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Javier E

What Gives Poor Kids a Shot at Better Lives? Economists Find an Unexpected Answer - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-community-employment-3eeef1c3

poor employment income research economics social mobility mobility social

shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • For all our divisions, Americans have been united by a singular obsession: How can we have a better life? Economists call this economic mobility—the ability to move up the income ladder and make it to a higher rung than your parents.
  • Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has spent more than a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible, and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others.
  • Using anonymized census and tax data, Chetty and his fellow researchers have been able to follow millions of Americans from childhood into adulthood. The data showed that even in neighborhoods bordering one another, outcomes for poor children can be vastly different.
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  • Analyzing data covering a near universe of Americans born from 1978 to 1992, the researchers found that when employment among the poor parents of children in a community improves, those children are better off economically as adults
  • it doesn’t rely on whether a child’s own parents are employed: Outcomes also improve for children who simply grow up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs. In other words, their own parents might be unemployed, but if their schoolmates’ parents work, their outcomes will be better.
  • : In places where parental employment deteriorates, the opposite happens—children do worse as adults.
  • “Growing up in a community where employment rates are higher for people in your race and class—if those employment rates are higher, the kids who grew up in those environments do better in the long run,”
  • For poor white children born in 1978, vast swaths of the U.S. were a land of opportunity. Apart from some areas, such as Appalachia and Rust Belt areas of Michigan and Ohio, these children overall had a good chance of making it to a higher rung on the income ladder than their parents. 
  • For poor white children born in 1992, the map was more constrained. While some parts of America, such as the upper Midwest, remained bastions of opportunity, much of the U.S. did worse. Children with parents at the 25th percentile who grew up in Milwaukee had lower income when they turned 27 in 2019—an inflation-adjusted $30,619—than their older counterparts had.
  • This dynamic, playing out across the country, led to a significant widening of the income gap between poor and well-off white children. A white child born to parents at the 25th percentile in 1978 made, on average, an inflation-adjusted $10,383 less at age 27 than a child born to parents at the 75th percentile. But for children born in 1992, that income difference was 27% larger at $13,202.
  • In contrast to the environment for poor white children, few places in America provided poor Black children born in 1978 much opportunity for advancement.
  • Kent County, Mich., is a little more than 100 miles directly east of Milwaukee, and home to Grand Rapids, another old-line manufacturing city. Black children born to parents at the 25th percentile by income in 1978 who grew up in Kent had an average household income of $17,029 at age 27. That put them at the 28th percentile by income, leaving them on essentially the same rung as their parents.
  • But poor Black children born in 1992 who grew up in Kent County did better. On average, a Black child at the 25th percentile in that birth cohort had inflation-adjusted household income of $23,547 at age 27, or 38% more than their 1978 counterpart. 
  • One thing that changed for poor white children compared with poor Black children was the relative share of their parents who were employed. 
  • In Milwaukee County, for example, the share of the parents of low-income white children who were employed went from 69.1% for children born in 1978 to 55.6% for children born in 1992—a 13.5 percentage point decline. Those employment declines were likely driven by the loss of more than a third of the county’s manufacturing jobs during those years. Children born at the 25th percentile in 1992 reached the 44th percentile on average, 4 percentage points lower than those born in 1978.
  • And this pattern of falling parental employment and worsening outcomes repeated itself across much of the country. In counties where employment rates among poor white parents fell sharply, such as Philadelphia County, Pa., the income ranks of poor white children in adulthood fell too. Mobility tended not to deteriorate as much for poor white children growing up in counties such as Sumner, Tenn., where parental employment held up better.
  • the experience in Kent was the general pattern across the country, with employment rates for the parents of poor Black children falling less than their poor white counterparts, or gaining. And as was the case with poor whites, the new research finds that changes in parental employment rates in a community were strongly associated with changes in children’s outcomes.
  • the researchers emphasize that it is not a zero-sum game, with mobility for poor Black people improving only because mobility for poor white people is falling: Indeed, places where opportunity for Black children improved most are also where white children did best.
Javier E

'Anxiety' Review: Confronting That Queasy Feeling - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...g-that-queasy-feeling-111e359e

culture anxiety review book

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • In “Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide,” Mr. Chopra builds his case on the pillars of four traditions of thought that in their various ways see anxiety as an inevitable part of the human condition
  • he first and oldest is Buddhism, which teaches that a feeling of dissatisfaction with life, dukkha, is the root of all mental suffering.
  • n the 19th and 20th centuries, Mr. Chopra notes, European existentialists saw anxiety as the necessary consequence of human freedom: Realizing that we have to choose our moral values and fashion our own futures induces a kind of vertigo as we feel the burden of responsibility for our fates.
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  • Freudian psychoanalysis offers yet another account. As Mr. Chopra’s summary has it: “Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality.”
  • Finally, there is the idea of “materialist alienation,” advocated by both Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse. This theory identifies the sources of anxiety in the material and economic conditions of society rather than in the individual psyche:
  • Although Mr. Chopra, a philosophy professor emeritus at Brooklyn College, notes many overlaps and commonalities in the four approaches, their differences make them inconsistent as a set. It isn’t clear that they are centrally concerned with anxiety at all.
  • ukkha in Buddhism isn’t usually understood to refer to anxiety but rather to a state of discontent.
  • Mr. Chopra acknowledges that one of his key existentialist figures, Nietzsche, never uses the term. Alluding to Marx’s alienated labor, Mr. Chopra asks: “What does such alienation feel like?” His answer: “Like anxiety, for it is anxiety.
  • Mr. Chopra interprets everything through the lens of anxiety and as a result either magnifies its significance or sees it where it is not. He says, for example, that from his own experience he has concluded that being “indecisive, distracted, insecure, or anxious . . . amounted to the same thing.” But for many people those conditions are very different.
  • Mr. Chopra is a serial user of the “presumptive we”: using the first-person plural to speak for all of us when he is really speaking for some or sometimes only himself.
  • At times Mr. Chopra writes of anxiety as though it were a key to self-definition, saying, at one point “thus does anxiety inform me of who I am.” Tell me your anxieties and I’ll tell you who you are may sound profound, but replace “anxieties” with “dreams,” “loves,” “hopes” or “values” and it is just as true.
  • Even philosophy in Mr. Chopra’s view springs not from wonder, as Aristotle and Plato claimed, but from anxiety. However, neither those giants of thought nor others who followed them for centuries had much to say about it
  • That “anxiety is a basic human affect and signature of human consciousness” is made somewhat problematic, he concedes, by the fact that it only emerged as “an explicitly named and identified problem in the nineteenth century.”
  • Still, Mr. Chopra is right to want to normalize the anxiety that people really do feel, saying that it is wrong to think that mental health consists in being anxiety-free. His basic therapeutic advice—not to push anxiety away but “to see what it ‘points to’ ”—is also spot-on
  • his book is a good primer on the major philosophers of anxiety, or at least its close relations.
Javier E

Opinion | In Indiana, the MAGA Revolution Eats Its Own - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ionalist-republican-party.html

revolution gop division 2024 extremism politics US history crisis

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”
  • The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero-sum, meaning it is either going to triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”
Javier E

The Bottomless College Parent Trap - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...trap-higher-education-ce6d7b86

college sports culture

shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • Payments to thousands of former and current athletes will approach $2.8 billion, minus the trial lawyers’ cut of the class-action suits. This follows the NCAA’s decision to let college athletes benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses
  • Most legal analysis of the settlement concludes that the days of the “amateur” college athlete are over. In the future, the men and women on Division I teams and others likely will be regarded as professionals who will be paid to play by universities through revenue-sharing agreements up to $20 million a year per school.
Javier E

Opinion | Belgium Shows What Europe Has Become - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...belgium-election-europe.html

belgium EU crisis right-wing

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.
  • For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,
  • The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state
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  • As the ideological glue that allows Belgians to cohabit has come unstuck, the traditional parties of government have found it difficult to retain public backing. Amid a wider fracturing of the vote, Flemish and Walloon voters are now lured by adventurers on right and left
  • Belgium serves as a stern reminder that there are few bulwarks against the trends that ail European nations. The country is no Italy or Netherlands, where the far right is already in government, and party democracy and its postwar prosperity survive only as faint memories.
  • Yet even with Belgium’s lower inequality rates, higher union membership and comparatively stronger party infrastructure, the march of the far right has also proved eerily unstoppable.
Javier E

Wrong Case, Right Verdict - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678551

rule of law history US trump

shared by Javier E on 31 May 24 - No Cached
  • If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cas... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thomas-recuse-trump-jan-6.html

Scotus impartiality constitution

shared by Javier E on 29 May 24 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
  • The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.
Javier E

Opinion | Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...supreme-court-nra-aclu.html

free speech viewpoint discrimination NRA SCOTUS

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • where is the line between government persuasion and government coercion?
  • In Justice Sotomayor’s words, “At the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.”
  • When the government can pick sides in an ideological debate and wield its power to suppress opposing views, then you’ve laid the foundation for authoritarianism. If free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” then censorship is one of the tyrant’s greatest weapons.
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  • As Douglass argued, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
  • Acts of intimidation are as grave a threat to free speech as restrictive government policies. Again, Douglass said it well: “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”
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