poverty
sastyk | August 23, 2011- The basic Rogoff/Reinhart observation that financial collapses due to asset bubbles just take a long time to work through. Given the size of the 2008 collapse, historical evidence suggests that it's going to take five or six years to recover, and that's that.
- The Tyler Cowen "Great Stagnation" hypothesis. We've picked through all the low-hanging economic fruit over the past century, and like it or not, we're now entering an extended period of low productivity growth because we're not inventing lots of cool new stuff.
- The related (I think) investment drought hypothesis. Ben Bernanke…
sastyk | August 9, 2011From Counterpunch, Ehrenreich, who, along with Jonathan Kozol and the late Joe Bageant and a vanishingly few others, tells the true story of American poverty more clearly than anyone else explores how we punish the poor::
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several…
sastyk | July 29, 2011I have a pretty good track record on the economic crisis. In 2007, I pointed out that the "slowdown" that people were saying was absolutely not a recession, was, in fact, a recession. In 2008, I pointed out that most major economic downturns of the past century haven't been very brief - although technically the 1970s economic crisis consisted of two recessions, rather than one, you could just as easily observe that it consisted of a decade or so of high unemployment, economic stagnation, etc...etc... I argued that it was likely that the major economic crisis we were finally acknowledging…
sastyk | July 27, 2011And in non-goat news....
According to the study, the inflation-adjusted median wealth among Hispanic households fell 66% from 2005 to 2009. Black households suffered a 53% drop in net worth over the same period. By contrast, whites saw a decline of 16% in household wealth.
In 2009, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth. Hispanic families had about $6,325 in wealth. The average white household had a net worth of $113,149.
The study also showed that a third of black and Hispanic households had zero wealth, meaning that their debts were larger than the value of all their assets.…
sastyk | July 26, 2011On Friday, in a move that shocked, truly shocked America, President Obama said that food stamps were more important than Defense. Since this sort of prioritization is one of the fundamental differences between the US extreme right (aka Republicans) and the US center-right (also known as the Democrats), the fact that this caused an uproar among Republicans should also stun you. Republicans warn us that slashing America's defense budget until it is only double the next largest nations will cripple us, Democrats call the Republicans meanies, and everyone ignores the point.
The point is that…
lborkowski | June 8, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Jamie Holmes in The New Republic: Why Can't More Poor People Escape Poverty?
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: 30 Years of AIDS, and How it Began (also Part II and Part III)
Jesse Green in New York: "A Textbook of Trauma" ("The crash of the Chinatown charter was the worst bus accident in the city's history. Fifteen of its victims ended up at one hospital. Fourteen lived.")
Emily Dugan in The Independent: The unstoppable march of the tobacco giants
Annie Lowrey in Slate: Your Commute is Killing You ("Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce,…
milhayser | April 7, 2011
The science portion of The Nation's Report Card was released on February 24th, with test scores from school districts in seventeen urban centers. Almost every district performed below the national average. Greg Laden explains, "Poverty determines the outcome of the results, and this is probably exacerbated in urban zones where private schools siphon off the small number of higher-income kids." Although Department of Education officials were firm in their stance that "correlation does not equal causality," Greg plots test scores against poverty level in the cities surveyed and reveals a very…
sastyk | March 18, 2011From the current issue of _American Educator_, fascinating research on Equality issues by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (PDF alert!) that shows that greater economic and social equality don't make things better just for the bottom:
It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative deprivation should be more common in more unequal societies. However, if you ask people why greater equality reduces these problems, the most common assumption is that greater equality helps those at the bottom. the truth is that the vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequality.…
sastyk | March 2, 2011If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation of this material myself later this week, but if you'd like to see it sooner, it is right there to look at, no great challenge.
What we see is fairly simple - and incredibly complicated. The intertwining of markets, of energy and food, tied by biofuel production and national policies, and the fact…
gregladen | February 24, 2011The Science component of "The Nation's Report Card" was released today and clearly indicates that we have moved one step closer as a nation in two of our most important goals: Building a large and complacent poorly educated low-pay labor class, and increasing the size of our science-illiterate populace in order to allow the advance of medieval morality and Iron Age Christian values.
The "Nation's Report Card" is meant to report academic achievement of K-12 students, and is conducted by the US Department of Education as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The current…
sastyk | February 24, 2011Mother Jones has a very clear visual presentation of the increase in economic inequity over the last years - 11 charts they say shows it all. I'm not sure it shows it all, but they are well worth looking at, particularly these two:
And this one, which shows the perception that Americans have - that things are much more equal than they are.
Ultimately, the same battles being fought in the Middle East are going to be fought here - because with an ever-shrinking pie in an economy that will struggle to grow because of a declining resource base, there's no other option.
Sharon
sastyk | February 14, 2011This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years - but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it.
There is no…
sastyk | February 1, 2011There's a great scene in the book _Cheaper By the Dozen_ (which had almost nothing to do with the recent movie Steve Martin was in, although there's a fairly good old one) in which Lillian Moller Gilbraith, mother of 12 (11 surviving) is offered by a joking friend as the ideal host for a Planned Parenthood organizational meeting. The PP representative, who has been told that Gilbraith is a model organizer, a professional woman and a leader in her community - but not that she has 11 kids. "Within 15 Miles of Organizational Headquarters!" announces the representative of Planned Parenthood in…
sastyk | January 31, 2011From The Onion:
According to anthropologists, untold millions of slaves and serfs toiled their whole lives to complete the gap. Records indicate the work likely began around 10,000 years ago, when the world's first landed elites convinced their subjects that construction of such a monument was the will of a divine authority, a belief still widely held today.
Though historians have repeatedly disproved such claims, theories still persist among many that the Gap Between Rich and Poor was built by the Jews.
"When I stare out across its astounding breadth, I'm often moved to tears," said…
lborkowski | January 13, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Travis Saunders at the Scientific American Guest Blog: Can sitting too much kill you?
Tanya Snyder in Streetsblog Capitol Hill: Actually, Highway Builders, Roads Don't Pay for Themselves
Tina Rosenberg for the New York Times' Opinionator: To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor
Ilan Greenberg in Guernica: Murder Music ("Jamaica's dancehall music is being blamed for the country's violent attacks on gays. But there are many who don't see the music as homophobic, only the battle cry of a changing nation.")
Environmental Health News compiles its Top Stories of…
sastyk | January 12, 2011
The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues.
On the lists of guests no one ever…
sastyk | November 10, 2010Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon. Working class people (who strangely, the paper and the author rarely seem to care about otherwise) can't afford an organic chicken or a gallon of organic milk! Ordinary people don't have time to make soup. Regular folk don't care about that stuff - that's for brie-sniffing folks, just the next rich people's food fad.
I can think of a few hundred refutations of this claim, of course. There are all of my…
sastyk | September 21, 2010...and I don't really have time today. Seriously, you've got to read the whinings of this idiot, and MTMB's response.
Maybe because my family of six pulls in less than 50K a year (as opposed to the 450K the gent in question is whinging about), and because I can identify still with the realities of poverty, I've got no tolerance for this bullshit. I still remember what it feels like to have your power turned off and the phone ringing off the hook about bills you simply can't pay. I'm lucky - my family is comparatively secure now - for now and by the grace of good fortune. But it is a…
sastyk | September 21, 2010_The Pump Handle_ often addresses the same issues that I do, from a public health perspective and is one of my favorite reads. As the UN Convenes to evaluate progress on the Millenium Development Goals - designed to reduce poverty worldwide, Liz Borkowski has done an admirable job of describing exactly what these are and how they work.
At the same time, however, I think both Borkowski and most evaluators don't explore the ways that the Millenium Development Goals simply begin from assumptions that don't allow them to succeed. That's why many of them are simply failing. The most basic one…
lborkowski | September 20, 2010If you're working on a major global problem like poverty, it's important to have goals to work towards. Back in 2000, world leaders came together and adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which commits to reducing extreme poverty and sets out a series of goals to be reached by 2015. Each of the eight Millennium Development Goals, as they've come to be known, has between one and five specific targets, many of which involve reducing the proportion (by half, two-thirds, etc.) of people who suffer from a particular condition or lack access to an essential resource like clean drinking…