Life Archives - The Pursuit of Happiness

The Problems With Seattle’s Minimum Wage Debate

July 11, 2017

Recently, a University of Washington study released on the impact of raising Seattle’s minimum wage from $11 to $13 in 2016 showed some disturbing effects. It revealed that the number of minimum wage jobs declined and while lower-income workers were making higher wages they were employed fewer hours, resulting in a net loss in wages.

The study, commissioned by the city, was so disheartening that the mayor of Seattle decided to get another study done that would show better results. But trying to come up with another study that proves an argument because the implications of the first are not what were expected won’t help the people impacted by the policy. It will keep the minimum wage debate alive, though.

That said, some limitations to the University of Washington study, as pointed out by economist Michael Strain, show that Seattle’s experiment won’t end any time soon.

The data it used make it difficult in some instances to determine whether a particular job is in the city of Seattle or elsewhere in Washington state, and the study attempts to deal with this challenge by limiting its scope to workers at single-location firms. The data also don’t include contractors.

To determine the effects of Seattle’s minimum wage increase, the study compares hours and wages in Seattle to those in neighboring counties, before and after the Seattle increase. This is reasonable, but one could also reasonably be concerned that those neighboring counties are not the best comparison group. To address this possibility, the study uses more complex statistical methods. There again, it’s reasonable to question those methods — but not the conclusion that the Vigdor study materially advances our understanding of the effects of the minimum wage. It’s hard for me to understand how any economist could conclude otherwise (emphasis added).

At the same time, the Vigdor study is just one study. Should it increase our confidence that minimum wage increases can hurt low-wage workers? Of course. Does it prove that point for all time in all places? Of course not. The Vigdor study covers only one city. The economics of city-specific minimum wage increases are probably somewhat different from that of state or federal increases. It’s also hard to be sure that what happened when Seattle increased its wage to $13 per hour in the context of getting to $15 per hour can be generalized to what might happen if, say, Kansas City increased its minimum wage to a different amount in a different context over different years.

So where does this leave the debate over minimum wages? Right where it was before: confused.

In other words, the University of Washington study was conducted as professionally and with the best methodologies available to economists to sort through the information. But circumstances are not static, and trying to prove an overall argument of the minimum wage debate based on one city’s experience is an instance where politics gets in the way of policy.

The rise in the wage was part of a three-year plan to get Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 per hour. The last bump took effect at the beginning of this year. Concerns that the impact of such a sharp minimum wage increase hurts lower income workers are legitimate even as the impact of the final increase have yet to be determined.

The Vigdor study does not subscribe to a social policy. It merely points out the effect of the social policy chosen in Seattle for Seattle are not what the engineers had hoped. As Strain points out, popular solutions are not necessarily the best solutions for the people the solutions are targeted to help.

When thinking about whether minimum wage increases are good or bad, you have to think clearly about the social goal you are trying to achieve. If your goal is to help reduce income inequality and to increase the earnings of some middle-class households, then the minimum wage is not a crazy policy.

But if your goal is to help the least skilled, least experienced, most vulnerable members of society to get their feet on the first rung of the employment ladder and to start climbing, then the minimum wage is counterproductive. Its costs are concentrated among those vulnerable workers. It is an obstacle in their paths. It is bad policy.

Read the complete Strain article at Bloomberg

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: fight for 15, Jacob Vigdor, Michael Strain, minimum wage, Seattle, University of Washington

Patient-Based Health Care … on Facebook?

July 5, 2017

Bertrand Might has a rare genetic disorder that his family confirmed in 2012 after almost four years of searching for an explanation. Bertrand was the first person ever documented with his disease, called NGLY1 deficiency.

When his family finally discovered what Bertrand was facing, they at least had an answer. But then they faced another problem — finding others coping with the same ordeal.

It’s a common problem for people with unusual illnesses. Because some diseases are so rare, when a family finally gets a diagnosis, they want to compare notes with others to learn tricks and tips for managing their situation. Unfortunately, in such cases, these others are hard to locate. Medical data networks are hard to access and usually don’t have much information in them.

Matt Might, Bertrand’s dad, had a background in tech, and was able to juice a blog post to get picked up in search engines. The post went viral and Might got a lot of news coverage about the problem his son was facing. He has since found 15 people in the world with the same disease Bertrand has.

But not everyone has that success, even when Google and other sites are trying to harness their technological power to make medical data easier to access and control. But for all their efforts, David Shaywitz, Director of Strategic and Commercial Planning at Theravance, a publicly-held drug development company in South San Francisco, says Facebook may already be the best-positioned platform to support patient-centered health care that so many people dream about as the future of medicine.

Facebook is where patients with rare conditions, and their families, often go to connect with others in similar situations – typically via private groups. Apparently, these can be extremely specific – the example the panelist cited was childhood epilepsy due to one or another individual genetic mutation. Families reportedly self-organize into private groups based on the specific mutation, and share experiences and learnings. …

The irony, of course, is that because of its features and popularity, Facebook has organically emerged as arguably the most attractive platform for patient groups to organize – despite the far more deliberate efforts of other companies and organizations that offer platforms aimed at bringing patients together. …

Now, everyone reading this post is probably familiar with Facebook. It’s quirky. It can manipulate what you see and don’t see, whether you can share your opinion or have your opinion banned. It tries to influence what viewpoints should be supported and which should be ignored. And it really only provides an illusion of privacy when, in fact, one false setting and you’ve gone “public” or worse, “live.”

But then again, isn’t publicity what people in the Mights’ situation are looking for? And doesn’t Facebook have a whole lot of people looking for other people to “friend”? Facebook’s influence is unparalleled.

Facebook, at its core, is about cultivating relationships — in marked distinction to the transactional core of Google (search) and Amazon (deliver). The core mission of Facebook is to connect people – and to help good things emerge from these connections. What better forum than Facebook to bring patients together — and what better platform for health?”

As Shaywitz notes, Facebook has already seen success in the health care arena, most notably allowing people to list their organ donor status, “an initiative which produced an immediate lift in organ donor registrations.”

Furthermore, as a platform to serve patients, Facebook already has the framework that other organizations are trying to build or replicate. Might told Shaywitz that Facebook could do a lot more, like create an opt-in “find patients like me” service. Shaywitz suggests other applications, like “user-friendly medical data import, sharing, visualization, and analysis.”

Ultimately, however, Facebook already has harnessed what patient-based health care is all about.

What many technologists fail to appreciate about health care is the importance and value of relationships, of human connection, of community. At its best and most foundational, medicine is about relationships, not transactions. Most of medicine, health, and wellness isn’t about showing up with a discrete question and leaving with a discrete answer. Our experience of illness and disease is so much more complex and nuanced, individualized and personal, a process of understanding that unfolds over time. The best physicians and care providers recognize this, and appreciate the importance of listening, and the value of longitudinal connection.

Do you think Facebook can appropriately manage health care databases and connections? Leave your comment.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: Bertrand Might, David Shaywitz, Facebook, health care

A Tax Fix That Helps Single Adults More Than Raising the Minimum Wage

July 3, 2017

Last week, a study released by the University of Washington on the impact of Seattle’s decision to raise the minimum wage to $13 caused quite a stir. The study showed that the sudden increase in the minimum wage – from $11 to $13 – led to low-wage workers facing reduced hours, fewer jobs, and lower earnings. These effects were not seen after the first increase from $9.47 to $11 in 2015, but they did appear with the minimum wage increase in 2016.

When the city first decided to implement a $15 per hour minimum wage (the $15 hourly wage took effect Jan. 1 of this year), supporters of raising the minimum wage argued that it would allow lower-income employees to earn more money. Opponents warned that it would cause people to lose their jobs.

Some opponents of raising the minimum wage say other methods for helping low-income workers would be more effective while not harming employment rates. One such idea is a tax credit that would be given to low-income workers in direct proportion to how much they earn on their own.

The idea is that if you work, you can benefit up to a certain salary by getting supplemental income. The program is called the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

How useful is the EITC? According to MDRC, a research group that studies the impact of social policy, the EITC has three major advantages:

The EITC encourages and rewards work. The EITC supplements each dollar that a low-wage worker earns up to a certain limit, providing incentives for the unemployed and welfare recipients to work and for low-wage workers to work more hours. A strong body of evidence demonstrates that work-based earnings supplements such as the EITC boost employment and earnings while increasing work effort.

The EITC reduces poverty. In 2015, the EITC lifted about 6.5 million people out of poverty, including about 3.3 million children. The number of poor children would have been more than one-quarter higher without the EITC. The credit reduced the severity of poverty for another 21.2 million people, including 7.7 million children. Workers in cities, small towns, and rural areas all benefit from the EITC.

EITC payments support important investments by families. Research indicates that families use the EITC to pay for necessities, repair homes, maintain vehicles that are needed to commute to work, and in some cases, obtain additional education or training to boost their employment prospects and earning power.

What the EITC doesn’t do is help people who don’t have kids or who have kids but don’t have custody of them. That’s why MDRC conducted a study in New York City and Atlanta to see the impact of extending the EITC to single adults.

Why is it important to help single or childless workers? Well, because when wages and employment rates fall, low-skilled, low-income workers get hurt the most, and that particular segment of the workforce includes a lot of single people! And there’s another tidbit to consider: Many of these adults in fact do have children but are not the custodial parent. So even when they don’t have kids in their households, they are responsible for children.

The three-year MDRC study in New York concluded that when people received the extra boost to their income (which maxed out at $2,000 per year for three years), they not only increased their pay, but the number of people employed also increased.

An added bonus to the uptick in incomes is that a significant segment of people in the pilot program ended up paying more of their court-ordered child support payments!

Paycheck Plus recipients paid an average of $54 per month more in child support than individuals in the control group — a 39 percent increase.

An additional benefit found in the study is that when people used the EITC, they actually filed their taxes. Now, that may seem like a negative to some — paying taxes isn’t exactly high on the list of stuff to be happy about — but paying taxes is a civic responsibility, even a legal requirement. And saying that you pay taxes is actually a common way of arguing that you have a say in how this country is run. So, hurray for the humblebrag. Now stand up and be counted.

EITC isn’t the be-all answer to ending poverty, and the tax credit does suffer from high error rates, but as a means of pulling people off the couch, it is a good way to encourage and reward work, and work is a formidable tool for helping people get more than just money. It is a means for providing dignity and learning skills that enable workers to aim higher for themselves. That path starts with the first dollar earned.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: EITC, low-income workers, MDRC, minimum wage, Paycheck Plus, Seattle

Lies, Damn Lies, and Data Lies: A Homeless Epidemic Among College Students?

June 30, 2017

Imagine lying on a friend’s couch in her studio apartment, using the light from your cell phone to study for your midterm exam in small-business entrepreneurship. It’s late but you’re just now getting around to hitting the books because you’ve been out all day preparing for a contest, the winner of which is going to take home a $1,000 scholarship, which you can use to enroll in more community college classes next semester.

You’re hungry because you couldn’t afford to eat today since shampoo, bus fare, and books, were more important purchases. The welfare benefits you receive each month just can’t cover all the costs. You’ve been living on your friend’s couch off and on because you keep fighting with your parents over chores and how late you can stay out now that you’ve turned the legal age at 18. Sometimes you stay at a friend’s, other times you find an abandoned building or a van to crash in.

Now imagine this happens to 46,000 students in one community college school district alone. Imagine nearly 150,000 community college-age kids in one district going hungry on a regular basis because they don’t have enough money for food.

Hard to believe, right? It is hard to believe. But that’s what a new study in the Los Angeles Community College School District found.

The advocacy group Wisconsin HOPE Lab, based in Washington, D.C., does research “aimed at improving equitable outcomes in postsecondary education.” The study it produced — and reported by The Los Angeles Times — was commissioned by the school district’s board of trustees after the county Board of Supervisors decided it would spend a newly approved sales tax on homeless services, and in particular, on homeless college students. The tax is alleged to be worth $3.55 billion over 10 years.

As LaCorte News reports, the sampling of students in the Los Angeles Community College School District wasn’t in fact scientific. The lab emailed thousands of students, asking them to fill out a survey online. Less than 5 percent responded. The authors acknowledged in their report that “the findings in this study are limited by low response rates and potentially non-random sampling. Students experiencing food and housing insecurity may have been more likely to respond to the survey.”

As the email-only news agency notes, “Polls created by organizations with a mission, unsurprisingly, nearly always end up with poll results supporting that mission. This was one.”

You can’t really blame the school district for wanting to get in on the cash windfall, it’s animal instinct for large organizations to do so. But data lies are easy to generate, and have become a major challenge for policymakers trying to figure how much money to raise and where to spend it.

The problem is so large that Congress has created a commission to study it. And Robert Doar, who served as both commissioner of social services for the state of New York and commissioner of the New York City Human Resources Administration, says the issue isn’t so much that the information doesn’t exist, but rather it’s not being shared “in any organized, comprehensive or effective way.”

This failure is especially true between the federal government and state and local agencies. The Feds are relying on Census Bureau data to determine the levels of welfare and food stamps each year, but the Census data are becoming “increasingly inaccurate” and not reflective of “the true condition of America’s low-income populations.”

Throughout my 20 years of working in the social services agencies of New York State and New York City, I was constantly aware that I had a clearer picture of what was going on in low-income households than what was being reported in the Census Bureau’s annual reports on the economic condition of Americans, including those living in my state. Using data systems common in every state, I could see who was receiving food stamps or other welfare benefits, in what neighborhoods, and in what types of families. I knew the education levels of recipients, their family structures, and employment statuses. In short, I knew how much assistance New Yorkers were receiving from various government programs.

Especially troubling was the fact that the Census Bureau was indicating greater economic distress than what my colleagues and I knew was really the case.

Doar says a new report shows why the quality of data is on the decline.

Households have simply become less inclined to respond to surveys; and when they do, they are less likely to answer certain questions and provide accurate information, particularly when they are being asked about receiving various forms of public assistance. …

(The study’s) coauthors revealed significant underreporting of receipt rates and the value of benefit received for most poverty-reducing programs. For example, surveys failed to capture almost half of the dollars given out by the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program.

He notes that underreporting makes the problem look much more severe than it is.

If the closer to the ground you get, the more reliable data become, then it would seem that sharing the data would be a helpful solution, but of course, in a world of regulatory paralysis, there needs to be some kind of “legal authority or established incentives for state agencies to share their datasets with the Census Bureau.”

If agencies did share their data, Doar predicts that “it would dramatically improve the ability of the Census Bureau to describe the real economic condition of Americans.”

Such a measure would allow for a much-needed correction in how we understand poverty and perceive government programs in the country, ultimately contributing to more targeted and more effective policy decisions. …

Such data sharing could have far reaching impact on federal policy by allowing us to know the actual value of the benefits we provide, and how effective these programs are in moving families toward self-sufficiency. There is no more important fact to know in the War on Poverty.

Read the full Doar article in Real Clear Policy.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: federal aid, HOPE Lab, Robert Doar, TANF, U.S. Census Bureau, War on Poverty, welfare

The Role of Parents in K-12 Education

June 21, 2017

Two classmates grow up together from kindergarten. They sit next to each other in homeroom, have all the same classes with all the same teachers, and take the same state-required tests. One does well and one not so much. What accounts for the difference?

The answer depends on who is responsible for a child’s education. The role of parents in K-12 education was so large in the 1980s and 1990s that it hurt student outcomes. Now the reverse appears to be true.

Educator and researcher Rick Hess describes what schooling was like back in the day.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, American education paid a lot of attention to the quality of parenting and far too little to the quality of teaching and schooling. It wasn’t unusual to hear educators declare that certain students were unteachable or that they couldn’t be blamed for not teaching kids who weren’t there to learn.

In the early 1990s, I was supervising student teachers for Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and I’ll always recall one exchange that crystallized the old ethos for me. I was visiting an iconic Boston high school that had seen better days. The bell rang and the social studies class I was observing got started. In a room of 30 or 35 kids, there were maybe a dozen who were taking notes, participating, and paying attention. The rest were passing notes, staring out the window and generally tuning out. My student teacher tried all manner of teaching strategies, but none made much difference.

The class finally ended and the students shuffled out. The student teacher, his mentor teacher, and I sat down to talk. I asked the mentor, ‘So, how’d you think the class went?’

He said, ‘What really impressed me was how engaged the students were.’

I wondered if he was kidding. He didn’t seem to be. I said, ‘Here’s the thing. To me, it looked like maybe 10 students were really involved. Did I miss something?’

What he said next has always stuck with me: ‘No, that’s about right. But he had all of the students who were here to learn. The others, the knuckleheads, well, you just want to keep them in line.’

Times have changed much to the better since the ’90s, but don’t confuse Hess’ recollection to mean that he believes educators alone are responsible for today’s student performance outcomes.

In fact, the push to ensure teachers are responsible for educating ALL students has swung the pendulum to the opposite problem. Parents are now on the back burner, and some are even conditioned to prefer it that way. In some districts “parental responsibility” dare not be uttered for fear that parents will slam teachers for trying to make excuses for poor educational outcomes.

But the role of parents in K-12 education needs to be raised to an even par with teachers. Parents must “do their part” to ensure their children learn. That means making sure that students are prepared when they arrive in the classroom. That means parents must insist their children show respect for their teachers, complete their homework before returning to school, and accept school-mandated discipline without students calling on their parents to argue their way out of a fairly meted punishment. It means parents themselves must be prepared as well for activities like parent-teacher meetings.

If not, then parents are left off the hook while educators take the brunt for poorly prepared students. Hess describes the balance that needs to be struck.

Think about how this works in medicine. When we say someone is a good doctor, we mean that they’re competent and responsible; we don’t mean that they perform miracles. If a doctor tells you to reduce your cholesterol and you keep eating steak, we don’t label the physician a ‘bad doctor.’ We expect the doctor to do her job, but we expect patients to do their part, too. This is the handshake between doctor and patient, and saying so isn’t seen as ‘blaming’ the patient.

When the patient is a child, parents come to play a crucial role. If a diabetic child ignores the doctor’s instructions on monitoring blood sugar, we don’t blame the child or say the doctor is failing. We expect parents to learn what’s required and make sure it gets done.

When it comes to the handshake between parents and educators, though, things have broken down. After all, teachers can’t make students do their homework, turn off their devices, or show up at school on time. Parents can.

Hess isn’t letting teachers return to the days of selective attention, and he acknowledges that raising healthy, mindful children is hard work. But education doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door. Turning over students to the school system and then complaining that they aren’t learning hurts educators who are doing a good job against the odds.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child, but it does take a parent-teacher partnership to educate one.

Read Hess’ article in U.S. News & World Report.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: K-12 education, parent-teacher partnerships, public schools, Rick Hess

Using the Burger King Mentality to Destroy a Four-Year Investment

June 18, 2017

Can you hear the tune playing? “Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way. … Have it your way at Burger King.”

It’s an enduring commercial with a memorable tune. Forty-three years since its release, people still recall the jingle as one of the most effective pieces of advertising ever made, driving home exactly what Burger King was selling — convenience, made-to-order fast food, delivered to you just the way you like it, no questions, no lip, no delay.

It’s the Burger King mentality, and it’s great for ordering a drive-thru dinner. But the sentiment has crept into a lot of college campuses lately, and unless you’re in the student union food court, the Burger King mentality has no place at these institutions of higher learning. In fact, it can do real damage to a four-year investment in a college education.

Sadly, however, that’s how many students think of this four-year investment in a college education. Take this example:

Back in my early days of college, I complained often and loudly about any professor who had the temerity to include attendance as part of the course grade. ‘Not only am I capable of making my own decisions about going to class,’ I’d explain haughtily, ‘my tuition and fees pay his salary, so I should really get to choose how I’m graded.’ I eventually learned the inherent flaws of this opinion – thanks in no small part to several well-meaning professors more than happy to use ample amounts of that mandatory class time disabusing me of this and myriad other asinine notions.

Unfortunately, my consumer-based justification for why I ‘deserved’ to be given a bespoke educational experience – I pay your salary – is quite common on college and university campuses. Rather than consider postsecondary education an undertaking of self-improvement or intellectual exploration, many students approach college as more akin to ordering off a fast-food menu: I already know what I want, and since I’m paying, I expect it served to me just as I asked, immediately.

This is how Grant Addison, an education policy studies research assistant barely out of college, described his thinking. His mind has changed since conducting the research showing the downside of such a haughty outlook.

Put generally, evidence suggests that today’s students graduate without sufficient intellectual humility. Intellectual humility governs how a person views (one’s) own mental capabilities: This involves things like one’s understanding of the limitations of their knowledge, receptivity to new ideas and evidence and ability to consider new or conflicting information fairly and dispassionately. Critical-thinking and argumentative-reasoning skills draw from this well, as do many emotional qualities related to positive social interaction. Therefore, along with increased educative abilities, the intellectually humble are also better able to engage in civil discourse and interact with opposing perspectives.

Unfortunately, intellectual humility has gone out the door as universities shift “toward a customer-service paradigm.” The commodifying of higher education — in which university administrators focus on the bottom line rather than on higher learning — has created other problems as well.

The first is that schools are intolerant of intellectual diversity, which means little room for dissent or creative energy. You can’t churn out uniform degrees if everyone has his or her own opinion. And this means a crackdown on the very purpose of university education — intellectual rigor and truth-seeking.

Perhaps nowhere has the abject failure of higher education to teach students to think critically or act maturely and civilly been on greater display than with the issue of free speech and expression. Examples of campus-speech controversies are numerous and varied, yet together they illustrate of a kind of intellectual protectionism that has consumed a significant portion of higher education. Feeling entitled as consumers, petulant students increasingly demand safety from and punishment of any views deemed ‘offensive’ or simply unwanted – justifying censorship with such intellectually bankrupt canards as ‘speech is violence,’ or even perpetrating actual violence. Fearing the ire of the campus mob – or worse, that prospective students might not view their school as ‘supportive’ – feckless administrators turn a blind eye to their institutional strictures and basic psychology to join this regressive call-and-response.

If that weren’t bad enough, then there’s this: Uniformity is taking its toll not only on the ability of students to think critically or to engage in intellectual disputes, but also it is damaging their ability to function in the workforce.

Just this week, The Wall Street Journal unearthed more data highlighting the failure of colleges and universities to improve students’ critical-thinking skills. This analysis builds on earlier work by Rich Arum and Josipa Roska concerning undergraduates’ abysmal results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, a little-known test that measures students’ critical-thinking, analytical-reasoning and problem-solving abilities. According to test results from dozens of public colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016, the Journal found, “At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table.” Even at some of the most prestigious flagship universities, “the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.’

These findings come on the heels of last Friday’s lackluster May jobs report, which detailed a continued deceleration of the job-growth rate. Analysts believe this signals that businesses are struggling to find qualified candidates to hire – which is consistent with reams of survey data gathered from employers who lament that newly hired college graduates aren’t prepared for the workforce. When asked which traits are lacking, most employers cite either critical-reasoning skills or interpersonal or people skills as their primary complaints.

What can be done? Well, there’s always the money angle, and removing the wrinkle of unfettered tuition loans in the supply-demand formula. Then there’s the option to skip the universities and choose alternative educational methods to hone valuable skills for the workplace. Lastly, administrators could return to doing their jobs.

As social scientist Charles Murray points out after a recent protest-turned-assault at Middlebury College, the president of the school could have used her authority to hold the offending students accountable. She did not. It would have been a good place to start, yet inaction has become the all-too-common response of late.

Murray quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s description of Aristotle’s concept of telos as an aspiration these administrators may want to revive. “A university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good,” in this case, truth.

Murray continues:

The competing agenda of social justice is incompatible with truth. In their personal lives, students, faculty, and administrators are free to pursue social justice as they define it. But the university cannot take sides. The end of the university, its very reason for being, is to enable the unending, incremental, and disputatious search for truth. A university must be a safe place for intellectual freedom, else it has failed in its purpose.”

To wit: if you use a Burger King mentality, don’t expect to get a prime rib-quality education.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: Burger King, Charles Murray, education, four-year investment, Grant Addison, higher education

The Success Sequence: Why Education, a Job, Marriage, Then Kids Is the Working Order

June 14, 2017

Ah, millennials. In some ways, they’re very traditional, suggesting that women should stay at home to raise their kids. In other ways, they are very Bohemian, doing as they please when the mood hits. But it turns out, the old-fashioned “success sequence” — a (high school or higher) degree, job, marriage, then children, in that order — is still the winning combination for securing financial well-being, even for this late-day-and-age group.

The term “success sequence” isn’t new. It was coined in the last decade by researchers looking for policy ideas that could help break the cycle of poverty. Of course, it was criticized for pointing out that the cycle of poverty is more likely to be perpetuated for kids born into poorly educated households without two parents and few economic opportunities. It has become rude to point this out even though that’s the problem the research is trying to solve.

But facts are facts, as it were, and a new study by W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Wendy Wang, of the Institute for Family Studies, found that the success sequence holds up as a guidepost for today’s Millennials as it did for Baby Boomers, even after adjusting for a wide range of variables like childhood family income and education, employment status, race/ethnicity, sex, and respondents’ scores on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT), which measures intelligence and knowledge of a range of subjects.

The study found that “diverging paths into adulthood” taken by 28- to 34-year-olds — the eldest of the Millennial age group — produce very different economic outcomes.

Among the findings:

Millennials who follow the “success sequence” almost always avoid poverty, with 97 percent of Millennials who married first not being poor by age 28, compared to 72 percent who had children first.
71 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put marriage before children made it into the middle class or higher when they reached adulthood. Conversely, 41 percent of Millennials from lower-income families who put children first made it into the middle class or higher when they became adults.
Among black young adults, those who married before having children are almost twice as likely to be in the middle- or upper-income groups (76 percent) than those who had a baby first (39 percent).

Since 55 percent of 28- to 34-year-old millennial parents had their first child before marriage, the economic and family impacts will be felt for decades.

Millennials are more likely than previous generations to delay marriage and parenthood, but that doesn’t mean that they have to forego the order of education, work, and marriage. Indeed, there’s a reason the success sequence works.

Why might these three factors be so important for young adults today? Education confers knowledge, skills, access to social networks, and credentials that give today’s young adults a leg up in the labor force. Sustained full-time employment provides not only a basic floor for household income but, in many cases, opportunities for promotions that further boost income. Stable marriage seems to foster economies of scale, income pooling, and greater work effort from men, and to protect adults from the costs of multiple partner fertility and family instability.

Moreover, the sequencing of these factors is important insofar as young men and women are more likely to earn a decent income if they have at least acquired a high school education, and young marrieds are more likely to stay together if they have a modicum of education and a steady income. So, it’s not just that education, work, and marriage independently seem to matter, but the sequencing of education, work, and marriage may also increase the odds of financial success for today’s young adults.

Wilcox and Wang point out that there’s no statistical model to perfectly predict a youth’s future success. Some who succeeded came from roots missing those steps. Others who lived in households that followed the sequence ended up in the bottom third of the income scale. Lastly, there’s no conclusive evidence that the “sequence plays a causal or primary role in driving young adult success.”

The researchers also note that it’s easier to follow the success sequence when one is born into it, as opposed to young adults who came from poor neighborhoods, bad schools, and less educated households. It’s also easier to follow the success sequence when one comes from a cultural background that adopts these ideals and expectations rather than those groups who hold these values in lower regard.

But there’s no mistaking that the numbers overwhelmingly favor those who do follow the course, and that’s where both one’s personal “agency” and public policy come into play.

This report suggests that young adults from a range of backgrounds who followed the success sequence are markedly more likely to steer clear of poverty and realize the American Dream than young adults who did not follow the same steps.

Given the value of the success sequence, and the structural and cultural obstacles to realizing it faced by some young adults, policymakers, educators, civic leaders, and business leaders should take steps to make each component of the sequence more accessible. Any initiatives should be particularly targeted at younger adults from less advantaged backgrounds, who tend to have access to fewer of the structural and cultural resources that make the sequence readily attainable and appealing. The following three ideas are worth considering in any effort to strengthen the role that the success sequence plays in the lives of American young adults.

Read the full report here.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: education, family, Institute for Family Studies, marriage, Millennials, poverty, success sequence, W. Bradford Wilcox

At Risk of Losing Your Lease? A Legal Battle Isn’t the Answer

June 6, 2017

If you don’t pay your rent, can you still stay in your rental property? Or is that landlord going kick you to the curb? It’s a fear that low-income families face in difficult times. Rent courts are tough. The legal battle is often reliant on a sympathetic judge and a very narrow window to find the money to pay rent before the sheriff’s department comes to get your stuff.

Eviction is a major cause of stress for everyone involved. For renters, especially parents with kids, the thought of losing the roof over your head is enough to keep you up at night. For independent landlords, it’s a scramble to cover the mortgage when the income stream has dried up. For everyone, there is the experience of material hardship and worsening health.

So what if the city came in and decided to help renters out — by paying the legal fee associated with getting a lawyer to help the renter in court? It would probably keep more people in their homes, but is it the best solution?

Only 10 percent of tenants get a lawyer when they’re facing a rent court dispute. Landlords have higher representation. Having a lawyer would probably help renters, but is it the city’s job to pick a side in a contractual dispute?

In fact, cities (and the parties in the disupte) may benefit more from helping people to stay where they are, but a better way to ensure that people have homes may not be to feed the legal system. Rather, it’s to use that legal fund to offer emergency assistance to keep renters afloat during difficult times.

A proposed program backed by members of Washington, D.C.’s City Council would have the city pay for legal representation for tenants who are facing eviction. It’s not a federal issue, but a local one, and it matters because D.C. is extremely expensive, and it’s hard for people who live on the edge to get quality, safe housing.

But think about it. Paying for a lawyer isn’t quite the investment in housing proponents wish it to be. Homelessness researcher Kevin Corinth says the idea not only has a strong likelihood of backfiring, but also of creating worse consequences than the harm of eviction.

Yes, legal assistance would reduce the risk of tenants losing eviction battles in court. It would probably even reduce the number of people threatened with eviction in the first place if landlords think they will have a legal battle on their hands.

But here’s the problem. Making it more costly and difficult to evict tenants who do not pay their rent makes it more expensive for landlords to rent out apartments. That could end up increasing the cost of housing in a city where escalating rents are already straining the budgets of low income families.

But an even more insidious consequence is possible. Landlords could decide that it’s no longer worth renting out apartments to people they believe are at risk of missing rent payments. Spotty employment histories, criminal records, and past evictions could be red flags that disqualify people from housing altogether.

In other words, it would be harder for anyone with a blot on his or her record to find a home, and would effectively drive lower-income city dwellers out of the marketplace altogether.

Emergency assistance isn’t an add-on to housing vouchers, and it’s not a permanent handout. The best part is that it helps the people who need a hand up, preventing them from ending up on a family members’ couch or a homeless shelter while raising the cost of living for every other renter. It would keep people in their units without distorting the rental market.

Emergency assistance programs have been tried and succeeded in Chicago and New York, and D.C. would benefit from getting its own pilot program lined up.

Unscrupulous landlords need to be watched and stopped. But, as Corinth states, “an entitlement to legal assistance in eviction cases threatens the basic ideal that the city should provide opportunity to everyone.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: anti-poverty programs, eviction, homeless shelters, homelessness, Kevin Corinth

Can We Reverse the Trend of Working-Age Adults Who Don’t Work?

June 2, 2017 by Robert Doar

Ten million working-age adults were receiving food stamp benefits in 2015, were not receiving disability benefits, and were not employed. This number of nonworking able-bodied adults is something that experts from both political parties agree.

And this nonwork is occurring during a time of low unemployment, when many employers are saying they can’t find workers.

Here is something else experts from the right and left agree on: Those nonworking Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients are almost certainly living in poverty, maybe even severe poverty, and are also prone to the significant health problems that come with nonwork and low income.

Challenging a large federal program (SNAP), which has successfully delivered needed assistance to poor families, to help out-of-work recipients find employment is a worthy objective and is part of what the Trump administration is trying to do with its proposals to reform the SNAP program.

To be sure, there are items of concern in the overall proposal: Reducing benefit levels and shifting costs to the states with broad flexibility could lead to increases in deep poverty and is a dramatic change to a long-standing federal commitment.

However, the proposed emphasis on increasing work is important and beneficial. The budget proposal would limit waivers from the work requirement that applies to able-bodied adults without children — a good idea.

The proposed cost shift to the states would be much better if it came with a carefully designed federal work requirement that both ensures that states are moving able-bodied adult recipients toward employment and prevents states from denying poor families assistance. Still, if these reforms succeed in forcing states to help (and push) SNAP recipients into employment, there is a reasonable chance they will reduce poverty.

That is why some liberal reactions to the administration’s budget, such as The New York Times editorial on the proposal, seem a little over the top. Yes, many SNAP recipients are working while they receive SNAP benefits, and yes, many are children, seniors, or disabled, and these pro-work efforts are not targeted at them.

But many of the nonworkers include able-bodied adults who are in need of more than just food stamp benefits, and focusing on ways to increase their income through earnings will help, not harm, them.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration should keep working to refine these SNAP reforms to maintain a focus on work for able-bodied adult recipients while carefully designing requirements so that states are not allowed to take actions that would increase deep poverty.

Filed Under: Insight, Life

Student Loan Defaults Are Huge, Do We Know Who’s Not Repaying Their Debt?

May 24, 2017

Outstanding debt from student loan totals $1.3 trillion. That’s a big number and it isn’t going down because the number of student loan defaults is massive and growing yearly.

The nation’s student loan industry is nearly as large as the federal government’s largest mortgage program through the Federal Housing Administration. The federal government is responsible for issuing 90 percent of all student loans given — nearly $100 billion in federal student loans are offered every year.

The variety of federal plans through the Direct Loan programs is large. Available to students on all kinds of degree treks, whether post-graduate or a short-term certificate, student loan repayment terms are frequently more generous than what a private lender would offer.

The repayment terms are also extremely negotiable. Some repayment terms are based on fixed payments spread over decades. Others allow repayment to increase according to borrowers’ earnings. Others are set at 10 percent of adjusted gross income (after an exemption of 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines). Some unpaid balances are forgiven after 20 years, or half that if the borrower is working in a nonprofit or government job. Deferments and forbearances are permitted to enable individuals to suspend payments for years.

It’s great that so many people are looking to better educate themselves, and it’s amazing that so many payment plans are available, but 8 million people are in default on their federal student loans today. That’s nearly 40 percent of all borrowers who are in default, delinquent, or using the forbearance and deferment options. That’s right: 40 percent of all borrowers are not paying back their loans.

What to do about it? Well, deciding a plan of action has hit a bit of a speed bump. Sadly, the government doesn’t know why the delinquency rate is so high because it’s not collecting the information needed to find out.

Reports suggest that many of the borrowers who default never even make the first payment on their loans. But it is impossible to analyze the data to better understand this issue. Some statistics also imply that a large share of defaulted loans are held by borrowers who left school over a decade ago, but many borrowers also leave default quickly and return to good standing. The lack of data means we do not understand what explains those very different patterns, and how policymakers might tailor solutions to these two groups.

Public policy researcher Jason Delisle told Congress that being able to accurately collect the information is halfway to solving the problem of delinquent debt, and to formulating a policy to tackle it.

How to deal with the problem of unpaid student loans and the toll it takes on the federal budget, the economy overall, and an education system that may not be properly serving its students is critical. Delisle made several suggestions on how to get the right information. He urged Congress to take a closer look.

Far too much is at stake for lawmakers to be satisfied with the existing data. Taxpayers and students deserve better than policies developed through anecdotes and assumptions.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: education, Jason Delisle, loan defaults, student loans

What US News & World Report’s High School Rankings Missed

May 6, 2017

There’s a saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Another, perhaps more humorous one, is the proverbial story about the drunk looking for his keys under the street lamp.

The meaning of the sayings are similar — if you only have one resource to identify and solve a problem, you’re never going to solve the actual problem that you may be facing.

Such is the problem with the U.S. News & World Report ranking of the best high schools in America, as identified by education researcher Nat Malkus.

For Malkus, USNWR does a decent job with the tools it has to measure the performance of more than 20,000 U.S. public high schools. The problem, however, is that it only uses one tool, over and over again, which doesn’t accurately measure outcomes in educating students.

Each year, U.S. News teams up with RTI International to run 20,000 public high schools through a four-step process to rank which are the best. In step one, they evaluate schools’ proficiency rates on state math and reading tests against statistical expectations given their student poverty rates. Passing schools move to step two, in which U.S. News assesses whether historically disadvantaged students performed better than the state average. In step three, U.S. News cuts all schools whose graduation rate is below 75 percent (somewhat odd, given that the national average is 83 percent). In step four, schools are ranked on a ‘College Readiness Index,’ which is based entirely on their success in Advanced Placement courses.

What makes a school ‘best’ in the U.S. News rating system? A school’s broader performance on state tests has to be moderately above average to clear the first three steps, but that left more than 29 percent of the schools moving on to step four this year. After that, it all comes down to AP passage rates. … No doubt, AP success is a high bar for high school students, and since the AP tests are the same nationwide, it provides a usable metric for academic excellence. But is it a good enough indicator to decide which high schools are best?

The answer is no. The reason U.S. News leans so heavily on AP is that the data are available. But that is like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys underneath the street lamp. The rankings promote the notion that the best high schools are the ones with the highest outcomes, and because AP success is the only outcome measure they have, they use it, even if the way the top schools generate those outcomes is dubious practice.

Several schools who outperformed the average in the USNWR study, specifically the BASIS charter schools in Arizona, push their students in the area that USNWR looks at — AP studies — so they will naturally look like they are turning out better results than schools that use other means of educating or getting students from A to Z, so to speak.

The problem with looking under the street lamp is that the rankings primarily gauge where students end up, not where they start from or how much they learn. The BASIS schools dominating the top ten push advanced academics hard and are transparent about the fact that the workload is not a fit for all students. Other schools in the top ten have GPA requirements for enrollment. It’s good that there are hard-charging schools for advanced students, but it’s irresponsible to ignore how selective they are. In focusing narrowly on AP outcomes, U.S. News leaves the impression that all schools have equivalent starting points when, in reality, it’s nearly impossible for non-selective schools to end up at the top of this list.

In fairness, U.S. News is arguably doing the best it can with the available data. Data needed to gauge student learning growth are not available in ways that could be applied to all schools. And the rankings do incorporate some measures of student disadvantage, although these only apply weakly in the first two steps. The problem is that their work is branded as ranking which schools are best, but their methods don’t back that up.

What to do about it? According to Malkus, the change has already started. With the Every Student Succeeds Act, states now have the freedom to decide on their own measurements of growth – including how far students have come – on top of mere proficiency to evaluate schools’ performance in educating children. Six of 18 states have plans in place for these measurements, as well as for consequences for schools that don’t live up to state standards.

More states need to come up with appropriate evaluations. And this new data offers USNWR another tool to determine which schools do the best job giving students an adequate education. From there, we can see how well our kids are doing by comparison when faced with a variety of challenges or limited learning options.

Read the full report on the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: education, Nat Malkus, performance rankings, public schools, U.S. News & World Report

How Innovation Can Defeat Homelessness

April 18, 2017

“I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.”
― Henry Ford

Henry Ford is credited with making cars better than those who came before him, but he also found a way to make them cheaper. So perhaps you can appreciate how maddening it must have been for Ford to look at the rising cost of goods that didn’t perform any better than their predecessors.

Same is true for social policy. While Ford revolutionized the production lines for cars, America’s homeless policy could benefit from a big dose of innovation. But where do we find the intellectual muscle?

The new book entitled “A Safety Net That Works” brings together some big thinkers on upward mobility, antipoverty programs, and government assistance. Among them is Kevin Corinth, a research fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who argues that innovation, on both a small and a large scale, is a key component needed to fix the homelessness crisis facing too many Americans.

Homelessness in America remains a real and daunting problem despite reports of a decline in the number of homeless. While the number of homeless counted since 2007 has fallen, Corinth explains that the changing methodologies used to count the number of homeless may better explain the drop than an actual reduction in the number of people needing shelter. Meanwhile, Corinth reports, “A number of major cities have reportedly seen recent spikes in the numbers sleeping on the street, leading several to declare a homelessness state of emergency.”

Rather than double down on plans to end homelessness with old solutions, we should invest in innovative ideas that push progress forward, while ensuring that resources are prioritized to the people who need them most.”

That seems a simple ask … and a logical start. Knowing who needs help and then tailoring assistance programs to their needs seems like a much less complicated task if we know the population we’re dealing with and the variables in their situations. Without that, current housing assistance programs are throwing possible solutions at the wall to see what sticks.

To start, Corinth divides the homeless population into single adults versus families. He notes that “while 43 percent of homeless single adults are found on the street, only 10 percent of homeless families are found in unsheltered locations.” Disability, mental illness and addiction also play a critical role in identifying homeless individuals.

Better homelessness policy starts with making a fundamental distinction — homeless families are different than homeless single adults, and they require wholly different policy responses. Homeless families generally live in private rooms in shelters. They most often need temporary housing assistance to get back on their feet. Homeless single adults generally sleep on the street or in congregate shelters, and they often suffer from severe mental illness or substance abuse problems. They are more likely to require longer-term, service-rich interventions.”

After identifying who needs help and how we improve upon their current sheltering is just one step. Creating new ways to help people through better prioritization of resources, improved outreach, and increased quality of services, comes next.

How? One way would be to incentivize service providers – program managers who serve the homeless – by holding them responsible for achieving specific goals.

Service providers should be offered substantial flexibility in their service models, but they should be held accountable for their performance in helping their clients achieve desired outcomes.”

One way to do this could be to innovate new ways of tracking people, including where they sleep from night to night, if they are gaining and maintaining employment, and how their physical and mental health is affecting these variables.

Data mining, Corinth says, is critical to this kind of tracking, and as easy as using something as commonplace as smartphones:

Homelessness policy could be reoriented around smartphones and big data. Homeless individuals could be given free smartphones and full service plans in return for providing daily information on their sleeping locations, health status, and other outcomes. Research could be revolutionized with access to detailed, longitudinal data on an otherwise hidden population.”

He certainly does think outside the box. And why not? With more than $4 billion a year spent on programs, greater accountability would certainly help measure success.

Instead of continuing to spend, spend, spend on programs that aren’t meeting goals, we need big thinkers like Corinth to be backed by leaders who control purse strings. We need them to collaborate, to innovate, to invent, and to implement new ways to tackle old problems.

There is no one-size-fits-all to helping those who are homeless. It’s an extremely challenging and complex issue. And while it’s easy to point a finger at the failures to help keep individuals and families safely sheltered, we can look once again to America’s great innovator, Henry Ford, to remind us that it’s not enough to see the problem.

“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: antipoverty programs, big data, homelessness, Kevin Corinth, poverty

How Airline Apathy Explains the Need for School Choice

April 9, 2017

If you’ve ever been stranded at an airport — or gotten involved in a debate over school choice — you can certainly empathize with Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI.

In a sarcastic and slightly cranky opinion piece, Hess details a bad stroke of luck with American Airlines that ultimately prevents him from delivering an important lecture despite trying every maneuver possible to rebook flights, book car rentals, and hightail it through an airport.

So I bolted off the plane, asking the ‘helpful’ lady guiding us to our transfer gates to please just let the gate know I was coming (she said she would). I didn’t make it. Well, by dashing up and down escalators and such, I actually made it there just in time, barely 10 minutes before departure—but the agent had already closed the door and was nowhere to be found. The idle American agent at the gate 20 feet over didn’t much care, even though an impartial third party might’ve thought I merited at least a modicum of consideration—given that I’d spent a big chunk of my day trying to juggle air reservations and rental car plans to accommodate American’s struggles.”

This kind of experience, unfortunately, isn’t all that rare. Travelers get the raw end of the deal at the mercy of airlines all of the time – even though they are paying for their airline ticket and trusting said airline with delivering them in a safe and timely manner.

So why is Hess’ experience important?

Because he makes an analogy that is an excellent window into the experience of many parents when it comes to their children being stranded in a school system that drops the ball time and time again. Only with education, the stakes are much, much higher, as Hess notes.

I’m annoyed today less because my flights were goofed up (which happens), and more because no one who works for the airline seems especially interested in doing anything about it. I would feel infinitely more chipper if I felt like someone really wanted to help ensure that the problem got solved. Instead, I’m staring at the face of a big, bureaucratic morass, a face which displays a remarkable lack of passion for doing the job well.

This happens time and again when it comes to big bureaucracies. Nobody seems all that concerned about helping out, preferring instead to spout lots of stuff about policy and procedure. We can never get hold of anyone who really seems to be in charge, and it can feel like the whole process is devoid of accountability or genuine human concern.

This frustration is at the heart of the school choice debate.

The bureaucracy of public education has been attacked and debated for years. There’s no changing that. And with bureaucracies of all kinds being laden with deficiencies, it’s not a surprise that education is also a victim.

As Ronald Reagan so aptly noted,

Every once in a while, somebody has to get the bureaucracy by the neck and shake it loose and say ‘stop what you’re doing.’

But it’s important that we not throw our hands up and end on a pessimistic, fatalistic view of education. The variable that Hess highlights is crucial to understanding the motive of school choice advocates – and the ability to improve Big Education by employing educators who work with passion and purpose. It’s not a question of for-profit motives, it’s about finding “smaller, more human-sized” school systems:

Hess is a physical traveler just as all parents navigate schools in the hopes of providing the best education possible to their children. If he had been given some semblance of genuine effort to help him reach his destination, Hess could have made his flight. Or even if he didn’t, he could have walked away knowing the best attempt was made by American Airlines to uphold their end of the deal.

That’s not asking too much, is it?

Likewise for parents, school children ought to be given every opportunity to receive the best education, not just the one they are stuck in because that’s where Mom or Dad pays rent or their mortgage. When kids are not afforded that opportunity because the bureaucratic mess of Big Education gets in the way and their education fails them, Mom and Dad become cranky too. Or downright angry, and justifiably so. Because we all know how important education is for setting a child up to pursue happiness and success.

What we all want, I think, in an airline—and a hundred times more in a school—is that professionals exhibit a passion for doing their job well. For figuring out smart ways to solve problems. For execution.

As for the children who’ve had the benefit of school choice, but still fail? Well at least they had access to their best shot. Just as flights will be missed, children will fail. There are countless reasons why. But having the confidence that every effort was made on his or her behalf is a whole lot more palatable than watching employee after employee halfheartedly clock in and out with no desire to help you reach your final destination.

Filed Under: Education, Happiness Tagged With: airlines, bureaucracy, Frederick Hess, Ronald Reagan, school choice

Teaching Doctors About Running A Business

April 5, 2017

The fields of science and medicine employ some of the most highly educated and hands-on professionals in the world. So you might scratch your head when hearing one expert call for training medical researchers on how to do their job more effectively. But the training isn’t more of the technical sciences; it’s an appreciation and understanding of business and entrepreneurship.

Scientists, medical researchers, and physicians are excellent at proposing ways to cure illnesses and overcome medical problems. Helping people, after all, is what drives so many in the medical profession. But as David Shaywitz says, medical training largely ill-equips doctors and scientists to translate their ideas into solutions and products that are viable for patients in the marketplace.

Too often, it seems, the training of doctors ends where the academic mission often seems to–with publication. Anything beyond that tends to be viewed as irrelevant and intellectually derivative at best, and vaguely (or not so vaguely) corrupt at worst. To make a discovery is noble; to see it commercialized is vulgar.

In other words, the pinnacle of success in the medical field is to innovate and invent. But that achievement is tainted when the practical, business side of medicine enters the equation.

Meanwhile, those of us who could benefit from medical discoveries wait in the balance. We aren’t exactly signing up to get surgery in a lab or get a prescription from a PhD lab researcher. We need businesses to see potential in these products – and a way to sustain the costs of bringing them to market – in order to gain access to them in our doctor’s offices and hospitals. Finding a cure for cancer, for example, may be a brilliant medical breakthrough. But it doesn’t save any lives without the wings of a pharmaceutical company that will work to put it in the hands of prescribing physicians and, ultimately, their patients.

The good news is that connecting the worlds of medical research and commercialization is not unchartered territory. Shaywitz cites several doctors who have already begun to navigate these worlds successfully and, with education tweaking, there is great potential to grow an appreciation of entrepreneurship.

Shaywitz, Chief Medical Officer of DNAnexus, a health data management company based in Mountain View, Calif., notes that the goal of teaching the appreciation of medical entrepreneurship is not with an eye towards making everyone in the field into entrepreneurs. Citing serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, Shaywitz writes:

The goal of teaching entrepreneurship isn’t to persuade every basic scientist to become an entrepreneur– ‘most would be terrible at it,’ he says. He hopes to pick up a few individuals who identify with the mission, but mostly, he hopes to impart a broader appreciation for how ideas that are often developed in academia find their way to market.

For the success of those who dedicate their lives to helping people through science and medicine – and for the betterment of humanity that relies on their success – we are hopeful that an appreciation for the business of medicine will translate into more viable drugs, treatments, and technologies.

Read Shaywitz’ entire article in Forbes.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: David Shaywitz, entrepreneurship, medical innovation, pharmaceutical companies

Scholarships to Encourage Kids to Attend School in Low-Income Neighborhoods?

April 3, 2017

Here’s a thought. Instead of busing underprivileged kids to wealthy suburbs, how about sending kids from wealthy households to private schools in low-income neighborhoods?

Some might say, “No way, I’m not sending my kid into a dangerous neighborhood just to attend a private school.” But what if a scholarship program could gentrify neighborhoods by encouraging parents to move to or stay in lower-income areas and send their kids to nearby private schools?

Residence as a determinant of school district has been a factor in the middle-class movement out of urban areas. Urban schools have declined in quality as a result of urban flight, and the surrounding neighborhoods have become blighted as the schools become increasingly dysfunctional. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Community Protection and Revitalization (CPR) scholarships aims to help decrease concentrated poverty, crime, and unemployment in communities that are threatened by urban flight. In a new brief, Bartley R. Danielsen identifies how more multifaceted reforms can not only improve educational outcomes for students but also increase opportunity on a larger scale for more Americans.

Many observe these problems and incorrectly attribute the plight of urban districts to bad school-district leadership. Bad leadership is not the primary cause of urban schools’ problems. If leadership could solve this problem, some urban district would have already solved it. Further, it is not reasonable to believe that all urban districts always have bad leadership. Instead, the plight of urban districts is a natural equilibrium condition that results when school assignments are based on residence.

Danielsen, an associate professor of finance and real estate at North Carolina State University, notes that historically, methods of addressing poverty in the education system have included moving kids — and often their entire family — out of poor neighborhoods through section 8 housing vouchers, and more recently, school choice vouchers.

These vouchers are often assigned by lottery or means-testing, but that method does nothing to actually fix the community that is being abandoned. The peripheral effect doesn’t just cause repercussions to the neighborhood left behind, but to wealthier communities that see rents and regulations go up in response to voucher families moving in.

An interesting argument Danielson makes is that a lot of areas that could benefit from these scholarships may be lower income, but that doesn’t mean they are bad places. Many families already live there, but decide to move when their kids are school age because they want them to attend a better quality public school. But dropping parochial or private schools into these areas and offering scholarships would keep those families in place.

Danielsen’s design for a CPR scholarship is aimed at not only keeping public money in the areas where it does the most good, but indirectly benefiting communities by attracting businesses that wish to be near quality schools. In other words, the scholarship not only is to ensure a good education, but to ensure resources are assigned to poorer neighborhoods.

You can read his proposal, but do you think that putting good schools in struggling neighborhoods and paying families to send their kids there could work to revitalize those neighborhoods?

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: poverty, private schools, school choice, urban flight

James Madison: ‘Father of the Constitution’ Thought You Should Know This

April 1, 2017

James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, is known as the “Father of the Constitution.” He was a statesman, a historian, a Pisces. He wrote the Bill of Rights.

But for some reason he doesn’t get the popular attention other founders receive, and Rebecca Burgess contends it may be because people today talk more and know less.

Not every past president and Founding Father needs his own national holiday. More legitimately concerning is the ever-growing distance between the sophistication of our technological methods of communication and the poverty of our public discourse. We are marvelously up-to-date but hardly well-informed. This is especially true when it comes to our particular constitutional form of government: knowing the branches of government (legislative, executive, judicial), by whom their powers are to be exercised, and, crucially, how they are to be exercised. …

Mere information about government (what now is often reduced to cries for “transparency!”) was only the baseline of what Madison had in mind. His intellectual dance around the issue of a bill of rights displays better how Madison connected popular opinion, political knowledge, and self-government premised on the preservation of rights (the first purpose of government, according to the Declaration of Independence). This is noteworthy, because Madison initially was not in favor of including a bill of rights in the Constitution—he believed that the Constitution was itself a bill of rights. Additionally, he was skeptical that a list of specified rights would have efficacy against actual abuses of those rights. It might only amount to a paper tiger, a “parchment barrier.” In other words (so to speak): They’re just words, words, words.

Burgess writes that “Madison was particularly concerned with the opinion of the vocal majority.” He anticipated that the tyranny of the masses executed through a central government could damage the rights of individuals, and he decided to write the Bill of Rights in order to ensure people felt a role and a stake in the federal republic outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Why does Madison matter today? Partly because in the effort to gain political ground, Americans have become entrenched in their own belief system and more willing to argue with separate sets of facts. The facts themselves are not supposed to be negotiable; they are meant to be the immutable foundation on which debate is formed. And yet in the process of debate, Americans have left it to the government to choose the facts and make choices on our behalf.
We don’t know as much as we think we know because we tend to give up knowledge for less argument. This is exactly what Madison forewarned against in a letter now nearly 200 years old.

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Learn more facts about James Madison.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: Bill of Rights, democratic majority, Father of the Constitution, James Madison, Lynne Cheney, U.S. Constitution

Data Capture: Why Big Brother Isn’t Always Scary

March 25, 2017

About 0.20 percent of the federal budget is used collecting statistics by government agencies. We’re not talking about surveillance or data mining, but the actual work of determining numbers on labor participation rates and other information valuable to business, policymakers, and families.

This information, government collected, is extremely valuable to business. Companies like food store Kroger, chain store Target, and investment house like Charles Schwab use information from research by the American Community Survey or the International Energy Agency to determine prices, where to put their stores and what to fill them with, or how much to anticipate oil prices will rise or fall.

Government data are used in a variety of ways — for instance local cost of living determinations or expected future demand, even demographic data on where to put schools or whether distribution centers like Amazon belong in Dallas or Baltimore.

Yet, data, both the government’s collection of it and private industry research, are getting a bad rap. The surveillance culture has made people wary of data collection. People are sick of being followed on every website they turn by digital advertisements. And government data are recently seen as suspect or twisted to serve a particular political leaning.

But data are vital. Even the Founding Fathers thought so, says economist Michael R. Strain.

America’s desire to collect data for the common good dates back to the founding fathers, when James Madison argued that reliable data on agricultural, commercial and manufacturing interests would allow Congress to represent the interests of its citizens more effectively. Hard numbers would be useful to Congressional debaters “in order that they might rest their arguments on facts, instead of assertions and conjectures.” Indeed, collecting data is a specifically enumerated requirement of government in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. …

We’ve come a long way since the 19th century. Today, the modern economy is especially reliant on data, and in this era of “big data,” businesses collect and analyze vast quantities of their own internal data to forecast sales, predict staffing and inventory needs, and weigh all sorts of decisions. The big data revolution is rightly celebrated as a great social and economic achievement. But a firm’s own data are not adequate to serve society’s larger purposes. Instead, private-sector data should be thought of as a fantastic complement to official statistics.

So what’s the big deal? Why should government be responsible for collecting data?

One reason: Consistency. It’s the same information being run year after year and decade after decade. Another: It’s free to everyone to access and use. A third reason: Credibility. The statistical methods and practices are designed to return high quality and impartial data — and to be shielded from political influence.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces statistics on employment and unemployment, has only one political appointee. The rest are dedicated career civil servants. Helping to maintain that credibility is that many data elements are carefully scrutinized by outsiders, whether the market — which reacts to certain regular data releases as important measures of economic health — or researchers.

Still a fourth reason: Confidentiality. Unauthorized use by government workers is punishable with prison terms while at the same time it can’t be used to prosecute providers of the information. Lastly, the ability to get it done. The public is more willing to respond to “direct requests for information from the government, with its strict confidentiality standards for data, than to a private firm.”

Finally, if government policymakers and lawmakers are going to decide on issues like how taxes are to be spent, it’s good to have data that are accurate.

Of course, when it comes to government, it’s not all rosy. Federal data collection is subject to shortcomings and limitations like the failure to capture information on new trends. Another problem is the refusal of people to participate in the data collection.

But failing to collect the data will never get us to learn where there’s room to make improvements, something we should always expect our government.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: data, labor participation rates, Michael Strain, U.S. Census Bureau

Paid Family Leave: Economical Conclusions From Three U.S. States

March 21, 2017

President Trump, with the encouragement of his daughter Ivanka, has been promoting paid family leave as a means to help families with income and work after the birth of a child or to care for a loved one who falls ill.

Democrats have long supported such plans, and Republicans are coming on board. That may surprise many who think paid leave is an unaffordable boondoggle, but the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it’s a boon not a boondoggle, and not just for families but for businesses that offer paid family leave.

Evidence of such claims are drawn from studies of paid family leave programs in three U.S. states — California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — that have already implemented such programs. Here are some of the conclusions:

Paid leave raises the likelihood that a new mother will remain in the labor market, which can help boost her lifetime income and contributes to our economic productivity overall.
Women who take parental leave are less likely to suffer from maternal depression and are more likely to breastfeed— and do so for longer periods of time — outcomes that are beneficial for the lifetime health and development of the child.
Paid leave encourages men to help more at home, freeing up time for women if they want to work, which boosts household income and spurs economic growth.
Fathers who take time off work at and around childbirth are more likely to be involved in childcare later in the child’s life. Children whose fathers are more involved in their early years perform better on language and cognitive tests, and social development than those with fathers who are less involved.
Paid leave has had a positive or neutral effect on profitability, according to employers in California and New Jersey.
State paid leave programs have helped employers recruit and retain talent, lower turnover, and boost morale and worker productivity.
Paid leave reduces the burden on government assistance in states, suggesting potential longer-term positive budgetary implications.
Uneven availability of paid family leave in the private sector ends up disproportionately benefiting higher-income workers, while low-wage workers also often lack other forms of paid days off that higher-wage workers can use for family leave. Providing low-wage, low-skill workers time to care for their families encourages work.

OK. There must be downsides, right? There are some potential hazards. These are some:

States looking to develop their own paid leave policies will have to build an administrative structure to create the system.
Lawmakers will grow government rather than make cuts to other programs to pay for paid family leave.
Employers dropping their paid leave programs for a federal program could become quite expensive if not offset.
There is the potential for “time-off creep” and the costs associated with that. Paid leave programs are now only four-six weeks, but New York has already passed a law to make its program 12 weeks.

The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer paid family leave.

What do you think of implementing a universal system?

Read the entire blog series on the impact of paid family leave.

Filed Under: Happiness, Life Tagged With: government regulation, marriage, Paid Family Leave, work

A Safety Net That Works: Enforcing Child Support Payments

March 17, 2017

What parent doesn’t want to help his or her child? Most people would wonder why the question even needs to be asked. But while child neglect and child poverty are issues that the social safety net and public assistance rightfully focus on addressing, legislative efforts to require delinquent or absent parents to take financial responsibility prove a handy tool for reducing the problem of childhood poverty.

Child Support Enforcement (CSE) was first passed into federal law in 1974. It was set up to make parents become financially responsible for their children. At the time, 75 percent of welfare caseloads involved an absent parent.

CSE became a part of the social services network in order to take pressure off government services and return the job of parenting to where it belonged — the parent. Yet nonpayment of child support remains a huge problem today, even after the 1996 welfare reform law strongly enhanced enforcement mechanisms.

Child Support Enforcement is an issue that crosses partisan lines. Separation and divorce are an unfortunate circumstance of modern life, and child support delinquencies are not confined to one particular income level or political belief. At the same time, CSE was a major factor in reducing poverty among children after the 1996 welfare reform law was signed.

Believe it or not, one quarter of the welfare reform law of 1996 was dedicated to CSE. Its impact was notable. Child support agreements among poor parents increased by 8 percentage points from 1993-2003, meaning more children were assured that the parent not living with them helped pay for their upbringing. Enforcing child support payments resulted in a 74 percent increase in payment collections over 10 years.

So what happened? In the second decade since the law was passed, the percentage of custodial parents with a payment agreement dropped by nearly 14 points.

What accounts for the loss of momentum? Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Health and Human Services, explains.

What accounts for this loss of momentum is a legitimate, although exaggerated, concern about being too tough on poor noncustodial parents, the parent who is not living with the child. A false wisdom has emerged in the policy community—from academics to the media—that the child support system forces noncustodial dads to, as the headline of a 2015 New York Times story put it, “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” Some influential commentators even see the system as fundamentally unjust by imposing on poor men burdens that are viewed as the government’s responsibility. …

Certainly, some poor noncustodial parents are struggling and need help to live up to their obligations. But most noncustodial parents, poor and nonpoor alike, are capable of working and could contribute something—even a regular payment of $25 per month has value. Analysts who are critical of the program seem to forget that the parent raising the child full time is often poor too. In 2013, for poor custodial parents who received child support payments, the noncustodial parent’s payments represented 49 percent of their income. Allowing parents to completely walk away from their financial responsibility to their children should not be an option.

According to Doar, if the share of poor custodial parents with agreements had held steady at the percentage that it was in 2003 when the welfare reform law was still being closely enforced, then 500,000 more poor custodial parents would have had orders to receive support in 2013!

“Surely a substantial fraction of these parents would have received enough in payments for them and their children to be lifted above the poverty line,” he wrote in the introduction to a recent volume he edited on the topic.

What Reasons Are There For Parents to Refuse to Pay Child Support?

A lot of times, the parent responsible for child support payments is cut off from the child. Other times, resentment of one parent toward the other leads to a child being caught in the middle. Still other times, suspicion that the money is being misused by the custodial parent is made as an excuse by noncustodial parents to withhold payments.

But sometimes, the paying parent claims he just can’t afford it. And while that claim may have been doubted or disproven, it sadly is becoming a more frequent excuse due to an unfortunate shift in American culture and economy — notably the increasing struggle of men in the labor market. More from Doar:

Reliable data on noncustodial parents are hard to come by because the Census Bureau’s major surveys do not ask whether a man living alone is also a nonresident father. But a survey from 1997 conducted by the Urban Institute found that only 43 percent of noninstitutionalized, nonresident fathers who were poor worked at all—and this was during the late 1990s economic boom. Another study from the Urban Institute used administrative data from nine states in 2003 and 2004 and found that 25 percent of all obligors had no reported income. …

I suspect, given the evidence on young, low-skilled men generally, that these rates must look even worse today. In 2000, among African American men age 16–24 without a high school diploma and not in school, the employment rate was 40.8 percent, and for similarly positioned whites, it was 72.3 percent. By 2007 (like 2000, a year at the peak of the business cycle), the rates had fallen dramatically to 28.7 and 55.0 percent, respectively.

Seven million men age 25 to 54 are not working or even looking for work, according to recent data. Many of them have children despite having never married. These men are disproportionately less educated, and seen by woman as less “marriageable.” Yet marriage is a reliable indicator of higher paying jobs.

With the increasing struggle of men in the labor market, sympathy has shifted. But there is something of a chicken-and-egg argument to all this. Where once women claimed they didn’t need men to raise their children, they still demanded that fathers (a majority of noncustodial parents) help out. Did women tell men to get lost because they were dead weight? Or did men become deadbeats because their paternal role was rejected?

Data show that 70 percent of arrears are owed by noncustodial parents who have no documented income or very little earnings (less than $10,000 a year). And 25 percent of poor custodial parents with a support agreement aren’t receiving payments. So whatever the relationship between parents, the question is now whether it is even possible to get blood from a stone?

Much can be done to fix the mish-mash of regulations and changes that have occurred over the last 40 years. For instance, determining what is a proper measure of a noncustodial parent’s income would go a long way to changing the way male parents look at work. Why is this? Because evaluating a parent’s ability to pay support based on an over-the-table paycheck disincentivizes men from going to work.

The reforms to the program in 1996 focused on tracking down and holding accountable “deadbeat” dads, but it did little to acknowledge or address those who really are dead broke. This is a difficult balance to strike—I know from my experience working in New York that many fathers who appear to have few assets and no earnings are working off-the-books or involved in illicit activities, but they are reluctant to make that known because they either do not want to pay or do not want the government to know of their off-the-books activities.

Another issue is the requirement to declare the other parent’s ability to pay support before qualifying for assistance. The purpose of the requirement is to ensure custodial parents look to the other parent to contribute before going to the government for help. This is the case with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the cash welfare program.

But TANF is on the decline while Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, child care, and housing assistance programs are on the rise. And guess what? Those programs don’t require opening a child support case as a condition of receiving aid.

But the issue, Doar explains once more, isn’t necessarily a matter of what you have to reveal, but whether the revelation leads to some kind of change.

Policy should not have to choose between helping single mothers or low-income men. CSE is a rare government program (outside the criminal justice system) that interacts often with disconnected, low-skilled men, but it does not do enough to help them. Order amounts should be responsive to the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay and his changing economic circumstances, and significant improvements have been made on this front. But a singular focus on reducing order amounts and forgiving arrears distracts from the main challenge these men face: not enough of them are working. Instead of reducing what we expect of these men, we should help them better meet their obligations to their families and society.

Lastly, Doar notes that if federal or state assistance is dependent on parents working, then expand the programs that incentivize work.

While momentum has been building in Washington for an expansion of the earned income tax credit (EITC) for all childless adults, this policy is not well-targeted. A better solution is to expand the EITC for noncustodial parents who work and pay current child support. As commissioner in New York State, I created and implemented such a program, and an Urban Institute analysis found that it increased the share of parents who paid their support in full.

Why Is the Child Support Enforcement Program Important?

Historically, CSE has worked. Even as late as 2015, CSE resulted in $5.26 in payments for ever dollar spent on enforcement. Doar explains that enforcement works for several reasons:

The program sends a clear message to all potential parents: if you play a role in bringing a child into the world, you have a responsibility to help support him or her.
Strong child support enforcement not only communicates that essential American value, it changes the incentives around fathering children outside of marriage by making it impossible to abandon the responsibilities of parenthood.
When child support obligations force an absent parent to be reminded of his financial responsibilities, he is also more likely to take up his other parental duties and be more involved in the child’s life. Unsurprisingly then, receiving child support is also linked to better outcomes for the children involved.
Studies have found that formal child support payments are associated with fewer behavioral problems, better academic performance, and increased self-esteem.
While it may seem counterintuitive, the CSE program offers one of policy’s best opportunities to address the crisis of prime-age male nonwork in America.

CSE is a needed and effective program. It currently lifts more than one million families above the government’s official poverty line, reduces single parenthood, and improves child outcomes, all by enforcing and facilitating personal responsibility at very low cost to taxpayers.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: child support, Child Support Enforcement, poverty, Robert Doar, safety net, SNAP, TANF, welfare reform

Can a Tech Startup Cure Diabetes?

March 10, 2017

Donuts ARE delicious! But you didn’t need TPOH or Dr. David Shaywitz to tell you that. There is also a downside to donuts, and we all know what that is. Weight gain. And with weight gain and obesity come risks for diseases, most notably diabetes. So can a tech startup stop diabetes with an algorithm and remote log-in? And could this be a new horizon in health care?

Imagine a treatment for Type 2 diabetes that requires neither surgery, medication nor calorie restriction, but rather relies on adherence to a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, tracked by regular finger-stick checks of blood chemistry and guided remotely by a team of physicians, coaches and algorithms.

That’s the premise of Virta Health, a San Francisco-based digital health company formed in 2014 and launched officially today, with $37M in the bank from investors including Dr. Robert Kocher of Venrock. The kickoff follows Tuesday’s publication of the results of an uncontrolled clinical study of several hundred patients in Indiana, who will be treated and followed for two years; the just-published data – an interim report of sorts – represent the first 10 weeks of study, sponsored by Virta.

Shaywitz, an endocrinologist and chief medical officer of a genomics data management company, DNAnexus, reviewed the study’s preliminary results, and they are impressive. The number of patients whose diabetic control level reached a healthy range nearly tripled after 10 weeks using the new program and a majority of patients reduced or eliminated use of one or more diabetes medications.

Can the smart use of technology really make people healthier? After all, “disease is messy” and “people are complicated.”

For Shaywitz, the answer seems hard to quantify. Low-carb diets have been a fad for ages, and an uncontrolled clinical study of 10-weeks duration is hardly a harbinger of things to come.

On a personal level, can you imagine a life essentially bereft of birthday cake, pizza, French fries and blueberry pie? After all, the trouble with most diets isn’t that they don’t work – it’s just that they aren’t sustainable. When embarked on for weight loss, just about all fail in the long term; the statistics are staggeringly depressing.

Proponents argue that low-carb diets are sustainable because hunger is attenuated, and weight loss occurs even though calorie counting isn’t generally party of the drill. Perhaps in the context of Type 2 diabetes, patients who respond to low-carbohydrate eating (and at least in the short term, many seem to) might be especially motivated to remain with the program, and enjoy and extend the benefits they achieved.

Moreso, Virta’s use of technology is dependent on people staying with the program, which, after all, amounts to a “d-i-e-t,” and plenty of companies, like Weight Watchers, have been tracking people’s diets online for years.

Virta’s CEO Sami Inkinen, himself a diabetes patient (and not as a result of eating donuts), is no doubt a successful businessman, having sold the real estate website Trulia to Zillow for $3.5 billion in 2014. He is now onto his next venture, turning research on a low-carb lifestyle into an interactive program.

The true benefit of startup innovations like Virta may be in the way they operate, the impact these programs have on patient care, alternatives to traditional treatments, and overall health care cost-savings.

Virta presumably makes money based on number of diabetic patients who reduce their medication load or can drop them entirely. In both cases, profit is based on saving payors (principally employers) the incremental costs of caring for diabetic patients–a difference of nearly $8,000/year on average in the commercially insured population, according to one (somewhat dated) estimate.

Virta describes itself as an “online specialty medical clinic,” with a staff that includes not only coaches who track data and personalize nutrition recommendations, but also physicians who assume medical responsibility for the patients Virta treats, monitoring their response to the low-carb diet and ensuring diabetes medications are adjusted accordingly (generally dialed down or eliminated) as the program proceeds. According to the company, Virta physicians are now certified in approximately 20 states, and moving towards their goal of all 50.

Whether it succeeds may be less a question about personal responsibility and more about whether the company effectively combines health care practitioners with data scientists and software engineers to create a complete experience that changes the way people do things. Technology has changed people’s behavior before. Speed, cost, and ease of access will be defining determinants.

Filed Under: Life Tagged With: David Shaywitz, Diabetes, health care, Silicon Valley, tech startups, Virta Health

The Dignity Deficit: Reclaiming Americans’ Sense of Purpose

March 3, 2017 by Arthur C. Brooks

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt on Arthur Brooks’ piece on the “Dignity Deficit” as published in Foreign Affairs magazine. The full text is available for subscribers:

“He who establishes conventional wisdom owns history,” a historian once told me.

So it’s no surprise that ever since last year’s extraordinary U.S. presidential election, all sides have been bitterly fighting over what happened—and why. The explanations for Donald Trump’s surprise victory have varied widely. But one factor that clearly played an important role was the alienation and disaffection of less educated white voters in rural and exurban areas. Trump may have proved to be a uniquely popular tribune for this constituency. But the anger he tapped into has been building for half a century.

The roots of that anger lie all the way back in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson launched his so-called War on Poverty. Only by properly understanding the mistakes made in that war—mistakes that have deprived generations of Americans of their fundamental sense of dignity—can the country’s current leaders and political parties hope to start fixing them. And only once they properly understand the problem will they be able to craft the kind of cultural and political agenda that can heal the country’s wounds.

All the way with LBJ

On April 24, 1964, Johnson paid a highly publicized visit to Inez, the biggest town in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County. Inez was the heart of coal country, the most typical Appalachian town that Johnson’s advisers could find. In the 1960s, “typical Appalachian” meant a place suffering from crippling despair. The citizens of Inez were poor. Many of them were unemployed, and their children were malnourished. Johnson had chosen Inez to illustrate that dire poverty was not just a Third World phenomenon: it existed right here at home, and not just in cities but in rural America as well. But he also came to Inez to announce that this tragedy could be remedied.

In one famous photo op, Johnson stopped by the home of a man named Tom Fletcher, an unemployed 38-year-old father of eight. The president climbed up onto Fletcher’s porch, squatted down next to him, and listened to the man’s story. According to a 2013 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader by John Cheves, “Fletcher never finished elementary school and could not really read. The places where he had labored—coal mines, sawmills—were closed. He struggled to support his wife and eight children.” The president used Fletcher’s struggles as a springboard for his own announcement. “I have called for a national war on poverty,” he declared. “Our objective: total victory.” Years later, Cheves reports, Johnson still remembered the encounter. “My determination,” he wrote in his memoirs, “was reinforced that day to use the powers of the presidency to the fullest extent that I could, to persuade America to help all its Tom Fletchers.” Over the next five decades, the federal government would spend more than $20 trillion trying to achieve Johnson’s dream with social welfare programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

Tom Fletcher personally received some of this largess: he got welfare benefits and found employment through government make-work initiatives, laboring on crews that cleared brush and picked up trash from roadsides. But he never held down a steady job, Cheves recounts, and although his standard of living rose along with the national average, he never made it out of poverty. By 1969, he no longer worked at all and relied instead on disability checks and other public assistance. After his first wife died, he married a woman four decades his junior, with whom he had two more children. In a cruel final twist, Fletcher’s second wife murdered one of those children (and tried to kill the other) as part of a scam to collect on their burial insurance. In 2004, with his wife still in prison, Fletcher died, never having gotten much closer to the American dream than he was when Johnson climbed onto his porch.

Visit the area today, and despite Johnson’s promises, you’ll see that idleness and depression still hang heavy in the air. In Inez, as across the country, the welfare state and modern technology have made joblessness and poverty less materially painful. Homes have electricity and running water. Refrigerators, personal computers, and cars are ubiquitous. Economic growth and innovation have delivered material abundance, and some of the War on Poverty’s programs have proved effective at bolstering struggling families.

But even though poverty has become less materially miserable, it is no less common. In Martin County, just 27 percent of adults are in the labor force. Welfare is more common than work. Caloric deficits have been replaced by rampant obesity. Meanwhile, things aren’t much better on the national level. In 1966, when the War on Poverty programs were finally up and running, the national poverty rate stood at 14.7 percent. By 2014, it stood at 14.8 percent. In other words, the United States had spent trillions of dollars but seen no reduction in the poverty rate.

Of course, the poverty rate doesn’t take into account rising consumption standards or a variety of government transfers, from food stamps to public housing to cash assistance. But the calculations that determine it do include most of the income that Americans earn for themselves. So although the rate is a poor tool for gauging material conditions, it does capture trends in Americans’ ability to earn success. And what it shows is that progress on that front has been scant.

The War on Poverty has offered plenty of economic analgesics but few cures. This is a failure not just in the eyes of conservative critics but also according to the standard set by the man who launched the campaign. On signing the Appalachian Regional Development Act in March 1965, Johnson argued that the United States should aspire to more than simply sustaining people in poverty. “This nation,” he declared, “is committed not only to human freedom but also to human dignity and decency.” R. Sargent Shriver, a key Johnson adviser on the War on Poverty, put it even more explicitly: “We’re investing in human dignity, not doles.”

I need you to need me

At its core, to be treated with dignity means being considered worthy of respect. Certain situations bring out a clear, conscious sense of our own dignity: when we receive praise or promotions at work, when we see our children succeed, when we see a volunteer effort pay off and change our neighborhood for the better. We feel a sense of dignity when our own lives produce value for ourselves and others. Put simply, to feel dignified, one must be needed by others.

The War on Poverty did not fail because it did not raise the daily caloric consumption of Tom Fletcher (it did). It failed because it did nothing significant to make him and Americans like him needed and thus help them gain a sense of dignity. It also got the U.S. government into the business of treating people left behind by economic change as liabilities to manage rather than as human assets to develop.

The dignity deficit that has resulted is particularly acute among working-class men, most of whom are white and live in rural and exurban parts of the United States. In his recent book Men Without Work, the political economist (and American Enterprise Institute scholar) Nicholas Eberstadt shows that the percentage of working-age men outside the labor force—that is, neither working nor seeking work—has more than tripled since 1965, rising from 3.3 percent to 11.6 percent. And men without a high school degree are more than twice as likely to be part of this “un-working” class.

These men are withdrawing not only from the labor force but from other social institutions as well. Two-thirds of them are unmarried. And Eberstadt found that despite their lack of work obligations, these men are no more likely to spend time volunteering, participating in religious activities, or caring for family members than men with full-time employment.

That sort of isolation and idleness correlates with severe pathologies in rural areas where drug abuse and suicide have become far more common in recent years. In 2015, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an extraordinary paper by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. They found that, in contrast to the favorable long-term trends in life expectancy across the rest of the developed world, the mortality rate among middle-aged white Americans without any college education has actually risen since 1999. The main reasons? Since that year, among that population, fatalities due to chronic liver disease and cirrhosis have increased by 46 percent, fatalities from suicide have risen by 78 percent, and fatalities due to drug and alcohol poisoning are up by a shocking 323 percent.

Unsurprisingly, those left behind hold a distinctly gloomy view of the future. According to a survey conducted last year by the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN, fewer than one-quarter of white Americans without a college degree expect their children to enjoy a better standard of living in the future than they themselves have today, and half of them believe things will be even worse. (In contrast, according to the same survey, other historically marginalized communities have retained a more old-school American sense of optimism: 36 percent of working-class blacks and 48 percent of working-class Hispanics anticipate a better life for their children.)

To be sure, rural and exurban whites who possess few in-demand skills and little education are hardly the only vulnerable group in the United States today. But the evidence is undeniable that this community is suffering an acute dignity crisis. Left behind every bit as much as the urban poor, millions of working-class whites have languished while elites have largely ignored them or treated them with contempt.

Americans from all walks of life voted for Trump. But exit polls unambiguously showed that a crucial central pillar of his support came from modern-day Tom Fletchers: Trump beat Hillary Clinton among white men without a college degree by nearly 50 percentage points. Tellingly, among counties where Trump outperformed the 2012 GOP candidate Mitt Romney, the margins were greatest in those places with the highest rates of drug use, alcohol abuse, and suicide.

Many analysts and policy experts saw Trump’s campaign as a series of sideshows and unserious proposals that, even if implemented, would not actually improve things for his working-class supporters. For example, academic research clearly shows that trade protectionism—a major theme of Trump’s campaign—is more likely to destroy jobs than create them. Yet Trump won regardless, because he was the first major-party nominee in decades who even appeared to care about the dignity of these working-class voters whose lives are falling apart.

Welfare to work

If its goal is to instill dignity, the U.S. government does not need to find more innovative ways to “help” people; rather, it must find better ways to make them more necessary. The question for leaders, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, must be, Does this policy make people more or less needed—in their families, their communities, and the broader economy?

Shock Story: Exploiting the Homeless Addicted for Profit

March 1, 2017

The Washington City Paper is reporting a completely distressing story entitled “Eviction Companies Pay the Homeless Illegally Low Wages to Put People on the Street.”

The headline pretty much says it all, but some of the details are worth noting. First, the homeless are coming to a local shelter in D.C. each day hoping to be picked up as day laborers. Second, the men (and occasional) women homeless people are generally dealing with addiction of some kind. Third, the eviction companies have already been sued about paying below minimum wage to these day workers. Fourth, while the payments are extremely low, the companies pick homeless addicts and occasionally supplement the wages with alcohol. This effectively drives the homeless addicts to get another fix, which then leads them back to the miserable work arrangement so they can get just enough money to get another boost.

Here’s part of the report:

A man who works for both Street Sense and on the trucks, who is homeless and did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the eviction companies, says he first got work on an East Coast Express Eviction truck right after he moved to D.C. several years ago. He had heard through the grapevine that employment was available outside S.O.M.E. and was surprised to find that he did not need to fill out paperwork. When he first got on the truck, he says he saw a cooler of beer, and thought, “I’m in the right place.” It seemed like a party—and it was—drinking in a van with other guys before work. But he soon learned that whatever he drank would be deducted from his pay at the end of the day.

And he realized why the men were getting beers. “We have seen babies crying, grandmas. … You get a beer, so you don’t have any emotion,” he says in an interview at the Street Sense offices. “You do some kind of drugs, so then you don’t care, so you leave them on the curb over there crying, and go on to next one.” He says the evictees don’t get any information either—no shelter listing or hotline number.

The man, who struggles with a drinking problem, also says it was no mystery to him why eviction companies continued to show up outside S.O.M.E. even after the lawsuit. “Instead of choosing someone professional who says, ‘I can’t do it,’ they choose people who don’t have any feelings anymore, and have given up on life,” he says. “Because they will get on this truck for $7.”

As poverty and homelessness research Kevin Corinth states, this is NOT OKAY. But Corinth’s reasons aren’t exactly what you may expect. For one, he’s not arguing about whether the minimum wage is “fair.” Nor does Corinth have a problem with eviction in principle. Even as a researcher on homelessness, he acknowledges that landlords have a legal and moral right to be paid rent for providing living accommodations. As he points out, “Stopping all evictions would mean that landlords would no longer be willing to accept the tenants who are at greater risk of defaulting on their rental obligations in the first place.”

Corinth also doesn’t have an issue with the person who would take the job of evicting a family because while difficult to do, a professional and empathetic worker can “help preserve a sense of humanity in the face of horrible circumstances.”

For Corinth, his issue is with eviction companies that would exploit homeless people with addiction to keep them coming back to the illegally low-wage job.

Rather than being encouraged to serve with professionalism and empathy, they are encouraged to numb their humanity with alcohol.

And that means that families at their lowest point are dehumanized as well. Their personal belongings are handled by crews of men who have shut down. Meanwhile, some workers reportedly engage in theft to supplement their wages. As ACLU attorney Scott Michelman puts it, “[l]osing your home shouldn’t mean losing your dignity.”

Corinth says there are solutions to the mistreatment of homeless addicted aside from taking these companies to court. They include relaxing regulations on how many workers must be used to clear out a house, which leads eviction companies to look for cheap, unqualified work crews.

Another solution could be to prevent evictions from happening in the first place. Recent research has shown that offering families who are at risk of homelessness modest one-time payment leads to sharp reductions in entries into homeless shelters (and presumably reduces evictions as well).

The research Corinth references is here. It notes that one funding experiment found that giving someone who is about to become homeless a single cash infusion, averaging about $1000, could delay homelessness for two years. The research was done by offering one-time cash payments “to people on the brink of homelessness who can demonstrate that they will be able to pay rent by themselves in the future, but who have been afflicted by some nonrecurring crisis, such as a medical bill.” The team found those who received the cash infusion were 88 percent less likely to become homeless after three months and 76 percent less likely after six months. That’s a worthwhile investment when the overall cost of homelessness to society is much more expensive.

Read Corinth’s commentary here.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Happiness, Life Tagged With: eviction, homelessness, Kevin Corinth, minimum wage, poverty

Suffering in ‘Real America’: The 21st Century Experience

February 22, 2017

Turns out America’s elite — the “talking and deciding classes,” as demographer Nick Eberstadt calls it — didn’t realize until Donald Trump was elected president that things weren’t going as swimmingly for Americans in the heartland as for Americans in the “bubble.”

The wake-up call, however, has been in the making for more than 15 years. “Real America” has been suffering through most of the 21st century, and the start of the difficulties can be traced to “a grim historical milestone of sorts.”

Eberstadt, who studies poverty trends, economic development, and political economy, says that the year 2000 is when the “Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then — and broke down very badly.”

Since 2000, America has been experiencing “an ominous and growing divergence between three trends that should ordinarily move in tandem: wealth, output, and employment. Depending upon which of these three indicators you choose, America looks to be heading up, down, or more or less nowhere.”

In terms of wealth, things look good. The estimated net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled between early 2000 and late 2016, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion.

Although that wealth is not evenly distributed, it is still a fantastic sum of money—an average of over a million dollars for every notional family of four. This upsurge of wealth took place despite the crash of 2008 — indeed, private wealth holdings are over $20 trillion higher now than they were at their pre-crash apogee. The value of American real-estate assets is near or at all-time highs, and America’s businesses appear to be thriving. Even before the “Trump rally” of late 2016 and early 2017, U.S. equities markets were hitting new highs — and since stock prices are strongly shaped by expectations of future profits, investors evidently are counting on the continuation of the current happy days for U.S. asset holders for some time to come.

That’s the good news. But looking at the economy from a different lens casts quite a stormy picture. The economic crash of 2008 was pretty awful, granted, but the recovery has been super slow, with the total value of the U.S. economy in 2016 being just 12 percent higher than it was in 2007. However, the slowdown didn’t start in 2008.

Between late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum. That compares with the nation’s long-term postwar 1948–2000 per capita growth rate of almost 2.3 percent, which in turn can be compared to the ‘snap back” tempo of 1.1 percent per annum since per capita GDP bottomed out in 2009. Between 2000 and 2016, per capita growth in America has averaged less than 1 percent a year. To state it plainly: With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today.

What is the cause of this middling performance? Economists can’t agree … except on one thing: The U.S. economy’s potential is declining — meaning that Americans should not expect growth to exceed 1 percent per year if things stay as they are.

Thirdly, Eberstadt notes that the jobs situation is shockingly pathetic. The labor force participation rate — the measure of what percentage of Americans age 20 and older are working — took a huge dive in 2007, and hasn’t come back up yet to where it was.

But again, it didn’t start there. U.S. adult work rates never recovered entirely from the recession of 2001, Eberstadt writes, even as America’s elite cite the oft-quoted “civilian unemployment rate,” to claim a rosy picture. In December 2016 the unemployment rate stood at 4.7 percent, about the same as in 1965, at a time of full employment. But as most people know by now, that rate doesn’t include people who “aren’t looking for work.” Add back in that group, and a much, much higher number is revealed of people out of work.

To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.

There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.

So how do we get to the point where we have more wealth, but slower growth and less work?

This is where Eberstadt starts to pull together some painful truths which many Americans, not just the elite, refuse to see, much less admit. These are the “nonmaterial” issues, specifically old-school notions of family breakdown and the decline of faith, but more recent and much graver concerns about society overall. They include a decline in general health, a drop in life expectancy, an increase in drug dependence, and an overwhelming number of ex-felons who have been precluded from the American Dream.

To start, the opioid epidemic has gone “mainstream” in America, with more people dying of drug overdoses since 2013 than from guns or traffic accidents. Eberstadt points to research by Alan Krueger, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, who found that “nearly half of all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts — an army now totaling roughly 7 million men — currently take pain medication on a daily basis.”

And whose paying for all these drugs? The federal government. The Census Bureau’s SIPP survey (Survey of Income and Program Participation), reports that “as of 2013, over one-fifth (21 percent) of all civilian men between 25 and 55 years of age were Medicaid beneficiaries. For prime-age people not in the labor force, the share was over half (53 percent).”

By the way: Of the entire un-working prime-age male Anglo population in 2013, nearly three-fifths (57 percent) were reportedly collecting disability benefits from one or more government disability program in 2013. Disability checks and means-tested benefits cannot support a lavish lifestyle. But they can offer a permanent alternative to paid employment, and for growing numbers of American men, they do. The rise of these programs has coincided with the death of work for larger and larger numbers of American men not yet of retirement age. We cannot say that these programs caused the death of work for millions upon millions of younger men: What is incontrovertible, however, is that they have financed it—just as Medicaid inadvertently helped finance America’s immense and increasing appetite for opioids in our new century.

“In 21st-century America,” Eberstadt concludes, “‘dependence on government’ has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning.”

Lastly, Eberstadt notes that about 90 percent of felons are free and living in American society today. He estimates that to be about 17 million men — or about one of every eight adult males living in the U.S.

Noting that this population is “roughly twice the total size of our illegal-immigrant population and an adult population larger than that in any state but California,” it begs the question, what is their opportunity in America?

Answer: Not good.

We might guess that their odds in the real America are not all that favorable. And when we consider some of the other trends we have already mentioned—employment, health, addiction, welfare dependence—we can see the emergence of a malign new nationwide undertow, pulling downward against social mobility.

Why does he guess that? Casual observation seems to work, but also falling numbers for geographic mobility, a drop in the churn rate of jobs (meaning the ability to move up the economic ladder as resumes are built), and the decline in the chance of achieving more than one’s parents did.

Where does this all lead? To a drop in social mobility — the ability to survive on merit and hard work, which is the heart of the America Dream.

Eberstadt notes that while America’s elite love to discuss “economic inequality,” that’s irrelevant to a lot of Americans. What does matter is the “reality of economic insecurity.” And if it took the 2016 election to wake up the wealthholders, well, then, the wake-up call is at least a start.

Read Eberstadt’s entire essay at Commentary Magazine.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: income inequality, Medicaid, Nicholas Eberstadt, opioids, prison population, wealth

Vast Array of Government Assistance Programs Ready for a Reboot

February 11, 2017

Reducing poverty is one of the biggest issues that TPOH discusses, with good reason. The expression that “a rising tide lifts all boats” is especially true in a liberal democratic society that values a free market. However, despite a vast array of government assistance programs, it doesn’t seem the tide is lifting the poverty blues.

For many Americans, the elusive path to success has not been found, and the promise of upward mobility has not felt like a reality for many families stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder. Various polls show that efforts to reduce poverty and expand opportunity are lacking. In an AEI/Los Angeles Times poll, 70 percent of Americans said they believe the conditions for the poor had either stayed the same or gotten worse over the past 10 or 15 years. A study by Pew Charitable Trusts found that 43 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain there as adults.

Sadly, more than 20 percent of children lived in poverty in 2014.

Of course, the poverty rate is a flawed metric because it does not consider a significant amount of government-provided assistance that raises families’ incomes above the poverty line. On top of that, people in poverty are living with less material hardship than 50 years ago. The poor today are better off materially than in the past.

But as Robert Doar, the former commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, the city’s agency for managing 12 public assistance programs, notes in the introduction to a new volume of essays on reducing poverty in America, government assistance has helped people live with more stuff, but government has not created the outlets to get people working or earning on their own.

This is the cause of that swirling dissatisfaction even among those recipients of government benefits. More than half of people living in poverty surveyed in The AEI/Los Angeles Times poll said that the main purpose of welfare programs should be to help the poor get on their own two feet.

Able-bodied adults need to work because steady employment almost always leads a family out of poverty, provides opportunities for upward mobility, and is a source of dignity and purpose. Children are best off when they are raised by two committed parents, which is most likely to happen in marriage. And society must maintain a safety net that reduces material hardship, ensures that children can be raised in healthy environments, and rewards individuals who work.

The volume of essays offers ways to turn good ideas into legislative reform. The volume covers poverty assistance programs from housing and child support to food stamps and welfare. Doar acknowledges that none of the authors present all the answers, but he notes that the analyses and proposals can help move America toward finally living up to the goals of the War on Poverty, a war that needs to be won if everyone is going to do better.

Of course, not all of the problems facing low-income Americans will be solved by federal antipoverty programs. But political reality dictates that these major programs are not going to disappear anytime soon, meaning leaders who are serious about helping poor Americans should learn how they work and develop an agenda for improving them. Moreover, many of these assistance programs do reduce poverty and, with thoughtful reform, could be even more effective in helping struggling Americans move up. This volume intends to help policymakers understand how each program functions—its strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

Download the book in PDF form.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, marriage, safety net, WIC

New Bill Encourages Private Sector to Help Struggling Communities

February 6, 2017

Turns out even lawmakers on Capitol Hill think it’s not the government but the private sector that must make the needed investments to turn around struggling areas of the country. So a group of lawmakers has come up with a tax proposal to do just that.

The Republican-led Congress is getting ready to debate the Investing in Opportunity Act, but get a load of this: it’s a bipartisan bill! Whaa? Unheard of, it would seem, but a real-live attempt at creating some good.

The proposal is the work of Democratic Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi of Ohio in the House of Representatives. Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., are shepherding the effort through the Senate. The bill is aimed at spurring private-sector investment in “distressed communities,” combating both poverty and the lingering gaps in economic recovery.

Those communities account for 50 million Americans that are below average thresholds on education, unemployment, poverty, median income ratio, and housing availability.

As Roll Call explains:

The legislation would allow investors to defer paying capital gains taxes if they reinvest in “opportunity funds” that would be targeted at “opportunity zones,” or a low-income communities designated by state governments.

“There’s really no direct federal involvement other than we defer capital gains,” Tiberi, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told a small group of reporters gathered in Scott’s office Thursday. “There is a cost because of the deferral of capital gains, but ultimately, those will be paid.”

The fact that the bill allows state governments to direct the funds and does not involve additional federal funds being sent to these communities should make it attractive to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the bill’s proponents said. …

The lawmakers said encouraging private-sector investment in those communities could have a multiplying effect. The addition of a new grocery store, Tiberi explained, would create more jobs and attract more people to the neighborhood.

This is not the first go-round of the bill. It was introduced in the last Congress, but because it dealt with taxes, it was dead on arrival. Now that President Trump has made tax reform and underserved communities two of his priorities, the GOP is looking at “budget reconciliation,” or bypassing the 60-vote threshold required in the Senate to end debate on legislation and head to a vote. Now it’s just a matter of picking up support for the legislation.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: distressed communities, poverty, private sector investment, Rep. Pat Tiberi, Rep. Ron Kind, Sen. Tim Scott, tax reform

Secular and Sacred: How Faith Inspired Business in the Great Outdoors

February 4, 2017

Faith gets dismissed a lot in this day and age, but for those who believe in God, whatever their religion, a true love of the Almighty is an inspiring mechanism from which to launch a business.

Indeed, a faith-inspired business is what Greg McEvilly set out to do after he started his path toward the ministry and then realized he had a knack for entrepreneurialism.

McEvilly combined his faith with his go-getter instinct and launched a company to inspire people to adventure and life-affirming experiences.

Kammok, based in Austin, produces outdoor items like climbing gear, hammocks, and tents. But it’s more than just the products. McEvilly said he was interested in the way the business could “have a transformative impact on a broader scale.” Adventure never seemed so epic.

“We want to use adventure very strategically to help produce something greater in people, so we hope that adventure produces humility, curiosity and wonder,” McEvilly said.

The customer transaction is just the beginning of the cycle. Travis Perkins, who manages customer experience, says that the products are not the endpoint but rather that the company is “an outpost that is equipping and inspiring and moving the mind.”

McEvilly said business is as good a means of sharing the word because it is not limiting communications with like-minded people. Instead, customer interaction means dealing with people with a diverse set of beliefs.

And even though McEvilly’s name has “evil” in the middle, we couldn’t think of a nicer guy to get people off the couch and into creation.

The story of Kammok is part of a new documentary called “To Whom is Given,” which looks at how businesses can help the common good. Click here to learn more about Greg McEvilly and “To Whom Is Given.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: camping, entrepreneurs, faith, great outdoors, Greg McEvilly, Kammok

How Feeling Needed Will Improve the Next Four Years

January 23, 2017 by Arthur C. Brooks

The next four years will present new challenges in governance and new opportunities to get policy right. It’s my honor to lead an institution that stands for the universality of human dignity and the limitlessness of human potential, and fights for policy and culture to better reflect both these truths.

One Huge Question That Could Define the Next Four Years!

If you’re into public policy, you may want to be a little more fluent in the emerging policy issues that the new Trump administration has to tackle. For instance, what will be done for veterans care? How will schools improve performance for K-12 students? What exactly is a “border adjustment tax“?

But there’s also a much bigger picture we need to understand. Let’s be honest: It wasn’t a massive popular demand for a border adjustment that swept Trump into the White House. So what was it? Here’s my explanation:

America has gotten pretty good at helping struggling people, but pretty terrible at needing them. Our nation is rendering millions of people effectively superfluous. This violates human dignity. And now we are seeing the results.

Everything from ancient philosophy to survey data tell us that feeling necessary – feeling useful to others – is a crucial piece of a happy and satisfying human life. How do you think things are trending for working-class Americans on this particular score?

Today, compared to 50 years ago, three times as many men are completely outside the labor force – that is, neither gainfully employed nor even seeking work. This dystopic economic shift owes partially to the Great Recession, partially to irresponsible policies, partially to decaying social norms, and partially to longer-term structural changes outside of Washington’s control.

The problem is only compounded by atrophy in other institutions that provide alternate paths to neededness. Instead of staying strong and buffering against economic decay, these other factors – family stability, religious participation, community engagement – are also sliding downward. Meanwhile, though our Great Society-era safety net has helped make poverty and joblessness a bit less materially intolerable, it has not made these states any less soul-crushing or any more escapable.

Both liberals and conservatives need to retire the old mindset of finding more ways to help citizens. This does not mean doing nothing, however. Congress and the Trump administration must develop a new agenda, consonant with the truths of free enterprise, that is specifically designed to make forgotten Americans more needed.

Editor’s Note: Sign Up to Stay in Touch With Arthur. Arthur is launching a new feature essay early this year that will diagnose this problem of feeling useful and instantiate an agenda with specific policy ideas to make more people needed. Updates will also be found at ThePursuitofHappiness.com.

For more information on the impact of being needed, enjoy this background piece on the subject.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: border adjustment tax, Donald Trump, happiness, work

Where Do Immigrants Live in the US?

January 17, 2017

Since the 2008 recession, the states with net-inflows of immigrants have changed dramatically from preceding years. So where are new immigrants moving to when they arrive in the U.S.? As a percentage of pre-existing immigrant populations, the biggest net gains are in the Eastern United States, specifically Washington, D.C., Florida, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia.

That’s according to 2016 U.S. Census estimates of state populations. At the same time, except for D.C. in Florida, the net outflow of people living in these states exceeded the number of people moving in. In other words, immigrants are moving into states where Americans are moving out.

On the flip side, Arizona and Nevada are seeing many more people who were already in the U.S. move into these states than the number of immigrants moving in. This is a change from previous decades. Columnist and demographer Michael Barone has a suspicion why this is.

(I)t seems likely given the increasing share of total immigrants coming from Asia rather than Latin America that a large share of these immigrants are Asian and presumably somewhat higher skill, on average, than the Hispanic and mainly Mexican immigrants who surged into the southwestern states in previous decades.

In other words, higher-skilled workers are moving into states where high-skilled industries are operating.

See which other states are experiencing changes in both domestic and immigrant populations.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: high-skill workers, Immigration, population shifts, state comparisons, U.S. Census

Treating Opioid Addiction: A Holistic Approach to Recovery

January 15, 2017

Dr. Sally Satel is a psychiatrist who has spent more than 25 years treating patients with opioid addiction. She has seen highs and lows that would make a roller-coaster jealous. But she also sees light on the horizon when it comes to treatment.

With public attention and resources now closely trained on the opioid epidemic, there is a real opportunity for enlightened systems of care. Never before in the history of addiction management have there been so many different therapeutic elements to apply in combination to promote recovery. But we can’t afford to focus on just one set of these tools under the false idea that addiction is a disease like any other.

Why not just treat addiction like a “chronic illness”? As Satel explains, it is much more involved than just a medical diagnosis and prescription plan.

But first, we must acknowledge the problem, and it’s big. In the U.S. today, opioid use is skyrocketing. Some shocking statistics reveal its impact.

With an estimated 2.6 million people addicted to opioids—including heroin, fentanyl and oxycodone—the toll is daunting. Fatal opioid overdoses have risen from around 8,200 in 1999 to 33,000 in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making them a leading cause of accidental death. Last year, deaths from heroin slightly edged out gun homicides for the first time since the government began keeping such data.

The CDC reports that deaths from heroin overdoses quadrupled between 2002 and 2013. Heroin use spans the gamut; its use is rising among men and women, all age groups, and all income levels.

So what needs to be considered when dealing with addiction?

Medical treatment: Opioids are combated with anti-opioid medications. Many people have heard of methadone, but other options, like buprenorphine, or “bupe,” have been rising in popularity. With it come hazards: proper dosage and handling of anti-opioids is critical to preventing abuse. Monitoring patient dosage is a matter requiring close attention.
Causes of Relapse: Satel notes that 40-60 percent of addicts drop out of treatment before they’re done. This is partly due to ambivalence on the part of the addict, partly because of the overwhelming pull of addiction, and partly because treatment plans are conducted by the wrong doctor in the wrong environment. In addition, often times, the treatment plan is too rapid or doesn’t address the triggers that cause people to return to drugs.
Restoration: Addiction doesn’t just ravage the addict’s body, its impact is savage toward everyone around. Not just treating the cause, but looking at ways to cope with the future is imperative. Without it, the toll continues on an addicts’ and their families, their ability to work, their social networks, and their ability to find satisfaction through something other than drugs.
Enforcement: In the desire to not overwhelm the public health or criminal justice systems, drug courts are looking for ways to influence addicts without destroying the possibilities of their being able to live a drug-free future. This means ruling with degrees of consequence like community service or “flash incarceration,” and providing other carrots and sticks, including expunging the record of someone who completes treatment.

Managing the situation of dealing with an addict is not easy, Satel notes.

I speak from long experience when I say that few heavy users can simply take a medication and embark on a path to recovery. It often requires a healthy dose of benign paternalism and, in some cases, involuntary care through civil commitment. Many families see such legal action as the only way to interrupt the self-destructive cycle in which their loved ones are caught. Users sometimes want it, too.

With an explosive rise in addiction, appropriate government policy can help. Satel says Donald Trump’s blueprint during the election was consistent with the Comprehensive Addition Recovery Act that passed Congress this summer, though is only partially funded. The bill calls for expanding addiction treatment access, funding for diversionary programs such as drug court, and funding for naloxone (the opioid antidote that instantly reverses the respiratory suppression of overdose), among other things. This is heading in the right direction, she says.

If you deal with addiction in your family, it’s important to get help. You can call 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or check out the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for resources.

Read Sally Satel’s article on treating opioid addiction.

Get more statistics on America’s opioid epidemic.

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid addiction, Sally Satel

Irregular Work Schedules While Raising Kids: Can Congress Pass a Law to Help?

January 10, 2017

Does Congress need to schedule your time off? A proposed law aims to address the downsides of irregular work schedules, and is receiving support from a surprising group of voters.

A recent focus group organized by the Institute for Family Studies was asked to look at ways for government to make it easier for working parents to succeed. This particular focus group, based in a small town in southern Ohio, was composed of 10 white, working-class Millennials who mostly expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump.

Like every adult-age youngest generation before it, Millennials are the favorite target of older generations who like to tell them they don’t understand how the world works. But this focus group may be on to something. It has been coping with the way the world works for a while now, and has a diverse set of viewpoints despite their demographic similarities.

Their recent free-wheeling discussion suggests that while they backed the conservative presidential candidate, they are willing to explore a liberal lawmaker’s solution to problems they face. Gasp, could bipartisanship come back in vogue?

The group’s post-election conversation hit such heady topics as paid parental leave, payroll taxes, marriage penalties in public assistance programs, and other issues that tend to divide policy agendas in Washington. A common theme that emerged was that they are willing to work hard, and in exchange they want economic independence couched in fair treatment from employers and government.

The conversation spilled into the minimum wage debate , but a couple issues that struck a chord came down to adequate scheduling of work hours and promoting a “success sequence” for young people (finish school, get a job, get married, have children, in that order). The success sequence may be popular, albeit difficult to implement, but a proposed bill in Congress already captures what the Millennials said about adequate scheduling — they want the ability to plan their day-to-day lives.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 10 percent of workers report that they have irregular schedules, which makes it harder for them to do typical activities like planning to attend functions at their kids’ schools or, as one couple in the focus group shared, scheduling their wedding. Another 7 percent of workers interviewed in the EPI study said they split or rotate shifts.

EPI reported that full-time employees in the retail and food service industries tend to have the most irregular shifts, but so do a significant proportion of workers in entertainment, repairs, transportation, and agricultural sectors.

What is concerning with the irregularity in scheduling, which inordinately hits lower income households, is the impact it has on the family. In essence, irregular schedules contribute to instability at home. For EPI, some of the solutions include implementing laws enabling workers the right to request changes and longer advance notice of what their schedules would be.

One bill on the table in Congress comes from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. It would do just what EPI supports. The legislation, called “The Schedules That Work Act,” would give workers in service industries the right to request changes to their schedules without fear of retaliation and would require employers to distribute schedules two weeks in advance.

It’s seems counter-intuitive that more law gives people greater freedom, but it has been done before. You’d be surprised what these Trump supporters in southern Ohio said about the idea.

Read the focus group’s response “The Schedules That Work Act.”

Filed Under: Front-Page Feature, Life Tagged With: Economic Policy Institute, Elizabeth Warren, Institute for Family Studies, Millennials, The Schedules That Work Act, work disincentives, working families