Hat tip: BA
Some counties in the U.S. (the red ones) saw declines in female life expectancy. Perhaps due to rises in inequality here in the land of the free.
Hat tip: BA
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My Applied Microeconomics professor, Jay Coggins, on inequality denial in the US in the Star Tribune.
The 400 richest people in the country are worth nearly as much as the poorest 57 million households... There exists a determined and noisy band of American inequality deniers, to which Cunningham evidently belongs. We all need to on guard against believing the things they know that just ain't so. Back during the resurgence of this blog, I wrote a long observational post about gender, families and work profiles. The general conclusion was: it doesn't look great for working women balancing families. Outright workplace discrimination over gender has decreased tremendously through some significant legislation, but why aren't men and women equal in the workplace? Full-time female workers still make on average 23% less than fulltime male workers. Through a good forward (thanks LW), I discovered a more optimistic interview addressing this same problem of women and work. Leonhardt's full article (though from last year) is here.
There's this harsh empirical reality: The main barrier is the harsh price most workers pay for pursuing anything other than the old-fashioned career path. “Women do almost as well as men today, as long as they don’t have children.” And these optimistic policy implications: There are steps that can help. Universal preschool programs — like the statewide one in Oklahoma — would make life easier for many working parents. Paid parental leave policies, like California's modest version, would make a difference, too. With Australia’s recent passage of paid leave, the United States has become the only rich country without such a policy....We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. Research and debate on gender discrimination and the labor force is still happening in full (as I'm learning in my Analysis of Discrimination class). This weekend, I'm heading to the Midwest Economic Association annual conference to present a paper (to be shared later) and the one I've been assigned to review is on patterns of mothers who opt-out of the labor force completely. Should be pretty interesting... An insightful interview with Ragui Assaad from the Council on Foreign Relations on the challenges and opportunities of youth bulges in many Arab countries. I like his note about pressures on international migration:
Many of the developed countries, but in particular Europe, have a deficit of young people, and there's going to be tremendous pressure for migration from the countries in the southern Mediterranean and elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia to migrate. We have to find ways to allow this migration without creating anti-migrant backlashes. Personal plug: Assaad is Professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and I work as his TA for the class International Development Planning and Policy Analysis (which, of course, I highly recommend). I heard an immigration lawyer and human rights activist speak this morning on the complicated process of immigration law. Aside from being befuddled by the broken system and bureaucratic layers, I thought one thing they said was particularly interesting:
"We don't refer to murderers or bank robbers as illegal murderers or illegal bank robbers, so why illegal immigrants? Let's try to refer to people as non-US citizens." What befuddles me? The legal immigration process. But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent? Oops! That’s already us.
-NK There has been some interesting debate about taxes recently- specifically about the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts. It seems to me that an argument for less taxes on the rich is based on an ideological America-dream-ish theory. This op-ed by Nicholas Kristof explores income inequality in the states. Unfortunately, with all this inequality, the idea that Americans can hope for the dreamy economic mobility is fading quickly. And the actual empirical data about who's relative tax breaks induce macroeconomic growth points right to lower income folks- they put that money right back into the economy. Kristof's Op-Ed Ayn Rand's 1957 book Atlas Shrugged became the main source for her philosophy called objectivism, defined by individual rational self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. This philosophy has been cited as a source for a lot of Republican or Libertarian thought (not my native land), so I attempted to delve into the literature for a deeper understanding. I disagree with the foundations of her philosophy. In economics, a public good is a non-excludable and non-rivalrous good, for example: street lamps, public parks, bridges etc. The author relies so much on the idea that capitalism and competition will solve all problems, that she essentially denies the existence of any public goods. She implies that acting in one's own self-interest is the only way to success or happiness and that neither community action nor non-profits can deliver any sort of positive benefit to society. Here, she criticizes (through the character Henry Rearden) the idea of a non-profit organization or charity:
"'I'm trying to raise money for Friends of Global Progress' [Phillip said.] Rearden had never been able to keep track of the many organizations to which Philip belonged, nor to get a clear idea of their activities. He had heard Philip talking vaguely about this one for the last six months. It seemed to be devoted to some sort of free lectures on psychology, folk music and co-operative farming. Rearden felt contempt for groups of that kind and saw no reason for closer inquiry into their nature" (Rand, 41). And here, Dagny Taggert recollects the positive qualities of grandfather, who started the nation-wide railroad system: "Nathaniel Taggart was a man who never accepted the creed that others had the right to stop him. He set his goal and moved toward it, his way as straight as one of his rails. He never sought any loans, bonds, subsidies, land grants or legislative favors from the government. He obtained money from the men who owned it, going from door to door- from the mahogany doors of bankers to the clapboard doors of lonely farmhouses. He never talked about the public good. He merely told people that they would make big profits on his railroad, he told them why he expected the profits and he gave his reasons. He had good reasons" (Rand, 59). The story in Atlas Shrugged is fascinating and Rand's writing is excellent, but I found myself disagreeing with the pervasive notion that no one can ever know or act on something good for society. I can think all too easily of examples: education, lighthouses, transportation, vaccinations, clean air, community centers ... the list goes on. Today marks the official closing of combat operations in Iraq. As one war finally draws to a close, let's recall the ultimate $3 trillion cost of these two wars that Stiglitz and Bilmes have pointed to. Of course, that's just the economic toll.
Here's a thought on the cost to humanity from Bob Herbert's recent op-ed in the NYT: "One of the reasons we’re in this state of nonstop warfare is the fact that so few Americans have had any personal stake in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no draft and no direct financial hardship resulting from the wars. So we keep shipping other people’s children off to combat as if they were some sort of commodity, like coal or wheat, with no real regard for the terrible price so many have to pay, physically and psychologically. Not only is this tragic, it is profoundly disrespectful. These are real men and women, courageous and mostly uncomplaining human beings, that we are sending into the war zones, and we owe them our most careful attention. Above all, we owe them an end to two wars that have gone on much too long." Full article I've been thinking a lot about the recent debate in Europe about banning burqas (a Muslim woman's face veil). To me, the arguments in favor of the ban seem rooted in fear of the different. Martha Nussbaum, a U Chicago philosopher and ethicist, provides an elegant destruction of the arguments in favor of the ban:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled-threats/ |