Half Changed World

Laura at 11d and Megan McArdle are going back and forth about child care subsidies today.  The comment that struck me was this one from "buffpilot" at Megan’s blog:

"We don’t need to give a subsidy to anyone, but making a means-tested
welfare, would be fine with mean. But base it on the income needed in
Mississippi – since you can move! If you want to live in NYC make the
money, don’t have kids, or move. Its YOUR choice. But don’t ask me to
give you money so you can live your lifestyle without making any
sacrifices. That’s what you want."

Similarly, when Bitch PhD posted last month about how unaffordable housing is, even given that her family has a good income, she got lots of "that’s what you get for living in California" type comments.

I really don’t have a good answer for the public policy question of how to handle cost of living disparities.  As has been pointed out repeatedly during the SCHIP discussion, a family in NYC living on $60,000 is in a fundamentally different situation than a family in Iowa with the same income.  But at least some of that difference is a matter of choice.  Are you willing to tax an Iowa family with a potentially lower income level to help that New York family?  Or do you tax the New York family more?  In spite of the federal tax deduction for state income and property tax payments, richer states — with higher costs of living — tend to pay more in federal taxes than they get back.  This is justified in the name of progressivity. But if you you take the cost of living argument seriously, progressivity might cut in the other direction.

Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house.  Long time readers may remember that I’ve written quite a bit about housework before.

I don’t think there’s anything inherent to housecleaning that makes it less moral to hire someone to vacuum your floors or scrub your toilets than to hire someone to mow your lawn or cook dinner.  And while Jody’s points about the lousy pay that most housecleaners get are totally on target, there’s a huge swath of the economy that is just as underpaid, but not as visible.  And most of us eat at restaurants without interrogating them as to what the busboys are making.

We don’t use a housecleaning service these days (we got a roomba!), but I didn’t feel guilty when we did.  My personal moral line is that I won’t use one of the big services (e.g. Merry Maids, that sort of thing), because too little of the money that you pay goes to the people doing the dirty work.  (And Barbara Ehrenreich also convinced me that they don’t get the house particularly clean.)  I know a few people who have worked as housecleaners, and while it’s hard work for not a whole lot of money, the fact that they have multiple employers gives them a degree of independence that lots of low-wage workers don’t have. (I do think the DC area is probably atypical, in that the Zoe Baird
history has created a real market for housecleaners and nannies who are
legally allowed to work and are reporting their income for taxes.)

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism has a really good action packet you can download with information about ethical treatment of domestic workers.  It talks about things you can do, from treating any workers that you hire justly, to advocating for expansions of various labor standards to include domestic workers.  It also includes a link to this article from Lilith magazine that offers a Jewish feminist perspective on hiring a housecleaner.

This week’s book is one of the ones that Nick Hornby writes about in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Stuart, a life backwards, by Alexander Masters, is the biography of Stuart Shorter.  Who is Stuart Shorter, you may ask.  He’s a homeless man who lived in Cambridge, England.  A violent criminal.  A drug user.  Someone with borderline personality disorder.  The kind of person most people try hard not to make eye contact with, if they can’t avoid entirely.  So, in many ways, the simple idea of writing a biography about Stuart is a political statement, an argument that his life is as worthy of study as the politicians, scientists, or writers who are more traditional subjects of biography.

But the book is far more than just a political statement.  The edition I have is covered with blurbs from impressive reviews, with "extraordinary" and "funny" being the most common words used.  Masters does an impressive job of portraying Stuart sympathetically without  whitewashing his crimes or excusing his truly awful choices.  He includes Stuart’s comments on the draft manuscript (which he thought was boring) and credits him with the idea of telling his life backwards, unfolding from their first encounters (working together to protest the unjust arrest of two social workers for not preventing drug dealing at a homeless shelter) to his earliest childhood (when he was both physically and sexually abused).  When Masters calls Stuart his friend, I believe him.

In another blurb, Zadie Smith is quoted as saying "It’s been years since I’ve been so delighted by a book."  Either she’s off her rocker or she’s got a different definition of "delighted" than I do.  The book is many things, but delightful is not one of them.  It’s depressing as hell.  If Neil in 49-Up is a walking advertisement for the welfare state, Stuart’s story is a parable about the limits of the welfare state.  Unlike his American counterparts, Stuart is provided a place to live and a living stipend, but neither is enough to give stability to his "chaotic" life.

At one point, Alexander is flabbergasted when Stuart refers to "posh" people who live on council estates — what we’d call public housing.  He writes:

"The boy’s a freak, surely.
"No.  He’s not.  People like Stuart — the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups — people who’ve had their school and social training lopped off at twelve: they simply don’t understand the way the big world works.  They are isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them.  If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation.  It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death."

It seems like talk about divorce is popping up on a bunch of parenting blogs, from RebelDad to the Business Week Working Parents blog.  I just don’t have the energy/time right now to write the long thoughtful post I want to about divorce, so I’m just going to put out some links and initial thoughts.

The main point that I want to make is that the number that often gets tossed around about divorce rates — that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce — just isn’t true.  It was a projection based on looking at what if the increase in divorce rates in the 70s continued at that pace, and in fact, the divorce rates have fallen since then.  Moreover, the most significant trend is that the divorce rates have fallen much faster among more educated individuals than among less educated individuals.

For example, of the women with at least a 4-year college degree who
married between 1990 and 1994, only about 17 percent were divorced
within 10 years.  For women without a HS degree, the figure is nearly
40 percent.  I don’t think either the decline in overall divorce rates since the
1970s or the increasing class gap in the rates has penetrated into the
general consciousness.

[For those of you interested in the research: Here’s a powerpoint presentation by Steven Martin that goes through the analysis, and here’s the full paper of his research on the "divorce divide".  And here’s a paper by David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks that talks about it in the context of single parenting more broadly.]

I think it’s a good idea to think about the future and to take risks into account when making your choices. But I don’t think the Leslie Bennetts of the world are doing people a favor by trying to generate hysteria over the risk of divorce, especially for highly educated women.

Via Laura at 11d, I read this thread on cities vs. suburbs at Matthew Yglesias’ blog.  One comment jumped out at me:

"What’s with this "suburbia is cheaper" claim? Where I live, suburbia is
more expensive (which is why low income people live in cities and older
suburbs)."

I’m not sure overall which is cheaper.  It’s certainly true that far-out suburbs are cheaper than close-in suburbs (at least in the DC area, I think elsewhere too.)   That’s why Prince William county just passed a harsh anti-illegal immigrant measure — lots of immigrants have moved there, because a bunch of people can share a house for a lot less than renting small apartments close in.  And there’s lots of evidence that everything from food to bank fees to insurance costs more for residents of poor inner city neighborhoods.

So why don’t more poor people move to the suburbs?  The US Department of Housing and Urban Development did an experiment called Moving to Opportunity where people who lived in public housing were divided into 3 groups, one that was offered Section 8 housing vouchers that could be used anywhere they chose, one that was offered special vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods, and one that was not offered vouchers, but continued to live in public housing.  This was a voluntary program, so everyone in it had said that they wanted to move.  One of the interesting findings is that the majority of the people who used the unrestricted vouchers moved into neighborhoods that were still high poverty — not as high as the public housing they came from, but still more than 20 percent.

Under the voucher program, what you pay is based on your income, not the rent, and you can rent any house up to what HUD calls the "fair market rent" for the metro area.  So why did the voucher recipients stay in high poverty neighborhoods?  If the researchers asked this, I haven’t found the report that says it.  But I can take some guesses: Because those are the neighborhoods that they knew, where their friends and family lived, where they knew how to navigate the transportation system and which grocery store had the best deals.  Because landlords discriminated against them — or because they were afraid that they might.  Because they didn’t have cars, and the upfront cost of buying a car is obvious, while the added costs of buying food in inner-city neighborhoods is hidden.

All this is mostly a long way of saying that I’m not sure that the fact that poor people live in inner cities proves that they’re cheaper than suburbs.

So, Yglesias argues that the suburbs are only so cheap because the roads and other infrastructure are so heavily subsidized.  Lisa Margonelli says that it’s a myth that people will drive less if gas prices get high enough.  She argues that high gas prices have hit the poor the most.  I think this is probably right — if people’s driving
is responsive to gas prices, it’s clearly only in the very long run, as
people choose where to work and live.  Somewhat less plausibly, Richard Brodsky claims that Bloomberg’s proposed congestion pricing plan for driving in Manhattan would be regressive, hurting poor and middle-income drivers the most.  I’m pretty dubious about the idea that many poor New Yorkers own cars.

But outside of New York, I think the evidence is overwhelming that helping low-income families own cars is a highly cost-effective anti-poverty strategy.  (We’ve actually just donated our old car to Vehicles for Change, an organization that does this.)  It opens up a world of job opportunities, lets people shop at lower-cost stores, go to church and doctor’s offices and more.  In an ideal world, you could do all these things by public transportation, but in most of the US you can’t. 

So, how do we help the environment without penalizing low-income families?  I still think that some version of Pay at the Pump auto insurance would be a good thing.  It would convert a big part of the fixed cost of owning a car into a variable cost of driving it, so would both make car ownership more affordable for the poor, and discourage driving at the margin.  School reform isn’t usually thought of as part of an environmental agenda, but if you could improve urban schools to the point that they seemed like a reasonable alternative for families who have options, more of them would choose to live in cities.

At D’s end of the kindergarten year ceremony, the kids performed a little song about all the things they had learned during the year, and were each called upon to say what they want to be when they grow up.

D wants to be a scientist who builds rovers.  He explained that a rover is a kind of robot that goes to other planets and if anything bad happens to the rover, it means you can’t send people.  (Yes, the Mars imax movie did make an impression on him, why do you ask?)

Of the other kids in the class who didn’t totally mumble their answers, the choices were:

• a soldier who drives a truck (said with truck driving action)
• a football player
• air force (said with plane flying action, which looks a lot like truck driving action)
• nurse (said with a simpering "Doctor, here are your instruments")
• ballerina (said with a pirouette)
• a cheerleader (said with a jump)
• a cheerleader (also said with a jump).

I found this intensely depressing.  Yes, I know they’re 6 years old, and "when I grow up" is further away than "once upon a time."  But it felt like they’re pulling from an awfully limited deck.  I don’t know; maybe I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about the exact same answers coming from a middle-class group of kids.

I think my dad still has hanging in his office the drawing I did when I was about that age of the different tools that a doctor uses, labeled in an adult hand, but clearly to my dictation (it says things like "this is the pointy part that shoots out.")  And no, I’m not a doctor.  But it was within the realm of what I could imagine.

Laura at Geeky Mom has a series of posts up about why she’s not a scientist.  There’s a lot of good evidence that girls tend not to take the prerequisite courses math and science in high school, shutting off options before they’ve really considered them.   That wasn’t me. 

In high school, I took calculus, Honors Bio, AP Chemistry (you had to dissect a cat in AP Bio, and that really wasn’t something I wanted to do.)  And then I went to college, and took the minimum 3 classes in hard math and science needed to graduate.  I was still interested in the topics, but where in HS I could take math and history and English and French and a science and economics and still have room for pottery, in college, you couldn’t take more than 4 or 5 classes a term.  And the introductory level science classes were notorious for being both boring and difficult.  And up a hill a 15 minute walk from the rest of campus.  By then I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a doctor.  So I signed up for the "great books" set of humanities classes and never looked back. 

Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.

D’s birthday is in January, so he’s in the middle of his class age-wise, one of the smallest kids, one of the most advanced academically.  One of his good friends, with a July birthday, is doing "junior kindergarten" this year — but he has some sensory issues, and I know his teacher were worried about his ability to stay on task.  It’s not clear how much easier he’s going to find it next year, though.  N’s birthday is in October, so he’ll be nearly 6 before he starts Kindergarten.  If I didn’t know that other parents were likely to be holding their summer-birthday kids back a year, I might be in the school office, arguing to let him start a year early.   I was 4 when I started school (November birthday, December cutoff) and didn’t suffer.

I think the points the author made about the class issues are real ones — redshirting kindergarteners is definitely an upper-middle class phenomenon — but am unconvinced that it matters in the scheme of class inequities in education.  For one thing, I’m doubtful that many poor kids are going to be sitting in the same classrooms as those redshirted kids.  EdWeek has a new tool out that lets you generate reports for any school district in the country on graduation rates and school segregation levels. I took a look at the one for Alexandria and was shocked to see that its school system scores a .78 (on a 0 to 1 scale) for racial segregation and a .52 for socioeconomic segregation.  Those numbers are far higher than average for either Virginia or the country as a whole, but what makes them really shocking is that all the segregation is in the elementary schools — there’s only one high school (TC Williams, of Remember the Titans fame) and two middle schools.

And we’re not talking separate but equal either.  My friend who has her kindergartener in one of the predominantly white, middle-class, active PTA schools has been told that her son has been identified as gifted and talented (even though the pull out activities don’t start until 3rd grade) and invited to come in for a meeting to discuss the curriculum.  I’m quite confident that if any such process were happening at D’s school, we’d have heard about it.  We haven’t.

A year ago, in my post about the decision to send D to this school, I wrote " What I worry about is whether they’ll learn that school is something to be endured."  I do think this fear has somewhat come true.  D’s bored a fair amount of the time at school — his biggest complaint is that it takes up too much of his day.  And the whole class often loses privileges when some kids misbehave.  D’s counting days to the end of school.  And frankly, I am too.

Picking up on the comments on the last post.

The problem with Mead’s view of the world is that even if you got all the men who are unemployed and got them to work in the same types of jobs as men of comparable education and work experience and even somehow married them off to the mothers of their children, they’d still overwhelmingly be poor.

Most poor people in the US are in families that include workers.  But the jobs aren’t regular enough, and don’t pay enough to lift people out of poverty.  And even if they make more than the official poverty line, it’s still not enough to make ends meet.  And it only takes one crisis — a sick kid, a car breaking down, a cold winter that makes the utility bill skyrocket — to make the whole damn house of cards fall down.

The folks at Inclusion argue that the problem with talking about poverty is that as soon as you start talking about "poor people" the image that jumps into most people’s mind is of dysfunctional teen parents in inner cities — of Random Family, rather than The Working Poor.   And the comments here show that there’s some truth to that.  But I’m still unconvinced that "social inclusion" is a viable alternative.  I do think that talking about "job quality" is an important piece of the conversation, but it doesn’t provide the framework for talking about other solutions, like expanding the earned income tax credit.

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half.  It offers a 12 point agenda designed to reduce the poverty rate in half in 10 years.

Perhaps what’s most exciting about this report is that there’s nothing terribly exciting in it.  Pretty much all of the recommendations have been made before: raise and index the minimum wage, expand the EITC, make it easier for workers to join unions, provide universal child care subsidies, make college more affordable, encourage savings, rebuild the safety net.  But the point is that it doesn’t take geniuses to figure this out.  The report makes clear that we’re not missing ideas about good things to do, but the political willpower to do them.

Poverty is finally starting to get some attention again.  It’s one of the key elements of John Edwards’ presidential campaign.  Bloomberg is focusing attention on it in New York.  The House Ways and Means Committee had a hearing on it today.  But even Charlie Rangel said that he’s focusing on getting rid of the AMT before he thinks about EITC expansions.  So don’t count on anything happening unless we build public support for it.  So go write your members of Congress and urge them to commit to reducing poverty.

The folks over at Inclusion have been pushing their argument that we should be talking about "Social Inclusion" rather than reducing (or eliminating) poverty.  While I understand their argument, I don’t agree.  First, I think that no one in the US has a clue what "social inclusion" means.  If we’ve got someone willing to give us 2 minutes of attention, I’d rather say "eliminate poverty" and spend the next 110 seconds pitching the main policy proposals than say "promote social inclusion" and spend all my time trying to explain what I mean by that.  Second, and more importantly, I think there’s a real risk of playing into the hands of folks like Larry Mead who think that poor people’s problem isn’t lack of money but that they are "outside the mainstream" and aren’t working a lot.  And finally, when the media is finally paying some attention to this issue, I’d like the coverage to focus on the proposals, and not on liberals’ perennial attraction to circular firing squads.

Poking around the Census web page today, I ran across this report, issued earlier this year, on A Child’s Day, 2003 (Selected Indicators of Child Well-Being).

It’s full of all sorts of odd and interesting statistic, like 6.7 percent of parents living with a child 12-17 said that they talked to or played with their child for 5 minutes "never" to "once a week."  What really jumped out at me is the ability to see what parental characteristics are associated with different parenting behaviors.  Affluent parents are more likely to report  reading to their preschool aged children than poor parents (although 40 percent of poor parents still said that they read to their kids 7 or more times in the last week).  The association with parental education is even stronger than with income.

I was quite struck by the correlation they found between "television rules" imposed on children (restricting the type of programs, the time of day, or the number of hours watched) and the frequency with which parents read to their kids.   This suggests at least the  possibility that the supposed negative effects of television on young children is a spurious correlation with parenting behaviors.

Consistent with Lareau’s description of concerted cultivation vs. accomplishment of natural growth, more affluent and more educated parents were far more likely to report that their school-age children participated in extra-curricular activities, including sports, clubs, and classes.  (There was no "egghead effect" — children of parents with post-baccalaureate degrees were still more likely to play sports than any other kind of activity.)  And the higher level of education the parents have, the more likely their children are to participate in gifted classes, and the less likely the children are to have been suspended or to repeat a grade.