Half Changed World

"I wanted to spend more time with my family" is the standard cliche of the day for explaining why you quit a high powered job when the real reason is that you were going to be fired if you didn’t get your behind in gear.  Occasionally, it’s actually true.

Matthew Yglesias doesn’t believe that Patti Solis Doyle really quit because of family obligations.  I agree that it would be incredibly unprofessional for her to quit at this stage of the race, and the idea that she’d do it because her six year old said he wanted Daddy is pretty ludicrous.  (Just in case it is true, here’s some unsolicited parenting advice: get over it.  Kids are good at yanking chains, and it doesn’t mean a thing.  T’s been the at-home parent since D was 4 months old, and there are times when the boys demand him and there are times when he might as well be chopped liver.)

The comment thread over there raises some interesting questions.  Is it anti-feminist for her to use this excuse?  Does it make it harder for other woman professionals with small children to be hired into positions of responsibility?  Is it an attempt to play for sympathy with working mothers?  Why go into this level of detail when no one is going to believe you anyway?

***

Today’s poem on The Writer’s Almanac is "Sestina for the Working Mother" by Deborah Garrison.

Sestina for the Working Mother

No time for a sestina for the working mother.
Who has so much to do, from first thing in the morning
When she has to get herself dressed and the children
Too, when they tumble in the pillow pile rather than listening
To her exhortations about brushing teeth, making ready for the day;
They clamor with "up" hugs when she struggles out the door.

Every time, as if shot from a cannon when she shuts the door.
She stomps down the street in her city boots, slipping from mother
Mode into commuter trance, trees swaying at the corner of a new day
Nearly turned, her familiar bus stop cool and welcoming in the morning.
She hears her own heart here, though no one else is listening,
And if the bus is late she hears down the block the voices of her children

Bobbing under their oversized backpacks to greet other children
At their own bus stop. They too have come flying from the door,
Brave for the journey, and everyone is talking and no one is listening
As they head off to school. The noisy children of the working mother,
Waiting with their sitter for the bus, are healthy and happy this morning.
And that’s the best way, the mother knows, for a day

To begin. The apprehension of what kind of day
It will be in the world of work, blissful without children,
Trembles in the anxious and pleasurable pulse of the morning;
It has tamped her down tight and lit her out the door
And away from what she might have been as a mother
At home, perhaps drinking coffee and listening

To NPR, what rapt and intelligent listening
She’d do at home. And volunteering, she thinks, for part of the day
At their school-she’d be a playground monitor, a PTA mother!
She’d see them straggle into the sunshine, her children
Bright in the slipstream, and she a gracious shadow at the school door;
She would not be separated from them for long by the morning.

But she has chosen her flight from them, on this and every morning.
She’s now so far away she trusts someone else is listening
To their raised voices, applying a Band-Aid, opening the door
For them when the sunshine calls them out into the day.
At certain moments, head bent at her desk, she can see her children,
And feels a quick stab. She hasn’t forgotten that she is their mother.

Every weekday morning, every working day,
She listens to her heart and the voices of her children.
Goodbye! they shout, and the door closes behind the working mother.

For those of you who don’t live in Virginia, the key piece of background information here is that the Virginia House of Delegates is generally controlled by the lunatic right.  These are people who aren’t sure that contraception should be legal, who would rather see all of Northern Virginia permanently frozen into gridlock than raise taxes to build roads, who think that preschool for poor kids is a socialist plot.  The Senate is usually more reasonable, even before the Democrats took back control in the last election.

So, I’m more than a little bit shocked to find myself supporting the payday lending reform bill adopted by the House of Delegates, rather than the sham reform being sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw.  It’s not a perfect bill –while it theoretically imposes a 36 percent cap on interest rates, it allows for fees to be charged on top of that, which drives the real cost of lending far higher.  But it would be a good start, and would help prevent people from getting caught into an endless cycle of taking out another loan to pay off the first one. 

By contrast, the folks who have been fighting payday loans — including the AARP, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, Voices for Virginia Children, and the Virginia Poverty Law Center — say that the Senate bill could be worse than nothing.  It’s hard not to conclude that campaign contributions are driving policy. 

As previously discussed here, there’s a real need for low-cost small dollar loans for people without great credit.  Even usurious rates can be worthwhile if the choice is losing your job when your car breaks down.  I’m not sure what the best solution is.  But a study from North Carolina — which banned payday loans a couple of years ago — shows that low-income people aren’t reporting hardship as a result of the ban.

Last time I posted about banking, reader Dave S. posted this link for the Predatory Lending Association.  I assume that anyone who spends a minute on that site will figure out that it’s a parody put up by the opponents of payday lending.  By contrast, I’m not sure that it’s immediately clear that the folks who were advertising on CNN during the coverage of the Potomac Primary results, with the URL "www.ReformPaydayVA.com" is the payday lending industry.

While we’re waiting for word from DC and Maryland on the primary results, I wanted to make a plug for the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality‘s new magazine, Pathways: a magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy.  The first issue features essays on how to end poverty from Edwards, Clinton and Obama (McCain and Romney were invited to participate, but declined).  But I think the rest of the magazine is even better.

• It includes the best summary for a general audience I’ve read of the evidence on the impact of housing vouchers on economic opportunity.  DeLuca and Rosenbaum explain the differences between the overwhelmingly positive results for the families who received vouchers under Gautreaux, a court-ordered remedy in a desegregation case, and the more mixed results for families who received vouchers under Moving to Opportunity, a random assignment evaluation modeled after Gautreaux, and make some reasonable arguments about the lessons that policymakers should draw.
• Robert Frank (of The Winner Take All Society) explains why inequality is bad for rich people too, and argues for a progressive consumption tax.
• Charles Murray (of the Bell Curve) makes an case largely grounded in Frank’s reasoning for why interventions aimed at increasing opportunity for low-income families won’t reduce inequality.
• Becky Blank, codirector of the National Poverty Center at UMichigan, reviews the three Democratic candidates’ proposals and concludes that they "all have multifaceted and serious anti-poverty plans.  Anyone concerned with poverty issues could happily vote for any of them.  Edwards has made poverty a centerpiece issue for his campaign from the beginning; Clinton has the best early childhood proposals; Obama is the most thoughtful on jobs for disadvantaged youth and urban change and (for my money) the most creative in putting new policy ideas on the table, such as low-cost Internet service in poor neighborhoods.  But all of them understand that the measure of this country is not just the size of its GDP or the wealth of its richest citizens."

The whole magazine is available as .pdfs, and hard copy subscriptions are free.  Check it out.

When I blogged about the "privilege meme," I promised a post about the differences, and overlap, between privilege as measured by money and privilege as measured by social class.  I keep postponing that post, because it’s a complicated topic and I want to get it right.  But if I wait until I get my thoughts totally sorted out, I’ll never get to it. So here goes with some rough thoughts, and hopefully it will at least get the conversation started.

As noted before, the privilege meme included a bunch of questions that are mostly about money — did your parents own their own home, were you aware of bills, did you have a phone at home, do you have student loans, did you get to travel abroad — and a bunch of questions that are more about social capital — did your parents read to you, did they take you to museums, did they attend college.  Some people got very heated about this, arguing that they shouldn’t be considered "privileged" even though they were read to, had books, etc, because their family was very poor, and it was just because their parents prioritized education that they had these things.

So, the first thing to lay on the table is that these are in fact two different dimensions of social class, and it’s possible to be privileged in one respect but not the other. But, the next thing to point out is that, in practice, there’s a great deal of overlap between the two.  I’m thinking of the chapter in David Shipler’s The Working Poor about the upper-middle class mother who is impoverished by her divorce and her subsequent choice not to work full-time, so as to be able to spend more time with her children.  She’s quite low-income as a result, but is able to leverage her social capital to get her children scholarships at fancy private schools and other middle-class privileges.  Her experiences prove that you don’t have to have lots of money to have privilege, but it’s also quite clear that she’s got a lot of things going for her that the typical low-income single parent doesn’t.

There’s a couple of different explanations for the overlap between poverty and lack of home-based educational experiences, and depending on which one you think dominates, you come up with very different policy solutions for fixing this (if, in fact, you think there’s a need to fix it):

• One school of thought argues that it’s really about the money — if a parent can’t afford food, then books are a luxury, and parents who are working 80 hours a week to pay the rent don’t have the time to do things like attend parent teacher conferences.  This points towards cash transfer solutions.
• Another explanation is that parental characteristics like lack of English skills or learning disabilities lead to both poor labor market outcomes and to inability to navigate systems (such as libraries or schools) on their children’s behalf.  This points towards two-generational approaches, and education aimed at parents.
• A third explanation is that it’s cultural.  This has lots of variations, ranging from the stereotypical — poor parents don’t value educational opportunities for their children — to the sophisticated — Annette Lareau’s work on "accomplishment of natural growth" versus "concerted cultivation."  This points towards lots of tongue-clucking and finger-pointing, and possibly towards conditional cash transfers, which give low-income parents cash incentives for desired behaviors.

And I guess the fourth option is to say that it doesn’t matter the explanation, but what we need is better schools and preschools so that even kids whose parents don’t provide educational opportunities and support have a chance to get ahead.

Today we took the boys to Obama’s "town meeting" at TC Williams high school.  Having dealt with their restlessness for the hour we waited for tickets on Friday night, we were a little more prepared today, and brought T’s video ipod, Catch the Match, and some snacks.  The boys played on the grass for a while, and eventually we got to go inside.  (I’m very glad that the brutal wind that is blowing now held off while we were waiting — I think we’d have given up and turned around if we had to stand in it for long.)

The crowd was polite to the other speakers, but everyone clearly saw them as just something to be got through before the main attraction.  Tim Kaine spoke for a few minutes in Spanish, and then explained that the basic translation of all that was "he’s a great guy."  I don’t think Obama’s speech was one of his peak performances, but it still rocked the crowd.  Someone I heard walking out said that it was basically his standard stump speech.

People sometimes complain that Obama is short on specifics, but the speech had plenty of specific proposals — tax credits for college tuition, linked to community service, rebates of payroll taxes — although they rushed by too fast for me to catch most of the details.  Frankly, I was waiting for the soaring rhetoric part of the speech, which he did eventually get to, arguing that hope doesn’t mean naiveté, but is the driving force that motivates the work needed to make change.

There was some time for questions.  People asked about his policies towards South America and Africa, which gave him a chance to talk about engagement with the world.  A man who identified himself as a gay veteran asked about "don’t ask, don’t tell."  Obama thanked him for his service, and said he opposed the policy.

A woman from Hawai’i said that her young son was enthusiastic about Obama, but her husband was out campaigning for Clinton, and she was torn, and asked him why she should vote for him.  I thought Obama’s answers were interesting.  He began by saying that Clinton is smart and capable, and would be a vast improvement over the current president.  He then offered 4 reasons why she should vote for him rather than Clinton:

1. His ability to bring people together — he argued that while both he and Clinton support universal health care, he has more of an ability to bring together a "working majority" to get it passed.
2. His desire to change the way business is done in Washington and challenge the special interests — he cited his refusal to take PAC money, and the Congressional ethics bill that he cosponsored.
3. His "straight talk"  — the example he gave is that he gave his speech on setting fuel economy standards in front of auto industry executives in Detroit.  He contrasted this with Clinton’s equivocation on the bankruptcy "reform" bill, which she said that she wanted to fail even though she voted for it.*
4. His ability to change how the US is seen internationally, because of who he is, and his experience having lived in Indonesia and having family in Africa.

The Obama campaign has posted video of the response if you want to hear him say it himself, rather than my paraphrase.

What’s striking about that list is that there aren’t really any policy differences between him and Clinton on it — which I think is right.  While there are some policy differences between the two, they’re awfully small in the scheme of things.  Ezra Klein had a nice piece last week about the style differences between the two.

I wanted to take the boys both because it was the only realistic way for T and I to both attend on short notice, and because I do think this campaign could be a historic moment for them to remember.   I don’t know how much they got out of it.  They were generally well behaved, although N was clearly fading by the end of the speeches.  They both enjoyed chanting "Obama" and "We can do it" with the crowd.  D wanted to know what "don’t ask, don’t tell" is, which resulted in a very long answer to a short answer.

* I was moderately amused that Obama went on for a bit about how awful
this bill was, while Congressman Moran (who was one of the major
sponsors of the bill and had just endorsed him) sat in the front row
behind him and looked at the floor.

One of the sections of The World Without Us that caught my attention is the description of the gigantic collection of plastic trash in the middle of the Pacific ocean.  It was running around in the back of my head last week when I read the NY Times article about how Ireland has essentially stopped using disposable shopping bags, driven in large part by a 33 cent per bag tax.  Meanwhile, D has been learning about recycling at school, and I’ve been trying to use that as a starting point for a broader lesson about the environment (and turning off lights when you leave the room, please).

So we’ve decided to see if we can break the plastic bag habit.  We’ll keep track of how many we take in each month, and see how low we can get the number.

I understand that giving up plastic grocery bags isn’t going to save the world.  And there are plenty of things that involve plastics that I have no intention of giving up.  But it strikes me that using disposable plastic bags in no way improves my quality of life.  It’s just a habit.  And one that we can choose to break.

We’ve got some canvas bags already, and I went ahead and ordered some folding ones that I can keep in my purse so I always have one with me.  We’ll see how it goes.

Updated:

So far, so good.  We’ve had some slip-ups, but have been using them more often than not (and often forgoing the plastic bag even when we didn’t bring the grocery bags).

Jo(e) has a great post up about reusable bags.  She argues that the problem is that they’re so convenient that they get used for everything BUT groceries.  But if you buy enough of them, they become ubiquitous, and you stop having to worry about what you did with them.

Last night I was far too distracted to write a book review, but I do want to get back into the habit of writing them.  This week’s book is The World Without Us, by Alan Weissman.  As suggested by the title, the book explores what would happen to the Earth if humans simply disappeared one day (whether abducted by aliens, taken in the rapture, or killed by a highly specific virus that left everything else on earth alone).  How long would our creations last?  Would the damage that we’ve done to the environment be healed, or would our chemical and nuclear facilities wreak even more havoc left untended?

Weissman uses these questions as launching points to explore a range of phenomena, from the Korean DMZ as wildlife refuge, to vast underground cities in Turkey, to the dead zone at Chernobyl, to the question of why there are almost no mega-fauna left anyplace on earth but Africa.  (Weissman’s answer is that African megafauna learned early to be wary of humans, while the great animals in other parts of the world were taken by surprise by the dangerousness of these apparently helpless primates.  As I write this, I’m not sure why Asian elephants and tigers are an exception to that rule.)

The wide range of topics in the book are both a strength and a weakness.  Weissman’s conclusion is that almost all traces of humans (except for bronze statues and radioactivity) will be erased, given enough time.  But because he jumps from issue to issue, having read the book, I still don’t have a specific sense of what the world would look like in 5 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years.

It’s hard to read the book, and not be horrified by some of the things that we’re doing to the earth — driving species to extinction, filling the oceans with plastic, changing the very climate.  But it doesn’t point to obvious solutions, and can leave you with a sense that nothing we do at this point can fix things very much.

I just got the boys to bed and went to make some phone calls in support of Obama, and got a message that their servers are overwhelmed by the number of hits they’re getting, and please try back in a little while.

***

There’s been a lot of endorsements in the Presidential election, and generally I’m not particularly moved by them.  But, in thinking of why I support Obama, I realized that two endorsements have made a big difference to me.

One is from someone I’m not going to name, as I don’t think he’s made a public statement of his endorsement.  (Because he’s the director of an organization that doesn’t make endorsements.)  But he’s from Illinois, and has devoted his life to anti-poverty work.  He worked with Obama when he was in the state senate, and he says he’s the real deal.  His support convinces me that there’s substance to go with the soaring rhetoric.

The other is Karen Mulhauser, who is a former executive director of NARAL.  She’s also the "fairy godmother" of the Women’s Information Network.  WIN was founded in 1989 by young women who had worked on the Dukakis campaign and then came to Washington DC and tried to find political jobs, and didn’t have much luck.  They went to Karen and said "we need something to help us compete with the ‘old boys network.’" And Karen opened up her address book for them, and WIN was born.  And now there’s been a full generation of young women who have had doors opened to them because of WIN.  Karen’s endorsement gives me the confidence that no, I’m not betraying my feminist ideals by supporting Obama.

I’m really not a football fan, but D’s teacher got him all excited about the super bowl, even though he’s never watched a football game, so we’re letting him stay up and hanging out watching it with him.  Fortunately she’s a Giants fan (or at least a Patriot’s anti-fan), because I’m not sure my brother would ever forgive us if D rooted again them.

I hope she’s a baseball fan too, because I’d really like some company to watch the ball games this summer.  I was a real baseball fan when I was a kid — I rooted for the Mets through some of the really bleak years in the 1980s, and was rewarded by the miraculous ’86 season — but haven’t been watching much lately.  I figured out last year that it’s because I don’t have anyone to watch with.

Well, I’m glad that D convinced us to watch.  That was a heck of a game.

A couple of posts that you should all go read:

• Lauren at Faux Real On Having Goals.  This made me cry and grin at the same time: "Somewhere along the way, I became the parent I wanted for Ethan. Strip
  away the 1950’s ideal that typified the family life I pictured when I
  felt so helpless, strip away the myth of preparedness, and it’s clear
  that what I wanted for Ethan was me, but stable."
• Flea at One Good Thing writes about Home, meaning South Carolina.