Housing wonks describe individuals who pay more than 30% of their income on housing as “cost-burdened”. So, who are these people, where do they live, and why can’t they find affordable housing?
Diversion is an intervention in the criminal justice system that provides offenders with a chance to avoid conviction and a criminal record by undergoing a period of community supervision. The study found that diversion for first-time felony offenders cut reoffending rates in half and increased employment rates by nearly 50% over 10 years.
As for Biden’s infrastructure plan, 59% of those surveyed in the NBC poll thought it was a good idea, 21% disagreed, and 19% had no opinion. Which got me thinking: what is it about the infrastructure plan that these people think is a good idea (or not)? Biden’s infrastructure plan is immense and involves dozens of large-scale projects, including …
The committee backed up their recommendations with results from a survey they had conducted of students and staff. The majority of people surveyed supported the position of School Resource Officer (SRO) , including 72% of Black students, 73% of Latino students, 77% of Asian students, and 62% of white students. White staff members were the most critical of the SRO role, with 54% opposing the position. No teachers and fewer than 6% of students found the SRO “hostile or mistrustful of kids.”
Why do so many Covid deaths go unreported? One reason is that most people die at home in developing countries and out-of-hospital deaths are rarely medically certified. For example, only around a fifth of all deaths are medically certified in India. Even in countries with substantial hospital data, cause-of-death is often misclassified, often a result of insufficient physician training. Sometimes, though, misclassification is deliberate, as in some hospitals in India, where officials have directed doctors to list cause-of-death as “sickness” and not Covid, possibly to avoid a panic. And then there’s Russia…
Non-native species are typically described as “invasive” species, clearly not a term of endearment. However, many biologists and conservationists are having a change of heart regarding these much-maligned “aliens” (another common descriptor): they’re not all bad - and some may even help native species survive and thrive, especially in biological communities under stress from habitat loss and a changing climate. A zero-tolerance approach to non-native species makes no sense when their effects are often neutral or positive.
Of course these five pathways don’t exhaust all possibilities. Personally I’d prefer something with more nuclear, less biomass, and lots of solar/wind - which doesn’t quite fit any of the distinct options provided by the Princeton group. But the study’s aim was more practical than encyclopedic, basically to help decision-makers implement well-informed and thoughtful climate change policies. Part of that service was to provide a strict accounting of the likely costs and savings generated by each decarbonization pathway.
Ideologies are typically inspired by utopian visions entailing a radical overhaul of the existing order - what I call the Big Solution. Problems like intrusive government, poverty, and environmental harm may drive initial attraction to a Big Solution, but in time the relationship between problem and solution changes. That is, where once the Big Solution was seen as a means to fixing problems, it eventually becomes an end in itself - one that requires Big Problems to justify. That’s because Big Solutions typically involve painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn). And that pain had better be worth it!
The US federal debt exploded last year. Between a battered economy and trillions in stimulus spending, it will take years to shrink the debt back to a manageable size. In the meantime, the Bold Centrist still wants to fix this country, focusing on six problem areas: healthcare, infrastructure, poverty, social mobility, housing, and threats to the biosphere. The challenge is how to fund the repair job without adding to the public debt or zapping economic growth.
That’s the problem on the micro-level: unhappy and struggling individuals and families. On the macro-level, we have a mismatch between worker skills and employer needs, which has led to chronic labor shortages - especially in the better-paying fields… These shortages not only hurt the company’s bottom line, they undermine labor productivity and economic growth. And the problem’s only going to get worse in the decades to come unless this country comes up with better ways to help people update their skills as needed to meet ever-changing employer demand.
Lifelong learning on a mass scale is in order.
The ASBI would mostly pay for itself through reduced spending on other government programs…An ASBI would not impact eligibility for some non-cash benefits such as housing and Medicaid, as well as any aid meant for children. However, ASBI recipients would have to pay somewhat more for their Medicaid premiums…. So how did I arrive at a cost of $2 a day in new taxes for the ASBI? Easy: tax increase of $216 billion divided by 328.3 million US residents = $658 = less than $2 a day/per Capita.
The advantage of the ASBI over Pell Grants and the Danish scheme is that it’s more flexible, less likely to impose economic hardship on recipients, and more likely to encourage skill building across adulthood. The ASBI wouldn’t force people to quit jobs to go to school and it would allow people to quit jobs to go to school.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, was founded in early 2019 by the then-mayor of Stockton, a city of about 292,000 in California. SEED is midway through an experimental project to demonstrate the advantages of a guaranteed basic income. The project includes a “treatment” group of 125 individuals who will receive a guaranteed monthly stipend of $500 for two years, as well as a control group that does not receive the stipend. Of the 125 in the treatment group, 100 comprise the core research sample and 25 serve as a “politically purposive, or storytelling cohort, or who publicly spoke about their experience with SEED.” (Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year, March 2021).
The first chart is based on annual surveys of violent crime victims, covering the period of 2008-2019 and collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Unfortunately, the BJS did not provide separate data for Asian victims, who are included in the ‘Other’ category... The next chart is hate crime data from thousands of law enforcement agencies, covering the period of 2015-2019 and compiled by the FBI... The last chart summarizes 2015-2019 survey data on the rate of violent victimization by race or ethnicity. This time the BJS did provide specific information on the victimization of Asians.
Conservatives have accepted the right to a public education and emergency medical care. But they don’t seem to have registered the implications of these modern rights. They still seem to think governments must be timid, as if it were impossible to mix fiscal discipline with ambitious policy goals or protect individual liberty while expanding the scope of government. Well, it is possible. Hard but possible.
So… how do people of various political persuasions differ in their worldviews, especially in their understanding of what is likely to lead to what? One way they differ is in the appreciation of scarcity and the implications of scarcity. By scarcity, I mean limited resources to achieve goals and satisfy desires, resources such as time, money, labor, skill sets, materials, the goodwill of others, and so on. As for the implications of scarcity, I mean how the realization that you can’t have everything you want exactly when you want it forces people to find ways to stretch their resources and prioritize their goals.
Okay, that’s the original essay. What I would add now is that ideologues are also prone to magical thinking, as reflected in the attitude that power plus the right values and a correct political understanding are enough to achieve ambitious societal goals.
Root cause attributions are often part of an ideological argument that highlights the opposition between Us and Them. Some common themes:
Their explanations of human suffering are false.
The dominant view is wrong.
The so-called experts are wrong.
Old ways of thinking must be discarded.
We know the true source of human suffering
We know how to think the right way.
Per the above table, a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t be much higher than the median wage in several states. However since my median wage figures are from 2016 and the US median wage has been increasing around 2% a year, let’s bump up the state median wages by 10%. That would make the average median hourly wage $16.75 for the low-paying states and $24.28 for the high-paying states.
In 2020, 132.1 million wage and salary workers age 16 and older were employed in the US. Around 73.3 million were paid by the hour, of which 1.1 million workers were paid wages at or below the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. This represents 1.5% of all hourly paid workers, a decline from 1.9% in 2019 and well below the 13.4% in 1979, when data on minimum wage workers were first collected on a regular basis.
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, here are some characteristics of US workers earning hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage in 2020…