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Good stuff, including “even if income support programs [i.e. welfare] … are not mobility-enhancing for their adult recipients, they may improve opportunity for upward mobility among their children.”
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Seems to bear out what i’ve said here before. Most Americans think the official poverty line doesn’t capture all actual poverty, and any ‘absolute’ poverty line is more like a snapshot of a regularly adjusted relative concept
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How strange: many young French speakers can’t agree on the gender of some pretty common nouns.
links for 2008-02-27
27-Feb-08
links for 2008-02-22
22-Feb-08
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Lane Kenworthy points out that the US has high relative poverty and, for a rich country, pretty high absolute levels of poverty too.
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Good post on the inheritance of status, also worth reading for the comedy value of the first comment in response.
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Ezra Klein: “Nobody’s saying we should make suburbs illegal. But we don’t have to abide by public policy that makes them look far cheaper and more economical than they are”. US density levels are indeed shockingly low.
links for 2008-02-19
19-Feb-08
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America’s war in the Philipines presaged atrocities in Vietnam and Iraq
links for 2008-02-18
18-Feb-08
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Strong arguments from Ryan Avent for and against both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade
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Yes, it does.
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Among other things, Daniel Hall makes the interesting point that people may systematically under-estimate the value of public transport versus roads as they don’t take indirect effects (such as impact on land use) into account.
links for 2008-02-16
16-Feb-08
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Megan brings us the latest in her long-running series “Dumbest Free-Marketeer Arguments Ever”.
Good old globalization
13-Feb-08
This post at Foreign Policy quotes an old remark by Tyler Cowen to the effect that
The more globalized parts of Mexico — most of all the north — have done extremely well since NAFTA passed. The biggest problems remain in the least globalized parts, most of all the south and big chunks of the interior.
One hears this kind of thing a lot, and I think it’s pretty silly. For one thing, if NAFTA opened up Mexico to imports of very cheap (thanks to US government subsidies) corn and these imports undermined the market for corn produced in the South - doesn’t that mean the South is feeling negative effects from globalization? Or are we only meant to ascribe positive effects to globalization? And since I thought we were meant to be down on methodological nationalism these days, does the term ‘globalization’ actually mislead if it labels trade links that (sometimes barely) cross national borders as more significant than trade links (probably deeper and maybe even longer) within national borders? And yes, I’m aware of the implications of this line of thinking for anti-trade scaremongering too.
links for 2008-02-09
09-Feb-08
links for 2008-02-08
08-Feb-08
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Sentence of the day: “Is collaborating with libertarian think tanks to oppose carbon restrictions really the most efficacious method of boosting spending on anti-malarials?”
links for 2008-02-03
03-Feb-08
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Huge decreases in malaria have been achieved in Rwanda in short time. If applicable to the rest of Africa, this could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, at the cost of about $10 billion.