Half Changed World

I made a couple of calls to women in Texas tonight for Obama, and the people I reached sounded pretty grumpy.  Maybe I just had a bad streak, but they just didn’t want to hear from me.  By contrast, when I was calling into Super Tuesday states, even the people who were going to vote for Clinton sounded happy with their options and willing to talk.

I’m guessing that tomorrow’s going to be a split decision.  Clinton will take Ohio and Rhode Island; Obama will take Texas (at least by delegates) and Vermont.  And I think that means the campaigns will slog on to Pennsylvania.

I’m a self-admitted political junkie, but I’ve run out of enthusiasm for this primary.  I like both candidates, and worry that the infighting is becoming too destructive.  I want Obama to win the primary, but I want a Democrat to win in November even more.

I’m starting to do my taxes, so I’ve been looking at my Prosper statement.  I must stay, the headache of figuring out the taxes is a major disincentive to lending through Prosper.  The couple of bad loans I’ve had are a particular bother.  Prosper’s tax page is pretty much useless: this blog post  and this wiki are a lot more helpful.

Since the last time I wrote about Prosper in October, my performance has dropped quite a bit.  As predicted, the two loans that were 3 months late were sold as delinquent; I now have another 3 that are between 1 and 3 months late.  What’s striking is that only one of them was what I’d consider a "high risk" loan based on credit — the other two had A or AA ratings.  And when I picked my loans, I made a deliberate choice to avoid anyone who wanted money for a real estate deal… So, another sign that people are hurting…

Head over to www.everyonegetssick.org and join the online rally for paid sick days.

Because you shouldn’t have to choose between taking care of your sick kid and having the money to pay your rent.  And from a public health perspective, you really don’t want the people who are preparing and serving your food, or loading your groceries at the supermarket, to be dragging themselves into work even though they’re sick because they can’t afford to stay home.

If you live in DC, check out www.dcsneezes.org and give your city councilmember a call.  They’re voting on the DC Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act on Tuesday.

And if you’re in Illinois, read this post to learn how you can help.

Here’s the NY Times editorial, Catching Up on Family Values, from earlier this week.

No one who is my age or younger in the US really has any experience dealing with inflation.  If anything, we’re used to consumer goods, especially electronics, getting cheaper each year.

I’m looking at the reports of 4.3 percent inflation over the past year, and the 4.5 percent interest we’ve been getting on our main savings account doesn’t sound like such a good deal.  On the other hand, it beats the negative returns that my retirement account (which is mostly stocks) got.  And it’s hard to see how banks are making money on mortgages in the 5% range, even setting aside the wave of defaults.

The headlines about stagflation are ridiculously premature.  But what’s true is that the Fed can’t do anything to combat inflation without risking turning the downturn into a full-blown recession.  So the hope is that weak consumer demand will control prices.  But the stimulus package and its "rebates" are supposed to increase consumer demands.

So what exactly are we supposed to be doing?

Today’s book is The Missing Class, by Katherine Newman (author of Chutes and Ladders and No Shame in My Game) and Victor Tan Chen.  By "The Missing Class," the authors mean the not-quite-poor, those with family incomes between 100% and 200% of the poverty line.  And in particular, they focus on the experiences of several New York City families who fall in this category.  They explore the things that help them rise up (mostly getting a better paying job, or adding another wage-earner to the family, homeownership in one case) and the things that drag them down (predatory lending, poor health, legal troubles, divorce and separation).

Although Newman and Chen emphasize repeatedly that these families are not "poor," the book in fact covers much of the same ground as David Shipler’s The Working Poor, as many of those families also had income above the official federal poverty level, which pretty much everyone agrees is outdated.   If I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Shipler’s book, which covers a greater geographic and social range.  (200 percent of the poverty level is a lot poorer in NYC than in much of the country, and I’d also like to have learned about people who were slipping into the "missing class" from above, as well as those struggling to stay out of poverty.) One of the new contributions of the book is the discussion of No Child Left Behind,
and how the combination of overworked, time-deprived parents, mediocre
to lousy schools, and high stakes testing comes down hard on the
children of the working poor.

My understanding is that the reason Newman and Chen want to draw the distinction between the "missing class" and "poor" people is that they want to draw attention to how these people often fall into the cracks, earning too much to benefit from means-tested public benefit programs.  I agree that’s an important policy issue.  But I worry that their discussion creates an impression that the benefits for the poor are more generous than they really are.  And it doesn’t acknowledge how much middle income people benefit from government subsidies for employer provided benefits, especially health care, and the mortgage interest deduction.

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine.  This is one of the two cookbooks that came out last fall with recipes for how to hide vegetable purees in a variety of foods to get a little more nutrition into kids.  (The other one was Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, and there was some discussion over whether she stole the other person’s idea, and got a lot more attention because of who she’s married to.)

I’m not morally opposed to sneaking vegetables into my kids’ food — I’ve been known to put pureed black beans into brownies when I was desperate to get some fiber into D’s diet — but I haven’t actually used the cookbook very much.  The main problem is that both cookbooks (I took the Seinfeld one out of the library at some point to compare) assume that all kids will eat things like macaroni and cheese and tomato sauce, and D won’t.  When you’re talking about a kid who eats his peanut butter without jelly and doesn’t like ketchup, there’s not a whole lot of opportunities to disguise food.  A few weeks ago, I did make sweet potato puree when I was making sweet potatoes for myself, but then I never got around to using it before it got all yucky and moldy in the fridge.

So, this morning, since the boys had off from school and I decided to work from home rather than hazard the ice, D asked if I’d make pancakes.  So I decided to try the chocolate chip pancake recipe, which involves a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and ground almonds.  I made some with chocolate chips, some plain, and some with blueberries.

Both boys loved the chocolate chip ones. Neither would eat the blueberry ones — and N usually adores blueberry pancakes.  They said the plain ones were ok, but not as good as my usual ones.  So, is it worth it to add the chips as a bribe to get them to eat some extra whole grains and protein?  Maybe occasionally, and especially if the alternative is bisquick, which is pretty low in nutritional content.  But Julia’s Oatmeal Buttermilk pancakes have just as much whole grains, and taste a heck of a lot better.

Oh, and having a book called "The Sneaky Chef" isn’t so sneaky once you have a kid who is old enough to read the title and ask what’s the ingredient he’s not supposed to notice.

T’s dad has been saying that we should take the boys skiing.  In particular, he’s suggesting that if D doesn’t learn to ski soon, he’ll never be "really good."

Cons:

• Skiing is ridiculously expensive, even at the dinky little mid-Atlantic ski areas that have almost no slope.  Between lift ticket and equipment, it gets up close to $100 a day per person.  We think long and hard about spending that kind of money.
• Especially when there’s no guarantee that the boys wouldn’t try it for 5 minutes and then want to go home.  D still has his training wheels on his bike, because when we take them off, he panics when he picks up any speed and puts his feet down.
• Downhill skiing is never particularly environmentally friendly, and is particularly not-so in the mid-Atlantic, where pretty much everything you ski on is man made.

Pros:

• Skiing is fun.  Downhill skiing is as close to flying as I’m ever likely to get without mechanical assistance.
• T’s dad is right that it’s easier to learn when you’re young, and not as discombobulated by falling down.
• D picked up skating this winter (on an indoor rink) pretty well, and many of the skills are transferable.
• I can imagine that at some point in the boys life, they will have friends who ski, and they may feel deprived/outside/something if they don’t know how.  Yes, this is a huge marker of class privilege.  But both T and I did learn to ski as children, and in some real way, I think we both feel slightly guilty at the idea of not passing this opportunity on to our kids.  Especially since we’re probably slightly more affluent, not less, than our parents were when we were young.  But — even setting aside the fact that T grew up in Michigan and could learn to ski on a local hill — I think skiing just wasn’t as crazy expensive a sport at the time.

Summons by Robert Francis

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded.


So here I am banging on your door to tell you to go outside right now and check out the eclipse tonight.

Paul Krugman’s column yesterday is called "poverty is poison" and refers to the growing literature on how poverty harms children’s mental development.  He uses this as a starting point to complain that both Obama and Clinton’s anti-poverty proposals are "modest in scope and far from central to their campaigns."

I think this is unfair — as Shawn Fremstad at Inclusion argues, "Calling Clinton’s and Obama’s anti-poverty initiatives ‘modest in
scope’ only makes sense if one thinks that calling for say, universal
health care, has little do with reducing poverty and isn’t part of an
anti-poverty initiative." And even if you only look at more narrowly defined anti-poverty programs, the Pathways articles I mentioned last week contain proposals that are far from modest.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. Krugman quotes this sentence from the Financial Times article: “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status
experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their
neural development.”

Two things are striking in that sentence:

1)  The "with low social status" part of that sentence suggests that it’s relative poverty, not material deprivation, that causes the stunted neural development.  Margy Waller at Inclusion may be unhappy that Krugman’s still talking about "poverty," but this point is totally consistent with their overall argument.  (More on this later — I’m in the middle of reading Robert Frank’s Falling Behind, which is all about relative status.)

2) It suggests that stress is the main connection between poverty and poor child outcomes, not lack of educational experiences or the other things we talked about last week.

Unfortunately, the AAAS presentations that this statement is based on don’t seem to be available online.  Some of the speakers have other papers available, but they’re pretty technical, so it may take a while before I have the energy to work through them.

Thought I’d share two sites where I’ve been wasting far too much time:

• Real Clear Politics has tons of poll data, for Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas and beyond.  Also head to head matchups between Clinton and McCain and Obama and McCain.
• Democratic Convention Watch has the best info on superdelegates — who they are, and whether they’ve committed.

Oooh, via Bitch PhD, here’s another fun site, an Implicit Association Test for the presidential candidates.  I took it, and it found that I had strongly positive attitudes towards Obama, with Huckabee, Clinton, and McCain (in that order) lower down.  I think it correctly captured the fact that the campaign has made me feel less favorably towards Clinton — I need to keep reminding myself that I think she’d be a darn good president.  And I’m not surprised that it said I like Huckabee more than McCain, even though I’d actually vote for McCain if I had to choose between the two.  I like Huckabee quite a bit, although I think he’d be a terrible president.