1. The Atlantic: If You Really Care About Ending Poverty, Stop Talking About Inequality
Don’t mind the rich-poor gap. Statistical analysis shows three factors—overall income growth, marriages, and local government spending—matter most for poorer children chasing the American Dream. …
… But for all the new attention devoted to the 1 percent, a new dataset from the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard and Berkeley suggests that, if we care about upward mobility overall, we’re vastly exaggerating the dangers of the rich-poor gap. Inequality itself is not a particularly potent predictor of economic mobility, as sociologist Scott Winship noted in a recent article with his colleague Donald Schneider based on their analysis of this data.
So what factors, at the community level, do predict if poor children will move up the economic ladder as adults? What explains, for instance, why the Salt Lake City metro area is one of the 100 largest metropolitan areas most likely to lift the fortunes of the poor and the Atlanta metro area is one of the least likely?
Harvard economist Raj Chetty, a principal investigator at the Equality of Opportunity Project, has pointed to economic and racial segregation, community density, the size of a community’s middle class, the quality of schools, community religiosity, and family structure, which he calls the “single strongest correlate of upward mobility.” …
2. AEI Ideas: 70% of Americans born at the bottom never reach the middle
… But while intergenerational mobility has not worsened, it has failed to improve. Perhaps it would have worsened if not for the war on poverty, or perhaps we have not reduced poverty enough. More likely, income is less important for child mobility — and income inequality less consequential — than Great Society liberalism asserted.
We need a war on immobility — a bipartisan crusade to identify and address the barriers that leave 70 percent of poor children below the middle class as adults. …
3. PBS: Poverty rates surge in American suburbs
… According to Kneebone, since 2000, the number of poor people living in suburbs has grown by 65 percent.
For example, poverty is up by almost 16 percent in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Up more than 27 percent in the suburbs of providence. Nearly 79 percent outside Seattle. And in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, the number of poor has swelled almost 143 percent. More poor people now live in America’s suburbs than in cities or in rural areas.
The main explanation for this shift is simply demographics. Many more Americans have moved to suburbs in recent years, and that growth included low-income residents and new immigrants. Other factors – suburbs are still recovering from the foreclosure and financial crises. Kneebone says federal programs for the poor were mostly designed back in the 60’s with rural or urban communities in mind, and when hard times came to the suburbs, many weren’t prepared. …
4. Family Studies: Why Working-Class Men Are Falling Behind
… All of these things mentioned above—early reliance on stimulating entertainment, lower educational attainment, disconnection from families and role models, and the attractions of different, “edgy” subcultures—contribute to a widening gulf between those more connected to family, work, and society, and those without these commitments. While men are losing connections, women continue to participate in the labor force, attend religious services more often, and belong to other community and civic organizations. This is partly because many have dependent children and need to support them, whereas men can to a large extent avoid this responsibility.
Men who are not committed to families enjoy all the options that a consumer culture gives them, have more independence and freedom, and thus are found in a wider array of subcultural activities that take men away from consistent work and commitment to families. At the same time that non–college-educated men have fewer economic opportunities, they have more opportunities to indulge in various activities. That’s a recipe for ever-widening gaps between these men and the rest of society.
5. Business Insider: The Most Damning Chart That Shows How Far The Economy Still Has To Recover
6. New York Times: More U.S. Economists See Half-Full Glass
Record exports and the smallest trade deficit in four years. Healthier consumer spending, including the strongest annual increase in automobile sales since 2007, spurred by a booming stock market and an improving housing sector. And a slow but steady pickup in job creation that has pushed unemployment to its lowest level since 2008.
The confluence of all these forces in recent weeks has prompted economists to sharply revise their expectations for growth in late 2013 and early 2014, and prompted hopes that a more sustained economic expansion has finally arrived.
Plenty of caution is in order. It is a refrain that has been heard several times since the end of the Great Recession, and frustrated job seekers and income-stretched workers have plenty of reasons to be dubious about the upbeat forecasts.
Still, a series of arrows from disparate parts of the economy in both the United States and elsewhere around the world are finally pointing in the right direction, experts and policy makers say. …
7. AP: Gloomy Americans foresee a downhill slide to 2050
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ask people to imagine American life in 2050, and you'll get some dreary visions.
Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, a majority of Americans predict a future worse than today.
Whites are particularly gloomy: Only 1 in 6 expects better times over the next four decades. Also notably pessimistic are middle-age and older people, those who earn midlevel incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds. …
8. Bloomberg: American Consumers in 2013 Most Upbeat Since Before Recession
American consumers in 2013 were more upbeat than at any time in the previous six years as views on the economy, finances and the buying climate improved.
The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index (COMFCOMF) averaged minus 31.4 for 2013, the highest since 2007, when it was minus 10.5. The weekly index fell for the first time since mid-November, dropping to minus 28.7 for the period ended Dec. 29, from minus 27.4.
An improved job market, higher stock prices and rising home values lifted sentiment at the end of the year and helped drive holiday retail shopping. Stronger wage and employment growth would help propel bigger gains in confidence and encourage Americans to boost spending, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the economy. …
9. Conversable Economist: The Slowdown in Rising U.S. Healthcare Costs
…The red line makes two obvious points. First, the slowdown in rising health care costs started back around 2002 or 2003. Indeed, health care economists have been writing about it for a couple of years now, and OECD evidence point out that a similar slowdown seems to be occurring across high-income countries. Thus, eager claims by Obama administration officials about how the Affordable Care Act–although still far from fully implemented–is bringing down the rise in health care costs are a prime example of finding a parade, running to the front, and then claiming to lead the parade. As the writers of the Health Affairs article note: "The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which was enacted in March 2010, had a minimal impact on overall national health spending growth through 2012." …
10. Conversable Economist: The median woman's wage to the median man's wage has been closing over time
11. Why Not Give Money Instead of a Gift?
"… Ariely, a good friend of Making Sense, whom we featured prominently in our segment about teaching kids how to save, most recently appeared in our segment on the economic waste of Christmas gift-giving, explaining why non-monetary gifts are more socially acceptable. Money's an awkward gift, and, as Ariely explains in the web-exclusive video above, a poor motivator. …"
12. The Atlantic: Should Your Minimum Wage Depend on Your Age?
Speaking on Fox News recently, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer proposed what, to many, might have sounded like a rather novel compromise on the minimum wage. His idea? We should have two of them, a higher minimum for "breadwinners," and a lower minimum for everybody else.
Here was Krauthammer's thinking, paraphrased. It might be hard to feed a whole household on $7.25 an hour. But raising the minimum is most likely to hurt teenagers and minorities who rely on low-paid, entry-level jobs to get a foothold in the working world. So how do you lend a hand to hard-pressed families without penalizing the young? Force employers to pay the "breadwinners" more, and everybody else less.
He called his two-tiered solution "a reasonable answer that Republicans and conservatives could offer." …
… Klein is right that that whole "breadwinner" concept would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. But what if we tweaked the idea just a little bit, and based the minimum wage on something more straightforward, like a worker's age?
We wouldn't be the first country to try it. Take Australia. …
13. Forbes: Raising Minimum Wage? How About Raising Employee Ownership?
With an eye towards the 2014 midterms, the administration is keen to talk about something other than health care and is banging the drum for raising the federal minimum wage. Republicans — voicing concerns about job loss and impact on small businesses — will oppose an increase and the issue will go nowhere at the federal level.
For fair-minded policy makers interested in helping working families today – and not just pushing a campaign issue – there is a different answer. It is one that has bipartisan support and could actually get passed: encourage companies to provide greater ownership opportunities or revenue sharing to all their workers. …
14. PBS: Who Counts as Poor in America?
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson announced a legislative agenda to wage "unconditional war on poverty in America." But how do we know what poverty is in America?
15. Here's How The U. S. Bureau Keeps Track Of Poverty In America
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