Tag: Poverty

Interview: The Politics Guys

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong: Interview: The Politics Guys: “Economic inequality, economic growth, why this is the best time ever to be poor (in the United States, at least)…

…grifters and suckers, alien sinister forces, McDonalds, restaurant gift cards, how the best con artists are those who can con themselves, and lots more….

Mike talks to UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong. Professor DeLong, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, blogs at ‘Grasping Reality….

It’s about politics. It’s about ideas. It’s about half an hour.

Must-read: Tim Worstall: “The Average American Today Is 90 Times Richer Than The Average Historical Human Being”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Tim Worstall: The Average American Today Is 90 Times Richer Than The Average Historical Human Being: “I have regularly tried to get over the idea that there is just no such thing as real poverty in the United States today…

…Absent those entirely outside our society through addiction or mental health problems there is just no one at all who suffers from what has been the usual human description of poverty. Actually, there’s no one at all in the US who has anything even close to what the human experience has been of poverty. By any historical, and by standards of all too large a part of the world today, all Americans are simply hugely, gargantuanly, richer than any but the fewest, most privileged, of our forefathers….

What should really leap out at you is how poor the past actually was. England in 1600 AD was at $1,000 a year. So, a little over 1.5 times what it is like to be in the poorest country in the world right now, that CAR. China was at this level in 1978: just goes to show you what an idiocy Maoist economics was. But note that this runs the other way too: the American living standard of today is about 50 times what it was in 1600 England, or 1978 China…. Real poverty is that $600 a year of the CAR or most of humanity for most of history, or the $1.90 a day that the World Bank today identifies as absolute poverty. America simply doesn’t have any of this. It just doesn’t exist and it hasn’t for at least half a century and was rare even a century ago.

Must-read: Robert Greenstein: “Jeb Bush, Please Talk to Bob Dole About Food Stamps”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Robert Greenstein: Jeb Bush, Please Talk to Bob Dole About Food Stamps: “[Jeb] Bush could profit from a conversation with… Bob Dole…

…Dole’s conclusion, after years of work… was that food stamps represent the single most important accomplishment in American social policy since Social Security…. Before the early 1970s, each state set its own food stamp eligibility standards…. Surveys by medical researchers in the late 1960s found shocking rates of malnutrition and nutrition-related diseases — akin to those in some Third World countries — among poor children in parts of the South and Appalachia.  These findings prompted President Nixon to lead a successful bipartisan effort to establish national food stamp eligibility standards. Studies in the late 1970s, after the national eligibility standards and other reforms that Dole had championed took effect, found dramatic reductions in child malnutrition and nutrition-related decreases.  The researchers concluded that the impressive progress was due in large part to the federal reforms extending and expanding food stamps…

Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty: “Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claim to have hatched a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty…

…The consensus plan will focus on three things: education, marriage, and work…. Since 1991, we have done precisely what the education-focused poverty people said to do. Between 1991 and 2014, we steadily reduced the share of adults in the ‘less than high school’ and ‘high school’ bins and increased the share of adults in every other bin…. [But] the poverty rate for each educational bin went up over this time and overall poverty didn’t decline at all. In fact it went up…. As the adults migrated up the educational bins, they took the poverty into the higher educational bins with them…. There are a number reasons why aggregate education gains do not necessarily translate into aggregate poverty declines. I will discuss three…. First, handing out more high school and college diplomas doesn’t magically create more good-paying jobs…. Second, having more education does not necessarily increase people’s productive capacity…. Third, poverty is really about non-working people…. Old-age, disability, unemployment, having children do not go away just because you have a better degree…. To the extent that education does nothing to provide better income support for those who do find themselves in these vulnerable situations, its effect on overall poverty levels will always be weak, or, as with the US in the last 23 years, totally nonexistent…

Must-Read: Belle Sawhill: Where Have All the Workers Gone?

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: I really want to see what happens to these numbers in a high-pressure low-slack economy…

Isabel Sawhill: Where Have All the Workers Gone?: “Among male heads of household between the ages of 25-54…

…[not at work,] 27 percent say it is because they are ill or disabled…. [But] we excluded from the sample anyone on disability…. Another 22 percent said they couldn’t find work–not too surprising in a year when the unemployment rate was still over 7 percent. The remaining half… going to school, taking care of home or family… retired (despite being under 55), or… some other reason for why they weren’t working…. These are all men in their prime working years and that their lack of work leaves them and anyone else in their household at or near the poverty line…. Women heading households are somewhat similar… with far fewer reporting that they are ill or disabled and more of them reporting that they are taking care of home or family…

Must-Read: Tim Harford: The Real Benefits of Migration

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Tim Harford: The Real Benefits of Migration: “UK Home Secretary Theresa May gave a speech… designed to polarise…. She succeeded…

…One statement… found the spotlight…. (Translation: immigration costs us nothing but we want to reduce it anyway.) Is May’s summary of the evidence correct? Probably not…. But there was a far bigger lacuna… [that] most commentators… missed it…. Migrants… prosper hugely… yet that prosperity hardly ever figures in debates about immigration. This is odd. I would not expect schools to fare well on a cost-benefit analysis if we ignored any gains to the under-18s. Nor would hospitals look like a good investment if we counted only the advantages to non-patients. Yet it seems that migration may still be mildly beneficial even after disqualifying any benefit to the people most likely to gain–the migrants. That is remarkable….

One might make the case that because migrants are foreign nationals, we are entitled to make their welfare a lower priority. My colleague Martin Wolf is one of the few commentators to bother asserting this openly; most simply seem to assume that foreigners count for nothing…. Being open to migration from poor countries is perhaps the best anti-poverty programme that rich countries can offer…. Whether foreigners should count as sentient beings in a British cost-benefit analysis is something I’ll leave to the philosophers….

How real a problem is… brain drain?…. Where developing countries do train large numbers of skilled workers–as with the Philippines, a world centre for nursing and midwifery–they also manage to keep a reasonable number of them at home. And… migrant remittances… [are] three times as much as is sent in official development assistance. Migrant networks can help make trade flow smoothly too. Then there is the simple matter of respecting individual liberties…. If we have gained anything from the harrowing images of desperate refugees, it is an appreciation that they are human. Economic migrants are human too… not pheasants to poach; nor brains to drain.

Must-Read: Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Michael Clemens: The South Pacific Secret to Breaking the Poverty Cycle: “The average Tongan household that participated was earning just NZ$1,400 per year…

…before these jobs. The average worker who participated earned NZ$12,000 for just a few months of work. It multiplied low-income workers’ earnings by a factor of 10. Almost no other antipoverty project you’ve ever heard of can claim that. Imagine what that did to poverty…. This project was ‘among the most effective development policies evaluated to date.’ And it did that not by taking money away from New Zealanders, but by adding value to the New Zealand economy. What’s working against poverty? International labor mobility….

The last time the United Nations set global goals to fight poverty, back in 2000, it completely ignored the power of labor mobility. The Millennium Development Goals, bizarrely, mentioned migration exclusively in negative and harmful terms…. This time… [they] at least mention migration…. But they decline to mention any possibility of actually facilitating migration…. The authors… still think that mobility doesn’t matter much for global poverty. That just does not make sense in a world where remittances to poor countries are several times as large as foreign aid. It does not make sense in a world where barriers to mobility cost the world trillions of dollars every year. What’s working against poverty is international mobility. And it will keep working to help meet the Global Goals for fighting poverty–largely in spite of them.