Neil Irwin: “Certain social welfare policies, according to an emerging body of research, may actually encourage more people to work and enable them to do so more productively.”
“That is the conclusion of work that aims to understand in granular detail how different government interventions affect people’s behavior. It amounts to a liberal version of ‘supply-side economics,’ an approach to economics often associated with the conservatives of the Reagan era.”
An interesting interactive graphic from The New York Times tests your perception of the surge of drug overdoses compared with other major causes of death.
Homelessness can be solved “if resources are committed to evidence-based programs,” Mary Cunningham, Sarah Gillespie, and Alexandra Tilsley argue for the Urban Institute.
“That’s where USICH and Opening Doors come in. USICH is an autonomous agency established in 1987 to coordinate the federal response to homelessness and work with local governments and the private sector. Though it has taken different forms, USICH has been reauthorized under both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
“Opening Doors was the first comprehensive federal strategy to end homelessness… Now, seven years after the release of Opening Doors, the work is focused on implementing and measuring the strategies it outlines. By examining which strategies work for different populations, we can understand where more progress is needed and what the field’s next steps could be if Congress reauthorizes USICH instead of eliminating the agency altogether.”
University of Toronto: “Two studies by researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto and their collaborators from the US, UK, France and China, show that six- to nine-month-old infants demonstrate racial bias in favour of members of their own race and racial bias against those of other races.”
“In the first study, “Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music”, published in Developmental Science, results showed that after six months of age, infants begin to associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music.”
“In the second study, “Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty”, published in Child Development, researchers found that six-to eight-month-old infants were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race than from an adult of a different race.”
Anya Kamenetz: “How important is it to have a role model? A new working paper puts some numbers to that question.”
“Having just one black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade reduced low-income black boys’ probability of dropping out of high school by 39 percent, the study found.”
“The study is big. The authors, Seth Gershenson and Constance A. Lindsay of American University, Cassandra M.D. Hart of U.C. Davis and Nicholas Papageorge at Johns Hopkins, looked at long-term records for more than 100,000 black elementary school students in North Carolina.”
David Graham: “On Monday, the department released a memo from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, dated March 31, about DOJ’s relationships with police departments at all levels. The memo voices concern for ‘officer safety, office morale, and public respect’ and says that local control is paramount: ‘It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.'”
“This is in keeping with Sessions’s statements before. He is skeptical of police-reform efforts, and has indicated drawing back from the active role that Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch took. What sticks out is that the Trump Justice Department seems to be interested in undoing the Obama administration’s already-completed work, too. The memo instructs DOJ officials to review all activities, including ‘existing or contemplated consent decrees … to ensure that they fully and effectively promote the principles outlined above.’ Also on Thursday, the Justice Department asked a judge for 90-day pause as it reviews the agreement with Baltimore.”
Washington Post: “The Drug Enforcement Administration takes billions of dollars in cash from people who are never charged with criminal activity, according to a report issued today by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.”
“Since 2007, the report found, the DEA has seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of involvement with the drug trade. But 81 percent of those seizures, totaling $3.2 billion, were conducted administratively, meaning no civil or criminal charges were brought against the owners of the cash and no judicial review of the seizures ever occurred.”
“College is unaffordable for a lot of families. That’s widely acknowledged across party lines. But a new report shows that as many as 95 percent of colleges are completely unaffordable—and thus unavailable—for huge swaths of Americans. For many would-be college students, their choices are delimited by their socioeconomic status before they have even taken the SAT,” Emily Deruy writes for The Atlantic.
“In a new report, the nonprofit Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) tackles those issues—and the numbers aren’t good: While students from the highest income quintile (earning around $160,000 or more) can afford about 90 percent of the more than 2,000 colleges studied, low- and moderate-income students (bringing in around $69,000 or less) can only afford 1 to 5 percent of those colleges.”
“The report offers several recommendations, including increasing the Pell grant and urging states to spend more on higher education. Pell grants are specifically for low-income students, but the cost of college has risen faster than the grants have increased, meaning that even with grant aid, low-income students still struggle the most to pay for college. And the report points out that even when the option to take out federal student loans is factored in, most students still struggle to find an affordable college.”
Claire Cain Miller: “Most people say workers should get paid leave to take care of a baby, a sick family member or themselves, according to two new surveys. But they disagree on the details: who should pay, and whether it should be mandatory or optional.”
“Large majorities support paid leave — between 67 percent and 85 percent, depending on the type of leave — according to the Pew report, which included two nationally representative online surveys of 8,000 Americans total. One survey was about people’s general opinions about family leave, and the other about their personal experiences with it.”
“But Americans are torn about the government’s role. Only half of people over all and one-third of Republicans think it should mandate leave, versus continuing to let employers decide. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats supported a government mandate.”
Thomas Edsall: “What drives success? Cognitive skills are important, but so are harder-to-measure strengths that fall under the heading of what is sometimes called character.”
“…the spectrum of noncognitive skills and character strengths are a major factor in American class stratification. Whether these factors are more or less important than extrinsic forces like globalization, automation and declining unionization remains unclear, but changing family structures are evidently leaving millions of men and women ill-equipped to ascend the socioeconomic ladder.”
“…neither religious leaders nor practicing politicians nor government employees have found the levers that actually make disadvantaged families more durable or functional. As a corollary, the failure of government efforts to affect or slow down negative developments has left an opening for conservatives to argue that government interventions make things worse.”
Thomas B. Edsall: “At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate… But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.”
“It would be paradoxical if the right-wing takeover of the country on Nov. 8 were to instigate significant policy initiatives to address this problem. Or perhaps not so paradoxical, given that males who are particularly conflicted about their disempowered status in American life — and who are the most loyal Trump supporters — might be the ultimate beneficiaries of this kind of reform.”
“It has been a longstanding objective of right-wing regimes to push women back into traditional gender roles. Is that what’s going on here? Or could it be something less pernicious and more important?”
Vincent Geloso: “Basically, a hidden (private cost) of the war on drugs is that we must reallocate resources that we could have used otherwise. Its a little like when I say that it is meaningless to compare healthcare expenditures to GDP in Canada and the United States because Canadians assume costs in a hidden manner through rationing. Waiting lists in Canada are longer than in the US. The cost is lost wages and enduring pain and that cost will not appear in measures of expenditures to GDP. The war on drugs works the same way. There is a fiscal cost (expenditures dedicated to it and the taxes that we must impose), there is a crime cost (destruction of lives and property) and there is a reallocation cost of privately providing security which is hard to measure.”
Robert E. Rubin: “Roughly 20 percent of U.S. children live in poverty. In the wealthiest country in the world, that’s not just a moral outrage — it’s a serious detriment to our economic future. For low-income children, Medicaid and SNAP are investments that significantly improve outcomes later in life. For example, one study found that children who received SNAP were less likely to experience stunted growth, heart disease and obesity as adults — and had graduation rates that were 18 percentage points higher. We need to do more, not less, to help these children — by providing early family intervention, better schools and housing, safer neighborhoods and much else.”
“What’s more, these programs serve as ‘automatic stabilizers’ during an economic downturn: In a weak economy, as more people lose income and become eligible for federal benefits, the programs expand, putting more money in more people’s pockets. People then spend that money, increasing demand and helping the economy recover.”
“All this adds up to a clear but underappreciated reality: Anti-poverty programs are an economic imperative. And yet their future is in jeopardy.”
Mother Jones: “A new report reveals a sobering truth behind the wrongful convictions of innocent people: Black Americans are more likely to serve time in prison for crimes they didn’t commit than their white counterparts.”
“In the National Registry of Exonerations’ new report, Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States, researchers looked at the 1,900 exonerations reported in the Registry between 1989 and October 2016. They found that while African Americans comprise only 13 percent of the population, they comprise 47 percent of those who were exonerated. This disparity cuts across all major crimes committed, but the report focuses on the three categories where exonerations are most frequent: murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes.”