Trust, But Terrify

Published this over at Freeman.

Have been getting a lot of pushback, questions like, "Can you be specific about what aspects of being poor and black are against the law?"  (And then, presumably, person mentally drops the mic and walks off stage....)

My question is, "Did you even read the article?"

I never claimed that the LAWS oppress the poor.  The POLICE do.  But it's not really the fault of the police, at least not primarily.

We all have a lot of normal, nonviolent daily activity. And a LOT of it is illegal, because we have criminalized everything.

The police, in their defense (and I mean that, sincerely), can't possibly arrest everyone who commits a crime. So they focus, quite sensibly, on people who (1) for reasons of simple prejudice we "all know" commit more crimes and (2) are less likely to be able to defend themselves or make trouble for the police.

Now, it's also likely that there is more actual criminal behavior in poor neighborhoods.

But even if there weren't, overcriminalization forces the police to ration their attention. The difference in "arrest and hassle" rates across race is greater than the difference in criminal proclivity due to poverty.

Race matters because of overcriminalization. It's not just a proxy for poverty.

(A somewhat different, but related, view from Sheldon Richman...)

Anonyman: From Law and Order to Disgusted

Anonyman sends this link...

And this email:

1) your program clearly isn't serving the needs of the poor if they are doing this
2) if you put a 77 year old in jail, you've really lost the war on poverty 

After being a law- talking guy for a while, I've come to realize that most of our justice system is really a war on the poor, not poverty. 

Preach, brother.

We Won the War on Poverty

A truly remarkable quote, from the NYTimes, of all places:

... the poor have made progress since the ‘60s as the nation’s living standards have risen. If poverty were defined based on what people bought in 1967, adjusted only for inflation, the poverty rate would have fallen to about 11 percent today, according to research by Jane Waldfogel and other researchers at Columbia University. 

But poverty is best measured relative to the actual living standards of our own society. By the standards of the 19th century, for instance, practically no American is poor. In comparison with Bangladeshis, there are precious few poor in the United States. 

A more nuanced analysis of the evolution of poverty and America’s efforts to combat it is not so consoling. Recent research on poverty suggests that government programs have done, in fact, a much better job than the headline statistics suggest. 

The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that the job of fixing it has gotten harder. “The government is doing more to reduce poverty now than it did in the 1960s,” Professor Waldfogel said. 

Um....wait.  The reason the poverty rate has budged so little is that we keep moving the target.  If the income of the poor doubled, but the rest of the country tripled its income, we'd say the poverty problem had gotten worse, when in fact the health, income, and other measures of welfare have improved dramatically. That's...that's...Orwellian!

It may be fair enough to redefine poverty that way.  But the usual narrative is the poor are getting worse off as "the rich get richer."  Instead, the poor are much better off, and the market economy has delivered on its promises of ending poverty, by any consistent definition.  The only way to say that the poor are worse off is to assume that the poor are as obsessed with relative status as the envious intellectuals of the left.  (On which Dr. Nozick had some interesting things to say).

Nod to Anonyman

UPDATE:  We DID!  We DID!  We DID win the war on poverty.

Spectacular: Lake Wobegonomics Research from the New School

This is from the New York Times.  It was written by Teresa Ghilarducci, the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz chair of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research

Six months ago, I visited North Carolina's state treasurer, Janet Cowell – the only Democrat in the administration now – and met with citizen advocates.. Our trip had impact, on us at least. On the plane coming home my colleague turned to me shell shocked, "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?" 

Ask two questions: How rich is the state? And what percentage of its children live in poverty? That's a working definition of good fiscal policy…. Let’s look at North Carolina. It is the 39th richest state, and yet it ranks 12th for the percentage of children living in poverty – only 11 states fare worse. 

Um, ma’am….if it is the 39th richest state, that means it's the 12th poorest state.  That means there are 11 states that are poorer. And if it is the 12th for percentage of children living in poverty….then again there are 11 states that are poorer. It’s exactly the same proportion, not out of line at all.  What's with this "And yet..." thing you got going?

Perhaps you believe that ALL of the states should have fewer children in poverty than adults in poverty, as a percentage, COMPARED TO OTHER STATES, but I’m a trained economist and I can assure you that averages don’t actually work that way. If some states rank higher for child poverty than overall wealth, then some state will rank lower. It’s just the way numbers work.

So, on to your question, "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?" 
(And putting aside the fact that NC has exactly as much poverty as our wealth would suggest).
That "illegal poverty" thing you bring up seems like a pretty radical solution.  I mean, we could make it illegal, and arrest poor people, or shoot them.  But I think that's a terrible idea.  Here's the thing: in any group of states, unless they are all identical, won't it be true that some are richer than others?  If you have a purely relative measure of poverty, then it will always be true that half the states are poor, because they are below median income.  We could increase income by 10 times, across the board, and half the people would still be below the median. 

Of course, this is fine, given that your answer to the question, "How much money should we give away?" is simply, "More."  It could never be enough.  And that's why those relative measures of poverty are so useful.  What has your knickers knotted, ma'am, is not poverty. It's inequality.  Let me assure that that is quite a different problem.  Most real solutions to poverty actually increase inequality.  Likewise, most solutions to inequality sharply increase objective (not relative) poverty.

I wanted to check to see where she got her PhD, because it had to be Berkeley.  Yup... Berkeley.

A kind reader suggested this is an appropriate illustration.

Nod to Joel R., for sending me the NYTimes piece in the first place.

Almost cut my hair

People, we almost lost the semi-sacred KPC monthly tradition of Christina Romer writing an Economic View column in the NY Times and then me mocking it here.

Almost but not quite.

Almost,  because 90 percent of the column about the minimum wage makes total sense.

Not quite because of the following two passages:

1.  some minimum-wage workers are middle-class teenagers or secondary earners in fairly well-off households. But the available data suggest that roughly half the workers likely to be affected by the $9-an-hour level proposed by the president are in families earning less than $40,000 a year. So while raising the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour may not be particularly well targeted as an anti-poverty proposal, it’s not badly targeted, either.

Yikes! What a low bar Romer has for government. A program that under the most charitable of definitions only hits an intended target less than half of the time is "not badly targeted"?

The official "poverty line" for a family of 4 is $23,000. So less than half of the policy effects hit a population defined as almost double the poverty line. Even for our poor blind doddering Uncle Sam, that is shitty targeting.

2. Then there are the last two sentences of the piece:

And pre-kindergarten education, which the president proposes to make universal, has been shown in rigorous studies to strengthen families and reduce poverty and crime. Why settle for half-measures when such truly first-rate policies are well understood and ready to go?

Please note that pre-K had not been mentioned at all in the previous 16 paragraphs of the op-ed. Only in the penultimate sentence does Romer pull the pre-K rabbit out of her hat, informing us that "rigorous studies" show it reduces poverty, among other wondrous things. She links to a review article which does not present any evidence that pre-K reduces poverty!

Yes, the EITC is a much better targeted and effective anti-poverty program than is the minimum wage. Good on Romer for saying so. But throwing in universal pre-K as a "well understood and ready to go" poverty reduction program is what kept our KPC tradition alive for another month at least.

I feel like I owe it so someone.

Corn to Ethanol Fiasco

As the WaPo noted, the US has a wide variety of idiotic "go green!" energy policies. It makes a little more sense once you realize that sacrifice and wasted resources are actually the goal, as in any religious exercise.

But the very worst is likely the requirement that companies find a way to use more bio-fuels.  And in THIS special place of stupidity, the focus on corn-based ethanal is the worst, of the worst, of the worst.

Given the amount of petroleum based fertilizer we use to raise corn, the environmental return on converting from oil to ethanol fuel is about 0.8.  That is, all things considered, the net impact of ethanol bio-fuel is actually harmful to the environment, given the distortion in land use and the expanded conversion of forested land into cornfields.  That's bad.

The world price of corn has gone up, and people all over the world are finding ways to grow more corn.  That is partly bad, and partly good.

But, we are NOT using the corn for food!  And that is really hurting poor people who depended on corn as a high calorie source, and protein source.  That, dear ones, is the worst, of the worst, of the worst, of the dumbest darned thing I can think of.  We waste petroleum to pay politically connected corporations to build useless ethanol stills so poor people can starve.  Really?  

Poor Little Rich Kids

Is Growing Up Affluent Risky for Adolescents or Is the Problem Growing Up inan Affluent Neighborhood?

Terese Lund & Eric Dearing, Journal of Research on Adolescence, forthcoming

Abstract:  Community studies indicating that affluence has social-emotional consequences for youth have conflated family and neighborhood wealth. We examined adolescent boys' delinquency and adolescent girls' anxiety-depression as a function of family, neighborhood, and cumulative affluence in a sample that is primarily of European–American descent, but geographically and economically diverse (N = 1,364). Boys in affluent neighborhoods reported higher levels of delinquency and girls in affluent neighborhoods reported higher levels of anxiety-depression compared with youth in middle-class neighborhoods. Neither family affluence nor cumulative affluence, however, placed boys or girls at risk in these domains. Indeed, boys' delinquency and girls' anxiety-depression levels were lowest for those in affluent families living in middle-class neighborhoods.

A Beautiful ____ in the Neighborhood(s)

An Alternative Approach to Addressing Selection Into and Out of SocialSettings: Neighborhood Change and African American Children’s EconomicOutcomes

Patrick Sharkey
Sociological Methods Research, May 2012, Pages 251-293

Abstract: This article develops a method to estimate the impact of change in a particular social setting, the residential neighborhood, that is designed to address nonrandom selection into a neighborhood and nonrandom selection out of a neighborhood. Utilizing matching to confront selection into neighborhood environments and instrumental variables to confront selection
out of changing neighborhoods, the method is applied to assess the effect of a decline in neighborhood concentrated disadvantage on the economic fortunes of African American children living within changing neighborhoods. Substantive findings indicate that a decline in neighborhood concentrated disadvantage during childhood leads to increases in adult earnings and income, but has no effects on educational attainment or other social outcomes.

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Neighborhood Effects on the Long-Term Well-Being of Low-Income Adults

Jens Ludwig et al.
Science, 21 September 2012, Pages 1505-1510

Abstract: Nearly 9 million Americans live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, places that also tend to be racially segregated and dangerous. Yet, the effects on the well-being of residents of moving out of such communities into less distressed areas remain uncertain. Using data from Moving to Opportunity, a unique randomized housing mobility experiment, we found that moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term (10- to 15-year) improvements in adult physical and mental health and subjective well-being, despite not affecting economic self-sufficiency. A 1–standard deviation decline in neighborhood poverty (13 percentage points) increases subjective well-being by an amount equal to the gap in subjective well-being between people whose annual incomes differ by $13,000 — a large amount given that the average control group income is $20,000. Subjective well-being is more strongly affected by changes in neighborhood economic disadvantage than racial segregation, which is important because racial segregation has been declining since 1970, but income segregation has been increasing.

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With a nod to Kevin Lewis