The Trouble with Helping Iran’s Dissidents
Iranian reform activists have a love/hate relationship with the Western NGOs that often advocate on their behalf.
Compassion and Coalition
Imagine an infant born into poverty. this child is statistically at greater than normal risk for every bad social outcome in later life associated with early chronic trauma. As the infant grows into a toddler, the child is more likely to have poor cognitive and emotional skills; later on, to do poorly in school; to…
Redeeming Public Remedy
Private enterprise produces employment, wages, and wealth, but our public structures are what facilitate the conduct of business, providing the framework necessary for markets to thrive. Key public systems also help protect people against the risks of a free-market economy and provide the infrastructure for economic opportunity such as public- and higher-education systems, tasks that…
Creating an Opportunity Society
Social mobility, economic security, and self-reliance are at the heart of the American ideal. These widely shared goals can be the foundation for a new political consensus built around the cultivation of financial and human assets. At least two sources animate this new policy context. First, globalization is widening economic inequality and insecurity, for the…
Debt: The New Safety Net
Victor and Eloise represent the new face of debt in America. Together, they’ve worked in a series of low-wage jobs that include stints at fast-food restaurants, small factories, and hotels. Technically, they are not poor according to the government’s official definition of “poverty,” but the economic vulnerability of the working poor and the near-poor are…
Wages and the Social Contract
From the end of world war ii through the mid 1970s, the real wages of American workers nearly doubled, moving up in tandem with the growth in productivity. The United States benefited from an implicit social contract: By working hard and contributing to productivity, profits, and economic growth, workers and their families could expect improved…
Faith, Charity, and Justice
In her book Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt recounts a story in which Pope John XXIII asked one of the Vatican gardeners, “How are things going?” The worker replied, “Badly, badly, Your Eminence,” telling Pope John what he earned and how many family members he had to support. “We’ll have to do something about…
High-Quality Preschool as Antipoverty
New evidence on brain development during a child’s early years makes it clear that early childhood should be a focus of increased policy attention. We now know that the basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that might be compared to the construction of a home: Beginning before birth, the brain’s…
Closing College Doors
American higher education is no longer the avenue of intergenerational upward mobility that it once was. Instead of serving as an agent of opportunity, much of higher education has become simply another agent of stratification. Two statistics are especially alarming. Top-achieving high-school graduates from low-income families now head immediately off to college at the same…
Inequality, Race, and Remedy
Our nation, at its best, pursues the ideal that what we look like and where we come from should not determine the benefits, burdens, or responsibilities that we bear in our society. Because we believe that all people are created equal in terms of rights, dignity, and the potential to achieve great things, we see…
What Can Worker Training Do?
One out of every six full-time U.S. workers earns less than 125 percent of the poverty line — under $18,865 a year for a family of three. And the share of low-wage workers is considerably higher in many of the sectors with the most job growth: retailing, hotel and food services, health care, and human…
Using Carrots and Sticks
In the last decade, we have seen that an effective approach to reducing poverty requires changes in personal behavior as well as government support. Further, we have learned that by judiciously applying policies that demand and then reward good behavior — what might be called carrots-and-sticks policies — we can induce and maintain the behavior…
False Choices on Poverty
From the 1970s through the mid-1990s, poverty policy was among the nastiest battlefields in the national culture war. Left and right slugged it out over why people were poor and how (or whether) to help them. Conservatives generally enjoyed the upper hand in these debates by focusing on individual-level causes of poverty, like family breakdown,…
Don’t Blame Immigrants For Poverty Wages
Our love-hate relationship with foreign-born workers has once again taken center stage in the national drama over immigration, only now it’s set against a backdrop of heightened concerns over national security and an unprecedented geographic dispersal of the foreign-born. Legal as well as undocumented immigrants are widely blamed for displacing U.S. workers and driving down…
Is Education the Cure for Poverty?
Economists may disagree a lot on policy, but we all agree on the “education premium” — the earnings boost associated with more education. But what role can education play in a realistic antipoverty policy agenda? And what are the limits of that role? First, it depends on whether you’re talking about children or adults, and…
Making Poverty History
We might not expect TV’s American Idol to be out in front of most presidential candidates on issues of national importance, but that’s what happened this spring. AI’s producers announced that they would dedicate two evenings to raising funds and awareness for children and young people in poverty, in both America and Africa. The show’s…
The Changing Face of Poverty in America
“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1960 american workers produced a gross domestic Product of $13,847 (in year 2000 dollars) for every man, woman, and child in the country. By 1969, GDP per capita rose to $18,578. In that period, the poverty…
Era of Hope and Sorrow
Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 by Jack Beatty (Knopf, 496 pages, $28.95) West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson (Yale University Press, 416 pages, $30.00) Are we living through a “new Gilded Age”? Although the phrase calls up images of rococo mansions…
Can Block Clubs Block Despair?
Why do some poor communities fall apart while others cohere? Community organization can help — up to a point.
Blowing Off the War
You might have had this experience at one time or another: Armed with an opinion you may not have thought much about, you find yourself arguing with someone who disagrees with you on a topic of current events. As the debate proceeds, you begin to understand that you’re actually wrong. The arguments you make to…
The Health of Nations
How Europe, Canada, and our own VA do health care better.
Branding the Democrats
From the May print issue: Staring down the president on the firing of U.S. attorneys sends a message of Democratic toughness.
Obama and the Rules
Democratic presidential primary contests often follow a familiar pattern: There is one candidate (usually the one I find myself supporting) with a high-minded pitch for “a new kind of politics” — what the Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein recently called the “wine track” candidate — and there is a “beer track” candidate who says…
Our Bodies, Our Choices
The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering by Michael J. Sandel (Belknap Press, 162 pages, $18.95) Most religious traditions today not only accept advances in medical science but regard them in some sense as a moral imperative. Christians say, “God helps those who help themselves,” Jews are urged to “repair the…
Shul Politics
Washington is a city of microcultures with major power. At first glance, its C-SPAN-ready inhabitants may all look alike, but over time you learn to distinguish the import of the small differences that Washingtonians allow themselves. If you see a gaggle of people smoking outside a formal dress event, for instance, you’re likely looking at…
Is Rising Inequality Reversible?
New figures came out at the end of march showing that income inequality in 2005 reached the highest levels since the 1920s. By coincidence, presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani that same day declared his support for the flat tax and received the endorsement of Steve Forbes. That the current front-runner for the Republican nomination could believe…
What Rudy Believes
Gun control? Welcoming immigrants? A woman’s right to choose? Never mind his past positions. The only -ism that Rudy Giuliani believes in is sadism.
