History lesson

Radical historian Howard Zinn in the Nation:

The New Deal was tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them. It created many jobs but left 9 million unemployed. It built public housing but not nearly enough. It helped large commercial farmers but not tenant farmers. Excluded from its programs were the poorest of the poor, especially blacks. As farm laborers, migrants or domestic workers, they didn't qualify for unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, Social Security or farm subsidies. Still, in today's climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward.

Whether you agree with Zinn's prescription, I think his characterization of politics in general is spot on. The right-wing noise machine can't admit it, and the milquetoast Clintons and Obamas can't either, but on economic issues, today's much-vilified "liberals" would have been right-wingers in the 1930s and 1940s.

Keeping candidates honest on health care

Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research News (PDF) is great for those of us without the time or train fare to attend all their briefings and symposia. The new (winter) issue includes a summary of health industry management prof David Dranove's December take on what presidential candidates aren't saying about cost containment, entitlement, and the role of technology.

I'm a sucker for people who are well enough informed to take a good whack at both sides. Here's DD on "the darling of Republican Party candidates," consumer-directed health plans. He says they're unlikely to have any impact because they target healthy well-educated individuals.

As for entitlements: "No one is promising a $300,000 house to homeless families. But many candidates are promising equal access to the world's most expensive and advanced healthcare system." That either means a big bill to pay, or a rationing system.

If you're a person of leisure, you can skip the newsletter and see the presenters' PowerPoint slides or watch a video of the event itself (46:45) -- and tell us about 'em in the comments.

Stupid state politician tricks

Nicholas Johnson at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains why a miniature version of the federal economic stimulus project won't do states any good, and may well do harm:

Unlike the federal government, which can run a deficit to cover the cost of its stimulus package, 49 of the 50 states are required by constitution or statute to balance their operating budgets .... states cannot simply enact new expenditures or tax cuts to be financed by increased borrowing. A reduction in revenue typically must be accompanied by a reduction in the spending that otherwise could occur.

Since roughly four-fifths of all state spending comes in just four areas — education, health care, transportation, and public safety — it is likely that tax cuts would come at the expense of one or more of those services.

Cutting services to pay for “stimulus” tax cuts would not only harm the people who depend on those services, but also negate the stimulative impact on the economy. Recipients of the tax cut would have a bit more money to spend. But the recipients of state expenditure dollars, including public employees and contractors (e.g., teachers, construction workers, and health-care workers), would have less to spend. In terms of aggregate economic impact, the result likely would be a wash.

Indeed, such a tradeoff could actually hurt the economy. The lost jobs and income resulting from the spending cuts would outweigh the stimulus from the tax cuts if recipients save their tax cut or spend it out of state rather than injecting it into the local economy. This might occur, for example, if the recipients are multi-state corporations or relatively well-off individuals.

I find this mode of argument -- that tax cuts can do good in some circumstances and not others -- far more persuasive than arguments from those who assume that tax cuts, or tax increases, are always the answer.

Berry in his own words

We had some words here about Wendell Berry a few weeks ago. In an interview nicely conducted by Lauren Wilcox in World Ark, a publication of the Heifer Project, Berry himself gives what I take to be a good short summary of his stance (this issue's not on line yet):

It's important at least that we understand our economic relation to the world, the way we live from it, the way we do or don't take care of it. I think the conservation movement unwittingly helped to drive a wedge between us and our land by implying that we could live most of our lives in circumstances that don't quite suit us -- doing work that doesn't suit us, work that makes us say, Thank God it's Friday -- and then somehow, on vacation, go to a national park and reconnect with the natural world. But of course that's not a connection. ...

You don't have to go to the Rocky Mountains to confront nature, to learn from it and ask the necessary questions. If you go to a good farm that has been properly and gracefully fitted into a place, then you can see that real questions about the terms on which we live have been asked, and answered.

Where you stand depends on where you sit

Kim Bobo of Interfaith Worker Justice reviews new books by Jim Wallis (The Great Awakening) and E. J. Dionne (Souled Out) in In These Times, but I'm most interested in her own experience:

Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions have a long history of supporting working class struggles. And the best indicator of whether a church will do so is based on where the workers attend services.

When coalmining members of Four Square Gospel churches in Appalachia go on strike, those churches get involved. When janitors who are members of Pentecostal storefront churches seek a contract, that church gets involved. When an unethical employer cheats members of a mega-church out of their wages, leaders of the church are likely to join a delegation to visit the employer, praying on the employer’s home doorstep until wages are paid.

Though such congregations are often written off as “conservative,” many are willing to advocate for workers if their members are affected. On the flip side, a wealthy congregation may be liberal on cultural issues but less likely to engage on worker justice issues. In other words, class matters—often more than theology.

BTW, I see Wallis will be at Seminary Co-op in Chicago, 5757 S. University, Monday noon.

Biofuels: even worse than I thought

At first I thought this was just part of the noise, but it looks serious: biofuels may well cause more global warming than gasoline. Read the whole thing at the Reality-Based Community.

Any guesses how many decades it will take the bipartisan Illinois politicans from ADM to notice?

Jencks on consequences of immigration

One of the few benefits of not being employed is being able to admit when you're late with something but it's interesting anyway. Last fall Christopher Jencks, formerly of Northwestern, laid out a characteristically straightforward account of the "immigration charade," as he calls it, in the guise of a review of a somewhat confused Pat Buchanan book. Here's the nugget:

Allowing employers to hire immigrants almost guarantees that unskilled natives will have more trouble finding steady work. Between 2000 and 2005 the unemployment rate among eighteen-to-sixty-four-year-old natives without high school diplomas rose from 10 to 14 percent; among their foreign-born counterparts it fell from 9 to 7 percent.

(The numbers are from this article from the Center for Immigration Studies by Steven Camarota.)

Jencks contends that a balance must be struck between the needs of native dropouts and of desperate immigrants, and that

The only way to strike a balance is to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, offer visas to more unskilled foreign-born workers, and set the number of visas with an eye on how that number will affect job opportunities for unskilled natives.

Note the strategically deployed passive voice. Any administration that did this would have to be willing to offend powerful employer lobbies, powerful immigrant lobbies, those do-gooders who feel sorrier for uneducated foreigners than for uneducated natives, plus it would have to somehow insulate from politics the setting of those visa numbers. Good luck with that.

Let's all move to California

At last, someone else is reading NBER working papers so I can quote the popularization. According to ENN, economists Enrico Moretti (UC Berkeley) and Oliver Deschenes (UC Santa Barbara) found that

Deaths linked to extreme cold account for 0.8 percent of the nation's annual death rate and outnumber those attributed to leukemia, murder and chronic liver disease combined. ...

The study also says that demographic shifts from colder climes to warmer ones -- for reasons such as better jobs, cheaper housing and sunshine -- appear to delay an estimated 4,600 deaths a year. The researchers also said that over the past 30 years, longevity gains associated with geographic mobility accounted for between 4 and 7 percent of the increases in life expectancy in the United States. ...

U.S. mortality rates peak in December and January and are at their lowest points from mid-July to mid-August. Cities recording the biggest numbers of cold weather-related deaths include Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and Cleveland.

Nobody's written an engrossing sociology book on cold waves. Sounds like they should. And maybe Mayor Daley should have one of his environmental geeks draw up a cost-benefit on the urban heat island. The full 58-page paper is here.

Cable TV as feminist vanguard

In fairness to a medium for which I have little use except on Sunday afternoons, economists Robert Jensen of Brown University and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago find that the introduction of cable TV to rural villages in India is good for women:

The villages that added cable were associated with improvements in measures of women's autonomy, a reduction in the number of situations in which wife beating was deemed acceptable, and a reduction in the likelihood of wanting the next child to be a boy. And, the effects were quite large. In a sample in which the average education level was 3.5 years, introducing cable appeared to have the same effects on attitudes towards female autonomy as 5.5 years of education. Cable also increased the likelihood that a girl aged 6-10 would be enrolled in school, although it had no effect for boys, and cut the yearly increase in the number of children or pregnancies among women of childbearing age.

This is from writer Linda Gorman's summary in the December issue of NBER Digest. The original abstract is here, or read the whole thing here (PDF).

"Creative destruction" for you and me

Economist and blogger Brad DeLong talks about his favorite economist:

"Marx saw that the coming of capitalist economies destroyed all feudal, traditional, and patriarchal relationships and orders. [Joseph] Schumpeter saw farther: that market capitalism destroys its own earlier generations. There is, he wrote, a constant 'process of industrial mutation -- if I may use that biological term -- that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in, and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.'"

Not to mention its employees.