, that sort of thing), because too little of the money that you pay goes to the people doing the dirty work.  (And Barbara Ehrenreich also convinced me that they don't get the house particularly clean.)  I know a few people who have worked as housecleaners, and while it's hard work for not a whole lot of money, the fact that they have multiple employers gives them a degree of independence that lots of low-wage workers don't have. (I do think the DC area is probably atypical, in that the Zoe Baird history has created a real market for housecleaners and nannies who are legally allowed to work and are reporting their income for taxes.)

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has a really good action packet you can download with information about ethical treatment of domestic workers.  It talks about things you can do, from treating any workers that you hire justly, to advocating for expansions of various labor standards to include domestic workers.  It also includes a link to this article from Lilith magazine that offers a Jewish feminist perspective on hiring a housecleaner.

TBR: Stuart, a life backwards

This week's book is one of the ones that Nick Hornby writes about in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Stuart, a life backwards, by Alexander Masters, is the biography of Stuart Shorter.  Who is Stuart Shorter, you may ask.  He's a homeless man who lived in Cambridge, England.  A violent criminal.  A drug user.  Someone with borderline personality disorder.  The kind of person most people try hard not to make eye contact with, if they can't avoid entirely.  So, in many ways, the simple idea of writing a biography about Stuart is a political statement, an argument that his life is as worthy of study as the politicians, scientists, or writers who are more traditional subjects of biography.

But the book is far more than just a political statement.  The edition I have is covered with blurbs from impressive reviews, with "extraordinary" and "funny" being the most common words used.  Masters does an impressive job of portraying Stuart sympathetically without  whitewashing his crimes or excusing his truly awful choices.  He includes Stuart's comments on the draft manuscript (which he thought was boring) and credits him with the idea of telling his life backwards, unfolding from their first encounters (working together to protest the unjust arrest of two social workers for not preventing drug dealing at a homeless shelter) to his earliest childhood (when he was both physically and sexually abused).  When Masters calls Stuart his friend, I believe him.

In another blurb, Zadie Smith is quoted as saying "It's been years since I've been so delighted by a book."  Either she's off her rocker or she's got a different definition of "delighted" than I do.  The book is many things, but delightful is not one of them.  It's depressing as hell.  If Neil in 49-Up is a walking advertisement for the welfare state, Stuart's story is a parable about the limits of the welfare state.  Unlike his American counterparts, Stuart is provided a place to live and a living stipend, but neither is enough to give stability to his "chaotic" life.

At one point, Alexander is flabbergasted when Stuart refers to "posh" people who live on council estates -- what we'd call public housing.  He writes:

"The boy's a freak, surely.
"No.  He's not.  People like Stuart -- the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups -- people who've had their school and social training lopped off at twelve: they simply don't understand the way the big world works.  They are isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them.  If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation.  It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death."

The divorce myth

It seems like talk about divorce is popping up on a bunch of parenting blogs, from RebelDad to the Business Week Working Parents blog.  I just don't have the energy/time right now to write the long thoughtful post I want to about divorce, so I'm just going to put out some links and initial thoughts.

The main point that I want to make is that the number that often gets tossed around about divorce rates -- that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce -- just isn't true.  It was a projection based on looking at what if the increase in divorce rates in the 70s continued at that pace, and in fact, the divorce rates have fallen since then.  Moreover, the most significant trend is that the divorce rates have fallen much faster among more educated individuals than among less educated individuals.

For example, of the women with at least a 4-year college degree who married between 1990 and 1994, only about 17 percent were divorced within 10 years.  For women without a HS degree, the figure is nearly 40 percent.  I don't think either the decline in overall divorce rates since the 1970s or the increasing class gap in the rates has penetrated into the general consciousness.

[For those of you interested in the research: Here's a powerpoint presentation by Steven Martin that goes through the analysis, and here's the full paper of his research on the "divorce divide".  And here's a paper by David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks that talks about it in the context of single parenting more broadly.]

I think it's a good idea to think about the future and to take risks into account when making your choices. But I don't think the Leslie Bennetts of the world are doing people a favor by trying to generate hysteria over the risk of divorce, especially for highly educated women.

Poverty and cars

Via Laura at 11d, I read this thread on cities vs. suburbs at Matthew Yglesias' blog.  One comment jumped out at me:

"What's with this "suburbia is cheaper" claim? Where I live, suburbia is more expensive (which is why low income people live in cities and older suburbs)."

I'm not sure overall which is cheaper.  It's certainly true that far-out suburbs are cheaper than close-in suburbs (at least in the DC area, I think elsewhere too.)   That's why Prince William county just passed a harsh anti-illegal immigrant measure -- lots of immigrants have moved there, because a bunch of people can share a house for a lot less than renting small apartments close in.  And there's lots of evidence that everything from food to bank fees to insurance costs more for residents of poor inner city neighborhoods.

So why don't more poor people move to the suburbs?  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development did an experiment called Moving to Opportunity where people who lived in public housing were divided into 3 groups, one that was offered Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used anywhere they chose, one that was offered special vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods, and one that was not offered vouchers, but continued to live in public housing.  This was a voluntary program, so everyone in it had said that they wanted to move.  One of the interesting findings is that the majority of the people who used the unrestricted vouchers moved into neighborhoods that were still high poverty -- not as high as the public housing they came from, but still more than 20 percent.

Under the voucher program, what you pay is based on your income, not the rent, and you can rent any house up to what HUD calls the "fair market rent" for the metro area.  So why did the voucher recipients stay in high poverty neighborhoods?  If the researchers asked this, I haven't found the report that says it.  But I can take some guesses: Because those are the neighborhoods that they knew, where their friends and family lived, where they knew how to navigate the transportation system and which grocery store had the best deals.  Because landlords discriminated against them -- or because they were afraid that they might.  Because they didn't have cars, and the upfront cost of buying a car is obvious, while the added costs of buying food in inner-city neighborhoods is hidden.

All this is mostly a long way of saying that I'm not sure that the fact that poor people live in inner cities proves that they're cheaper than suburbs.

So, Yglesias argues that the suburbs are only so cheap because the roads and other infrastructure are so heavily subsidized.  Lisa Margonelli says that it's a myth that people will drive less if gas prices get high enough.  She argues that high gas prices have hit the poor the most.  I think this is probably right -- if people's driving is responsive to gas prices, it's clearly only in the very long run, as people choose where to work and live.  Somewhat less plausibly, Richard Brodsky claims that Bloomberg's proposed congestion pricing plan for driving in Manhattan would be regressive, hurting poor and middle-income drivers the most.  I'm pretty dubious about the idea that many poor New Yorkers own cars.

But outside of New York, I think the evidence is overwhelming that helping low-income families own cars is a highly cost-effective anti-poverty strategy.  (We've actually just donated our old car to Vehicles for Change, an organization that does this.)  It opens up a world of job opportunities, lets people shop at lower-cost stores, go to church and doctor's offices and more.  In an ideal world, you could do all these things by public transportation, but in most of the US you can't. 

So, how do we help the environment without penalizing low-income families?  I still think that some version of Pay at the Pump auto insurance would be a good thing.  It would convert a big part of the fixed cost of owning a car into a variable cost of driving it, so would both make car ownership more affordable for the poor, and discourage driving at the margin.  School reform isn't usually thought of as part of an environmental agenda, but if you could improve urban schools to the point that they seemed like a reasonable alternative for families who have options, more of them would choose to live in cities.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

At D's end of the kindergarten year ceremony, the kids performed a little song about all the things they had learned during the year, and were each called upon to say what they want to be when they grow up.

D wants to be a scientist who builds rovers.  He explained that a rover is a kind of robot that goes to other planets and if anything bad happens to the rover, it means you can't send people.  (Yes, the Mars imax movie did make an impression on him, why do you ask?)

Of the other kids in the class who didn't totally mumble their answers, the choices were:

• a soldier who drives a truck (said with truck driving action)
• a football player
• air force (said with plane flying action, which looks a lot like truck driving action)
• nurse (said with a simpering "Doctor, here are your instruments")
• ballerina (said with a pirouette)
• a cheerleader (said with a jump)
• a cheerleader (also said with a jump).

I found this intensely depressing.  Yes, I know they're 6 years old, and "when I grow up" is further away than "once upon a time."  But it felt like they're pulling from an awfully limited deck.  I don't know; maybe I wouldn't have felt so strongly about the exact same answers coming from a middle-class group of kids.

I think my dad still has hanging in his office the drawing I did when I was about that age of the different tools that a doctor uses, labeled in an adult hand, but clearly to my dictation (it says things like "this is the pointy part that shoots out.")  And no, I'm not a doctor.  But it was within the realm of what I could imagine.

Laura at Geeky Mom has a series of posts up about why she's not a scientist.  There's a lot of good evidence that girls tend not to take the prerequisite courses math and science in high school, shutting off options before they've really considered them.   That wasn't me. 

In high school, I took calculus, Honors Bio, AP Chemistry (you had to dissect a cat in AP Bio, and that really wasn't something I wanted to do.)  And then I went to college, and took the minimum 3 classes in hard math and science needed to graduate.  I was still interested in the topics, but where in HS I could take math and history and English and French and a science and economics and still have room for pottery, in college, you couldn't take more than 4 or 5 classes a term.  And the introductory level science classes were notorious for being both boring and difficult.  And up a hill a 15 minute walk from the rest of campus.  By then I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a doctor.  So I signed up for the "great books" set of humanities classes and never looked back. 

Kindergarten blues

Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.

D's birthday is in January, so he's in the middle of his class age-wise, one of the smallest kids, one of the most advanced academically.  One of his good friends, with a July birthday, is doing "junior kindergarten" this year -- but he has some sensory issues, and I know his teacher were worried about his ability to stay on task.  It's not clear how much easier he's going to find it next year, though.  N's birthday is in October, so he'll be nearly 6 before he starts Kindergarten.  If I didn't know that other parents were likely to be holding their summer-birthday kids back a year, I might be in the school office, arguing to let him start a year early.   I was 4 when I started school (November birthday, December cutoff) and didn't suffer.

I think the points the author made about the class issues are real ones -- redshirting kindergarteners is definitely an upper-middle class phenomenon -- but am unconvinced that it matters in the scheme of class inequities in education.  For one thing, I'm doubtful that many poor kids are going to be sitting in the same classrooms as those redshirted kids.  EdWeek has a new tool out that lets you generate reports for any school district in the country on graduation rates and school segregation levels. I took a look at the one for Alexandria and was shocked to see that its school system scores a .78 (on a 0 to 1 scale) for racial segregation and a .52 for socioeconomic segregation.  Those numbers are far higher than average for either Virginia or the country as a whole, but what makes them really shocking is that all the segregation is in the elementary schools -- there's only one high school (TC Williams, of Remember the Titans fame) and two middle schools.

And we're not talking separate but equal either.  My friend who has her kindergartener in one of the predominantly white, middle-class, active PTA schools has been told that her son has been identified as gifted and talented (even though the pull out activities don't start until 3rd grade) and invited to come in for a meeting to discuss the curriculum.  I'm quite confident that if any such process were happening at D's school, we'd have heard about it.  We haven't.

A year ago, in my post about the decision to send D to this school, I wrote " What I worry about is whether they'll learn that school is something to be endured."  I do think this fear has somewhat come true.  D's bored a fair amount of the time at school -- his biggest complaint is that it takes up too much of his day.  And the whole class often loses privileges when some kids misbehave.  D's counting days to the end of school.  And frankly, I am too.

"Poverty"

Picking up on the comments on the last post.

The problem with Mead's view of the world is that even if you got all the men who are unemployed and got them to work in the same types of jobs as men of comparable education and work experience and even somehow married them off to the mothers of their children, they'd still overwhelmingly be poor.

Most poor people in the US are in families that include workers.  But the jobs aren't regular enough, and don't pay enough to lift people out of poverty.  And even if they make more than the official poverty line, it's still not enough to make ends meet.  And it only takes one crisis -- a sick kid, a car breaking down, a cold winter that makes the utility bill skyrocket -- to make the whole damn house of cards fall down.

The folks at Inclusion argue that the problem with talking about poverty is that as soon as you start talking about "poor people" the image that jumps into most people's mind is of dysfunctional teen parents in inner cities -- of Random Family, rather than The Working Poor.   And the comments here show that there's some truth to that.  But I'm still unconvinced that "social inclusion" is a viable alternative.  I do think that talking about "job quality" is an important piece of the conversation, but it doesn't provide the framework for talking about other solutions, like expanding the earned income tax credit.

Let's cut poverty in half

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half.  It offers a 12 point agenda designed to reduce the poverty rate in half in 10 years.

Perhaps what's most exciting about this report is that there's nothing terribly exciting in it.  Pretty much all of the recommendations have been made before: raise and index the minimum wage, expand the EITC, make it easier for workers to join unions, provide universal child care subsidies, make college more affordable, encourage savings, rebuild the safety net.  But the point is that it doesn't take geniuses to figure this out.  The report makes clear that we're not missing ideas about good things to do, but the political willpower to do them.

Poverty is finally starting to get some attention again.  It's one of the key elements of John Edwards' presidential campaign.  Bloomberg is focusing attention on it in New York.  The House Ways and Means Committee had a hearing on it today.  But even Charlie Rangel said that he's focusing on getting rid of the AMT before he thinks about EITC expansions.  So don't count on anything happening unless we build public support for it.  So go write your members of Congress and urge them to commit to reducing poverty.

The folks over at Inclusion have been pushing their argument that we should be talking about "Social Inclusion" rather than reducing (or eliminating) poverty.  While I understand their argument, I don't agree.  First, I think that no one in the US has a clue what "social inclusion" means.  If we've got someone willing to give us 2 minutes of attention, I'd rather say "eliminate poverty" and spend the next 110 seconds pitching the main policy proposals than say "promote social inclusion" and spend all my time trying to explain what I mean by that.  Second, and more importantly, I think there's a real risk of playing into the hands of folks like Larry Mead who think that poor people's problem isn't lack of money but that they are "outside the mainstream" and aren't working a lot.  And finally, when the media is finally paying some attention to this issue, I'd like the coverage to focus on the proposals, and not on liberals' perennial attraction to circular firing squads.

Stats on parenting and class

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child's Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It's full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau's description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" -- children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.

TBR: Fear of Falling

Today's book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, by Barbara Ehrenreich was published in 1989.  I picked it up because I read a reference somewhere that made me think that Ehrenreich might have made the connection I've been trying to draw between high-intensivity parenting and the increasingly competitive economy.

Ehrenreich does argue that middle class parents are highly insecure about their ability to pass their class status on to their children, but doesn't really go with it in the direction that I'm interested.  Rather, she suggests that middle-class status is largely a function of the willingness to defer gratification, whether in the form of extended education and low-paid entry level jobs or in the form of the savings needed for homeownership.  Parents are anxious because there is little they can do to assure these values among their children.  Ehrenreich argues that this is why the 60s were so unsettling to middle class adults -- their children were rejecting the very values that made them middle class.

While the book made some interesting points, overall, it was so dated as to be of little interest.  Fundamentally, Ehrenreich is trying to explain the shift to the right of American politics in the 1980s.  She rejects the idea that it was due to a significant shift of the working class (the Reagan Democrats) and argues instead that it's because the upper middle class chose to identify with the upper class corporate elite, rather than joining in solidarity with the middle and working class.  I find that an unconvincing argument.

I also think it's absurd to talk about the increased appeal of investment banking and law to college graduates in terms of an ideological shift without any acknowledgment of the increased burden of student loan debt.  And as a Gen X-er myself, I found myself irritated by her idealization of the 60s without any acknowledgment that the boomers didn't exactly live up to their youthful promises to build an egalitarian society.  Ehrenreich also discusses the middle-class "discovery" of poverty in the 60s without any mention of the role that poor people played in the war on poverty.

So, I can't recommend the book.  But I don't regret taking the time to read it.  I found parts of it very interesting, especially the discussion of how the media hyped the idea that blue collar workers were opposed to the social activism of the 60s, and downplayed the role of unions in progressive coalitions.

Framing

Via Margy Waller at Inclusionist, I've been reading some reports about the "framing" of low-wage work in the media.

I have to say, I'm sort of dubious.  The media consultants (Douglas Gould and Co) are saying that it's bad when newspaper articles or magazine reports start off with stories about individuals or families who are struggling to get by.  The argument is that even if the subjects are highly sympathetic, this pushes the reader into a frame of "sympathy for the poor" and they get stuck on the merits (or flaws) of the individual example, rather than looking at the social and economic system that leads to the problem.

Ok, they're the experts, and this is based on research on the subject.  And I know that when newspapers run these stories about, for example, people who are about to lose their homes because of medical bills, they often get donations for that specific family.  But my question is how many people read the stories -- my guess is it's higher for the ones that start off with the compelling story.  As Gould and co acknowledge, reporters certainly think that it's better journalism that way, and that more people will read the stories than if they lead with straight economic analysis.  And a story that no one reads doesn't do you much good, right?

I was also a little dumbfounded by the statement that it's "highly advantageous" that welfare has essentially disappeared from news stories "as welfare tends to call forth negative stereotypes about low-wage work and workers."  Wow.

I did think that it was interesting that they found that stories about family leave and low wage work were disproportionately likely to be framed as personal rather than as a question of workforce policy.  I'm not sure if this is a statement about the issue per se, or about the lack of specific legislative proposals that encourage the use of a systemic frame.

49-UP

This weekend, I watched 49-UP, the most recent in Michael Apted's series of movies about the lives of a group of people who were first interviewed as 7 year old schoolchildren in Britain and have been reinterviewed every 7 years since.

Interestingly, Tony, who grew up in working class poverty and now appears to be solidly middle class (with a second home in Spain), expresses what I would consider the most "conservative" views about the appropriate role of government in society, saying essentially "I made it, why can't they?"  Upper-class John, who always seemed quite the snob and is now a Queen's Counsel, describes Tony Blair as a "conservative" and says that his concerns about the government are about the attacks on due process.  And upper class Andrew points out, as I did previously, that you can't imagine any 7 year old today being able to confidently (and accurately) predict where he was going to go to university, the way they did now.

But overall, the whole question of class seems to have faded in importance.  The time-lapse aspect of the show -- watching the same people at 7 and 21 and 49 -- is just overwhelming.  (Among other things, it makes me want to grab the video camera and ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up and if they want to marry and where they want to live.)  It helps me imagine the next decades of my life far more vividly than anything else I've seen or read.

It's also far more of a positive picture of middle age than is generally provided.  Those who are married (either still married or remarried) seem genuinely happy with their spouses, not just partnering off because it's expected.  And those who are single mostly seem to have made their peace with that.  Suzy, who was so awkward as a teen and then seemed to disappear into the role of mother, finally seems to be comfortable in her own skin.  Nick's research has hit a dead end, but he clearly loves teaching.  Bruce has compromised his ideals somewhat, but also thrives on teaching.  Lynn starts crying at the prospect of being pushed out from her job as children's librarian.  Andrew has made a late-in-life career change.  Jackie challenges the picture of her from 42-Up as being overwhelmed by her physical limitations.

And Neil.  Neil, who was so bright and lively as a child, who wound up homeless and questioning his own sanity, has found a niche as a small town politician.  I can't help but thinking that he's a walking advertisement for the welfare state, since I have little doubt that he'd be homeless and addicted in the United States, if not dead.

If you've got the time, I recommend watching the whole series from the start. But if you don't, there's enough clips from the earlier shows to provide some context.  It's worth watching.

What it takes

The NY Times Magazine cover story yesterday was on the disadvantage faced by low-income students and what it would mean to take seriously the idea of "no child left behind."  It's an interesting article, pulling together a lot of different strands of research and thinking.  I want to try to pull the different strands apart, though, because I agree with some of the assumptions behind the article, but not all.

1)  The first claim is that low-income children enter school at a significant disadvantage compared to middle-income children.  I think there's pretty much broad consensus behind this one.  Anyone care to argue it?

2) Next, Tough argues that this disadvantage is primarily due to differences in parenting styles, especially the use of language.  There's not a consensus on this one.  On the one hand, there are those (cf. The Bell Curve) who argue that the differences in performance are larguely genetic.  I think that's wrong -- there's good evidence that genetics is a strong driver of differences in IQ among middle- and upper-class children, but that poor kids often don't get to develop up to their full potential.  On the other hand, there are a lot of liberals who would reject Tough's claim that parenting style matters more than the material deprivation that poor kids experience.

(Tough doesn't entirely dismiss the role of poverty, but concludes that parenting matters more: "True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey.")

As Jal Mehta points out at TMPCafe, this isn't just an academic dispute -- it has real policy consequences.  If you think that material hardship is the main reason poor children are lagging, it points you in the direction of child allowances and other income redistribution schemes.  But if parenting matters more, just giving poor parents more money won't solve the problem.  You either need to somehow change their parenting practices (possibly through some form of home visits), or compensate for them (through programs like Head Start and redesigned schools).

I think the evidence that there are class-based differences in parenting practices is strong (I've written about Lareau's Unequal Childhoods here before), but am not quite willing to write off the role of money. 

3)  The next question is whether poor kids are entering school so far behind that they couldn't succeed if given schools with the resources of the average American public school.  Tough suggests that they can't, because there are so few examples of schools that are succeeding with overwhelmingly poor, minority populations.  I'm not convinced that makes his point -- as Kozol argues in Shame of the Nation, it's essentially an experiment that has never been tried.  The best argument for Tough's position, I think, is that the small number of low-income kids in predominently middle-class schools have generally not done particularly well.  (And I think the strongest part of NCLB is the attention that it has forced school administrators to pay to that achievement gap.)

Tough argues that the kinds of schools that have succeeded -- and are needed for widespread success -- provide three key components: extended school days and years, highly structured lesson plans, with frequent testing to make sure that the desired skills are being aquired, and an explicit focus on affecting the behavior and values of the students by "teaching character."  He writes:

The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.

But is this a better education?  It's certainly a more costly education, once you burn through the supply of true believers who are willing to subsidize such schools by working extra hours for no extra pay.

But I'm reminded of Scrivenings' post about his horror at a New York Times story about a kindergarten class that is operated along such lines.  While some parents would welcome the eased demand for after school care, I think an equal number of middle-class parents would be outraged if their kids' schools added another 3 hours of classes a day, especially if that time were spent on core reading and math rather than "enrichment" activities.  I know that my biggest concern about sending D to a school with lousy test scores was fear that they'd adopt a drill-and-kill approach.

And I know a lot of good teachers resist such a highly structured approach, prefering the flexibility to follow the children's interests and take advantage of teachable moments.  Kozol argues that schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods get caught in vicious cycles, where they get the least experienced teachers, so the administrators rely on scripted lessons, which makes the schools even less attractive for creative teachers.

***********

Edited to add that none of this says that any individual child can't succeed.  There are certainly kids who overcome mediocre parenting and indifferent schools to achieve great things.  And there are poor parents who devote all their limited resources to making things better for their kids.  All this is about averages.

eBay

Last week, MC Milker (from the Not Quite Crunchy Parent) commented that one of the advantages of wooden play kitchens is that they're sturdy enough to last through several kids, and can be sold on eBay when you're done with them.

I certainly know people who use the high potential resale value as a justification (excuse?) for buying high end baby and kid stuff, from Bugaboo strollers to Hanna Andersson clothing.  But I wonder how many of them actually wind up reselling things?  The most cost-effective thing to do is probably to both buy things used and resell them.

I've sold some baby stuff, but I've given away far more.  For t-shirts and the like, I just can't be bothered to carefully wash, photograph, advertise, respond to questions, and then either schlepp to the post office or make arrangements to meet the buyers.  I'm  curious about the people who do find this worthwhile.  Some people are clearly doing this on a semi-professional basis, buying things at end of season sales specifically in order to sell them online the next year.  But others are just listing a few items, as their kids outgrow them.  It's a high tech yard sale.

I try to give things to friends or family, but if they're not interested, or if I'm just desperate to get something out of the house, it goes to Value Village.  We just gave our jog stroller to a friend who is expecting her first baby.  Yes, we probably could have gotten some money for it, but the money isn't make-or-break for us, so we decided to just give it to her.  Things have to be pretty beat up before I just put them in the trash.

We buy the vast majority of the boys' clothes on ebay.  I refuse to spend $8 on a t-shirt.  Some day maybe they'll figure it out and protest, but as long as we can get away with it, we will.  I focus on the large lots, since otherwise the shipping makes it less of a bargain.  When I'm paying $2 each for pants, I don't sweat it if one or two pieces don't fit.  I know it's more expensive than the thrift store, but I'm willing to pay a few dollars for the convenience.

I happened to be looking at my eBay profile today, and discovered that I've been a member since June 1999.  That surprises me -- I wouldn't have guessed that I'd been on it so long.  I've got a feedback level of 71, but I've probably bought closer to a hundred things (not everyone gives feedback).  Of all the things that I've bought on eBay, I've only really been disappointed once (by a used computer where the battery wouldn't hold a charge).  At this point, I'm surprised when I run into people who have never bought anything on eBay.

TBR: Chutes and Ladders

In 1999, Katherine Newman published No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City.  This book examined the experiences of 300 individuals who had applied for minimum wage jobs at fast food restaurants in Harlem during the early 1990s.  Newman found that competition was fierce for these jobs, with as many as 14 applicants for each position, and high school graduates in their 20s crowding out teens and high school dropouts.  Moving back and forth from generalizations drawn from the broad study to detailed profiles of individual workers, she reported on the fast food workers' pride in being part of the legitimate economy -- even in low-status, low-paid jobs where their friends teased them and they came home stinking of grease.   They valued the semi-independence that paying their own way gave them, even though almost none could afford to live on their own.  Published just after welfare reform, the book was a stinging rebuke to those who said that the poor didn't want to work.

Seven years later, Newman is back with Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market.  She's followed a subset of the workers she first met in 1993 and 1994 and is back to tell us how they fared during the boom years of the late 1990s and the recession of 2001-2002.  The book opens with an update on the workers who were most prominently featured in the first book. Jamal is now working at a lumber yard in a small town in Northern California, having followed his new wife back to her family out west.  Kyesha has a union job as a janitor for the NYC Housing Authority.  Carmen is out of work, having been fired from her department store job for a rules violation, but her husband Sal is the manager of the video store.

Newman divides the workers into three groups -- "high flyers," "up but not outs" and "low riders."  While many, even most of the workers are still struggling, perhaps the biggest surprise in the study is how many high flyers there are in a group that once seemed so disadvantaged -- about 20 percent of those Newman was able to track over time.  (She also uses a national sample for comparison, and estimates that the figure is closer to 10 percent for overall minimum wage workers in retail food industries.  She also argues that this figure is not much lower in economic bad times than in boom years.)   Although Newman doesn't explicitly make the connection, one of the points I took away was that the "welfare reform success stories" that various governors liked to flaunt were neither as rare as the opponents of welfare reform suggested, nor as much the result of welfare reform as the supporters implied.

Newman concludes the book with a review of suggestions for how to improve the lives of the working poor, and generally I agree with them (expand the EITC, make higher education more affordable, support quality child care).  But the book left me with many unanswered questions about what made some of these workers succeed while others struggled.  By and large, formal education wasn't the answer -- the high flyers were more likely to have succeeded by getting into a unionized position or a skilled trade than by getting a bachelor's degree.  (Those pursuing advanced degrees may not yet have seen the payoff, since they were usually only able to go to school part-time.)

In addition to the core ethnographic study, Newman pulls in a lot of data and information from related studies.  I'm a policy wonk, and even I found myself glazing over at times.  But the book is well worth reading, mostly for how it will undermine your preconceptions, whether you consider yourself a liberal or a conservative.

***

By the way, I've set up an Amazon aStore as a way to display the books that I've reviewed by category.  It's a work in progress, so let me know if you have requests.

Motherhood Manifesto: the movie

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to view the Motherhood Manifesto documentary.  (I work for one of the Moms Rising aligned organizations, so we set it up in the conference room during lunch and brought popcorn.)

It's very well done.  For each of the letters in the MOTHER agenda, they have a funny pseudo-fifties animated clip, a feature about someone affected by the issue, and brief interviews with experts who are working on the issue with aligned organizations.  It's a nice mixture of wrenching personal stories with just a touch of policy wonkery and, unlike many discussions of work-family issues, they leave viewers with hope that progress is being made rather than with handwringing over the current state of the world.

When the movie was done, we sat around and discussed it.  Some in my organization (which focuses on low-income individuals and families) were concerned that there weren't more low-income mothers featured in it, but I'm pretty sure that was a deliberate choice.  I think it's almost certainly true that the way to get more affordable child care, health care, etc. for poor families is to get middle- and upper-income families to fight for changes in the system, out of self-interest as well as altruism.  But I think it's also important to make sure that the solutions then work for everyone.  (Recently, there was a discussion on one of my parenting email lists about the high cost of child care in the DC area, and the solution that someone suggested was to increase the amount that could be put aside tax free for child care in Flexible Spending Accounts.  I tried to be polite in pointing out that FSAs don't help people who don't make enough to owe federal income taxes.)

The more interesting question that was raised was whether it's limiting to frame this as a mothers' organization rather than as a caregivers organization, since many of the proposals are needed by people caring for the elderly or sick as well as by parents.  And someone -- not me -- did ask my favorite question of Where Are The Dads?  I'm really ambivalent about this one.  On the one hand, I do think that always talking of these issues as mothers' issues lets fathers and others off the hook.  But I do think that being a mother is a very salient part of lots of mothers' identities, and so it's a good way to mobilize them.  In particular, there are a lot of people who don't think of themselves as activists, but if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother, they might do it.  And I'm not sure that a broad "caregivers movement" would engage people in the same way.  What do you think?

In any case, the documentary is worth watching.  If you're in the DC area, and want to see the movie, the Women's Information Network is having a screening and discussion tonight at AFSCME.  (Sorry, I won't be there -- I'll be at D's soccer team dinner.)  If that doesn't work for you, let me know if you'd like me to arrange a kid-friendly viewing at my house some time.  (Probably not until January.)

TBR: The Winner-Take- All Society

Today's book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, by Robert Frank and Philip Cook, is somewhat dated in the details (it was first published in 1995) and can be repetitive at times, but is nonetheless a must-read for anyone interested in inequality in American society.  Frank and Cook were among the first to note that the biggest driving force in inequality today is not the gap between the very poor and everyone else, but the one between the very rich and everyone else.  Paul Krugman is probably the person who has spent the most time in recent years discussing this fact.  As Krugman noted in the NY Times in February:

"Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.

But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint."

Frank and Cook labelled this phenomenon "the winner-take-all society" and argued that a variety of technological, political and economic factors have combined to create highly competitive national or global markets in which relative position is more important than absolute skill, and in which the very few top performers in any given field capture the vast majority of the returns.  The most obvious examples are in sports and the arts -- while the superstars get millions in endorsements and appearance fees, no one can name the 100th best tennis player or violinist in world.  Frank and Cook argue that the same thing is going on for doctors, lawyers, authors, and CEOs. 

While I'm not entirely convinced by their explanations for why this happens (for one thing, in most fields it is not possible to rank people's performance as accurately as in pro golf), I don't think there's any doubt that the description of the phenomenon is dead on.  The math is beyond me, but I am assured by people I generally trust that there are a wide variety of occupations in which the earnings distribution can best be explained by assuming that there are a series of "tournaments" in which only the winners proceed into the next rounds, and that small differences in skill thus are magnified into huge differences in earnings.  This probably explains a significant portion of the penalty for part-time work -- it handicaps people at early levels of the tournament and makes it unlikely that they'll get into the "leagues" with the really high payoffs. 

It's hard to pin Frank and Cook down on a left-right scale.  They are economists, and I think they overstate the role of markets and understate the role of institutional structures in creating the outcomes that they describe. (See this American Prospect article for a good sample of their approach.)  But they believe that there are huge inefficiencies in this distribution -- because people don't take into account the effect of their entry into competition on other people, more people than is economically efficient compete for the few prestigious slots -- and thus argue for progressive taxation, especially if tied to consumption.

After I finished this book, I had a really interesting conversation with T. about how the idea of the winner-take-all society interacts with the long tail -- the ability for even very small niche products to find their audience using the powers of the internet.  I think our conclusion is that the long tail makes it possible to opt from the tournaments without giving up entirely on being in the game.  T's example is that while it's harder and harder to get a book (commercially) published these days, he thinks he makes more money self-publishing his game than he could make if it were picked up by a publisher, even recognizing that they could get it into distribution channels that he can't reach.  But I think that for most people, the money they are going to make from their piece of the long tail is for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from zero.

Opportunity and Education

"At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities."

Anyone who believes that opportunity -- the ability of children to have a future that isn't defined by their parents' socio-economic position -- is an important value should read Isabel Sawhill's issue brief on Opportunity in America: The Role of Education.  The whole volume of The Future of Children on Opportunity is worth reading, but the issue brief is only 5 1/2 pages, so there's no excuse for not reading it.

Sawhill begins by discussing how, contrary to the public image, the US does not have particularly more intergenerational mobility than other industrialized countries, and how such mobility is declining over time.  She notes that Americans are quite resistant to more progressive schemes of taxation and benefits, but -- in theory -- are highly supportive of the role of education in creating equality of opportunity.  And then she makes the statement I quoted above: "At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities." 

First, she argues that the K-12 system is generally weak, and "a society with a weak educational system will, by definition, be one in which the advantages of class or family background loom large."  Then she notes that because of the ways that public schools are funded, poor kids go to worse schools than well-off kids.  And finally, she notes that "access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources."

Sawhill goes on to mention some possible ways to address these deficiencies.  This part of the essay is not as convincing.  I'm not sure I think all of the proposals are good ideas, and I'm fairly confident that they don't add up to enough to eliminate the systemic problems that Sawhill has identified.

But go read the brief, because the description of the problem is spot-on.  And then come back and we can discuss whether it's possible to change any of this.

TBR: The Great Risk Shift

Today's book is The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement And How You Can Fight Back, by Jacob Hacker.  Can I just say that I wish I had written this book?  It answers the question that a bunch of us wrestled with in the spring -- how can we be so affluent, and yet feel like a "middle-class" life is out of our reach?  Hacker's answer is that we're facing more risk than ever before, so even if we're doing well today, we worry that it could slip out of our grasp tomorrow.

Specifically, Hacker shows how a range of economic and political forces have combined to increase risk in almost every aspect of our lives:

• Income volatility has increased significantly, and has increased more among the middle- and upper-class than the poor.  (The poor still have higher levels of income volatility.)
• Job loss is more likely to lead to long-term unemployment, and re-employment at significantly lower wages and/or in a different industry.
• Marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
• Education is an excellent investment, but also a risky one -- students are borrowing more than ever, and going to college doesn't guarantee a high income.
• Defined benefit pensions are rapidly disappearing, replaced by 401ks.
• More people are uninsured than ever before, and even people with insurance have a higher probability of being hit by large uncovered bills than in the past.

Hacker's not the first one to say any of this, but he does a really nice job of pulling it together in one package.  (One of my few complaints about the book is that when Hacker incorporates true-life stories that illustrate his points, the stories are oddly familiar, because he picked most of them them up from the same newspaper articles that I've read.)

The most immediately politically salient part of this book is where Hacker takes on the proposals to privatize Social Security and to shift people from standard health insurance into Health Savings Accounts.  Hacker argues that these are part of an ideologically driven "Personal Responsibility Crusade" that is designed to increase risk, even though most people feel like they have too much risk in their lives, thank you very much. 

Hacker also makes some proposals for how to reduce risk from its current levels.  The simplest is probably his proposal for universal 401ks, that could be portable across jobs, and that workers would be automatically enrolled in unless they opted out.  He also proposes that the government would annuitize these accounts when people reach retirement.  He also proposes to open up Medicare for people under 65 and to create a system of Universal Insurance that would cover people against sharp drops in income.  (Neither of these proposals are described in any detail in the book, which attempts to reach a general audience and so tries not to scare people off with too many formulas.)

Like Warren and Tyagi, Hacker also offers some practical advice -- build up some savings, sign up for a 401k if you can, buy life insurance, don't buy a house that you can only afford with a variable rate mortgage, don't enroll in a college that you can't afford to stay in until you finish.  He also points out the significance of "loss aversion" -- that it's more painful to give up something that you have than to never have had it in the first place.

If all this isn't familiar to you, read the book.  And if it is, send it to your Congressman.

WBR: The Price of Privilege

Today's book is The Price of Privilege, by Madeline Levine.  Levine is a psychologist in Marin county, California, and she writes about how she's seeing more and more affluent teenagers who are depressed, anxious, anorexic, using drugs, cutting themselves, or otherwise acting in self-destructive manners.  She argues that this isn't in spite of their privileged backgrounds, but because of them. 

In particular, Levine suggests that affluent communities are characterized by:

• intense pressure to perform, in both grades and extra-curriculars
• materialistic values
• very busy parents who don't have time for their kids (whether or not they work outside the home).
• isolation and lack of social supports.

She claims that the result is kids who don't have a real "sense of self."  They know what is expected of them -- and depending on their personality, may either conform or do precisely the opposite -- but don't know who they are and what they really value in life.  Or, as the subtitle says, "How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids."

Levine argues that parents need to both take a step back from their kids' lives -- let them make more decisions on their own, and learn to deal with the consequences -- and be more connected with them as persons and let them know they love them for themselves, not just their accomplishments.  This rang true to me.  I know that my husband is still dealing with the message that he got from his parents as a teenager that they believed that if he was left to make his own decisions, he'd ruin his life. 

The book also helped me articulate some of my irritation with the Post magazine article on "toxic parents" from a couple of weeks ago.  The article seemed to suggest that the only parenting alternatives were to a) let your kids do whatever they wanted, including buying alcohol for them and letting them have unsupervised parties, and b) to track their whereabouts every minute.  I'm pretty sure that the right choice is c) set clear expectations, provide freedom within reasonable limits, and let there be consequences if the kid screws up.  (Levine admits that in spite of her best efforts, some of her son's friends snuck alcohol into a party at her house, and she got busted by the police.)

That said, I'm not convinced that the people who read this book will be the ones who need to, or if they do, that they'll recognize themselves.  I suspect it's more likely to be read by people who enjoy tssking at other people's bad parenting, and feeling virtuous by comparison.  (And who wouldn't feel virtuous compared to the dad who wanted Levine to fix his kid's drug problem, but wouldn't give up using himself?)