Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a really excellent short essay on the forgotten lessons of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, a book that is often characterized as a jeremiad against conformity, yet which is in fact better understand as “a discussion of the emotional life of information.” His distinction between inner-direction and other-direction — both ideal types — wasn’t mean to contrast nonconformists against conformists, but rather to contrast different modes of conformity:

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries. As Riesman put it, “the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.” You can imagine how the Internet intensifies things.

Riesman drew no moral from the transition from a community of primarily inner-directed people to a community of the other-directed. Instead, he saw that each ideal type had different advantages and faced different problems. As Riesman understood it, the primary disciplining emotion under tradition direction is shame, the threat of ostracism and exile that enforces traditional action. Inner-directed people experience not shame but guilt, or the fear that one’s behavior won’t be commensurate with the imago within. And, finally, other-directed folks experience not guilt but a “contagious, highly diffuse” anxiety—the possibility that, now that authority itself is diffuse and ambiguous, we might be doing the wrong thing all the time.

And Riesman observed that other-direction had a number of positive aspects, e.g., greater openness and interest in the values, experiences, and opinions of others. Lewis-Kraus builds his mini-essay around a critique of Lee Siegel and an effort to capture what really sucks about Yelp, an online review site. Yet he also gives us reason to be optimistic about other aspects of contemporary culture.

Dylan Matthews reports that Jason Richwine, co-author of the recent Heritage report on the fiscal impact of less-skilled immigration (which AEI’s Andrew Biggs, an occasional co-author of Richwine, has addressed in a smart and measured way), wrote his doctoral dissertation on immigration and IQ. I find it odd that is proving to be such an explosive revelation, as Richwine has written on this subject on a number of occasions, e.g., in an article for The American on immigration and the “diversity dilemma” described by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. The gist of the article is captured in the passage below:

I intend to focus on one such important characteristic—how smart the immigrants are. Intuitively, it is not a stretch to believe that smarter people are better at organizing networks and understanding the long-term benefits of cooperation, and a burgeoning academic literature confirms that intuition. IQ, a construct that psychologists use to estimate general intelligence, has been separately linked to elements of social capital, such as sophisticated ethical thinking, altruism, planning for the future, political awareness, adherence to informal community standards of behavior, and cooperation for the greater good. Despite this research, the direct link between intelligence and social capital has been drawn only in a handful of technical articles. It is time to bring the IQ-social capital link out of the academic journals and into the policy debate. Doing so could help us deal realistically with the problems Putnam has identified.

Some might object to the notion that “smarter people are better at organizing networks and understanding the long-term benefits of cooperation,” but as Garett Jones observes in his paper on “National IQ and National Productivity,” this is a widely held view. The really controversial aspect of what Richwine writes relates to race. Dylan writes:

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — “the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ” — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”

Toward the end of the thesis, Richwine writes that though he believes racial differences in IQ to be real and persistent, one need not agree with that to accept his case for basing immigration on IQ. Rather than excluding what he judges to be low-IQ races, we can just test each individual’s IQ and exclude those with low scores. “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection,” he writes, “since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” He does caution against referring to it as IQ-based selection, saying that using the term “skill-based” would “blunt the negative reaction.”

A few thoughts immediately come to mind:

1. What troubles me about Dylan’s story is that I think it will be used to tarnish all individuals who believe in a skill-based immigration policy with a racialist brush, when in fact a skill-based immigration policy would yield an immigrant influx that is at least as racially diverse as the current immigrant influx. 

2. Here’s the thing. There is an enormous difference between race, as described by scholars like Armand Leroi, and historical ethnicity. And the groups that we use in the U.S. shouldn’t really count as either. Americans who identify as Hispanics come from a dizzying variety of racial and ethnic groups, and are in many cases the product of generations of ethnoracial admixture. To suggest that there is some genetic component (i.e., more than zero) to differences in IQ across individuals is not generally considered controversial, and that there would be differenes in IQ across groups defined somewhat arbitrarily — the people who come from countries within this broad circle, whether they are of Amerindian or African or East Asian or European origin, or some mixture of the above, as compared to people who come from countries within some other broad circle, which might have a similarly diverse population — seems reasonable enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some difference in IQ between the residents of my apartment building and some apartment building down the street. But I think we’d all agree that job candidates should be evaluated on the basis of their own qualifications and skills rather than their address. This is why a points-based system that rewards immigrants for educational attainment and English language proficiency makes more sense than a system that heavily weighs national origin, or for that matter group membership. One might object that the system I have in mind privileges members of the college-educated “group” over the non-college-educated “group,” yet the distinction that is doing the work is not a racial distinction.

3. One of the core goals of egalitarians in recent years has been addressing deficits in cognitive and noncognitive skills created by deficient or disrupted home environments. This work is premised on a recognition that (a) there is such a thing as deficient home environments and (b) that deficient or disrupted home environments have an impact on cognitive and noncognitive skills. If this is true of households, and if concentrations of similarly situated households can give rise to problematic neighborhood effects — hence the case for reducing poverty concentrations — it is not unreasonable to suggest that intense poverty in a given society can mean that individuals raised in the society in question might suffer from serious deficits in cognitive and noncognitive skills. Consider, for example, the impact of enviromental health risks on IQ, as documented by Jones:

A study of excessive fluoride in Indian drinking water found a 13 IQ point-difference between children “residing in two [separate] village areas of India with similar educational and socioeconomic conditions” (Trivedi et al. 2007, 178). If even half of this relationship is genuinely causal, and if intelligence has some of the technological and political spillover effects discussed below, then public health matters are of first-order concern for economic development.

Arsenic and fluoride exposures are also associated with low IQ in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Shanxi province (Wang et al. 2007, 664), even when comparing “groups [who] lived in rural areas with similar geographic and cultural conditions and a comparable level of socioeconomic development.” High arsenic exposure was associated with a 10-point IQ gap, and high fluoride exposure with a 4-point gap. In both cases, the “normal” group had an IQ of 105, 5 points above the US mean.

In the Visayas region of the Philippines, Solon et al. (2008) found evidence that lead levels reduced the IQ of children. In their study, one microgram of lead per liter of blood was associated with a 2.5 point reduction in the verbal IQ of older children, and a 3.3 point reduction in the IQ of young children. In their sample of children, the levels of lead in the blood averaged 7.1 micrograms per liter, so lead exposure could be costing the average child in this sample 15 IQ points even under conservative estimates.

In an experimental nutritional study in Pune City, India, 10 weeks of zinc supplementation caused a 15–25 percent increase in the number of correct answers on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (Tupe and Chiplonkar 2009).

Is it impossible to imagine that some countries might have more exposure to these environmental health risks than others? If anything, I’d suggest that it is far more likely that poor people growing up in very poor countries will be exposed to these and other environmental health risks than nonpoor people growing up in affluent countries, which is why I, like many other people, favor humanitarian measures designed to mitigate these environmental health risks in the developing world. One could think of these measures as a kind of “human enhancement” technology. In a similar vein, welcoming less-skilled individuals from impoverished countries, many of whom will inevitably suffer from serious deficits in cognitive and noncognitive skills that flow from their deprived upbringings, will give their children a better shot at a successful life. But the cost of doing so will not be trivial.

One conceptual question for those of us with a humanitarian interest in bettering the lives of the global poor is this: should we try to rescue some trivial share of the global poor by allowing them to work and settle in the U.S., and accept that they will tend to cluster in the bottom fifth of the U.S. socioeconomic distribution while spending a significant sum of money to help them lead dignified lives in a high-cost country? Or should we devote this significant sum — or some much larger or even much smaller sum — to interventions that might benefit a much larger share of the global poor, e.g., by making investments in mitigating various environmental health risks? I can see the sentimental case for rescuing a trivial share of the global poor by allowing them to become U.S. service workers. It’s not clear, however, that this is the best strategy in terms of bang-for-the-buck, or that it best serves the interests of various domestic constituencies, the issue that I tend to focus on in this space. 

I was pleased to see David Brooks reference Richard Alba’s excellent book Blurring the Color Line, which I briefly discussed in a column The Daily back in 2011. Alba’s book offers a very smart framework for thinking about America’s ethnic future. Basically, periods of ethnic transition go more smoothly when there is robust economic growth, as growth creates the possibility of “non-zero-sum mobility,” in which members of the dominant group and members of minority groups can rise in tandem. Sluggish growth, in contrast, implies that members of the dominant group might resist progress by members of outgroups, as everyone is duking it out over the size of the slices of a slow-growing pie. Alba, and by extension David, are absolutely right that the retirement of the baby boomers creates opportunities for members of minority groups. One anxiety, however, is that the level of educational attainment among Latinos and African Americans is somewhat lower than it is among Asian Americans and non-Hispanic white Americans, and so as the demographic composition of the labor force shifts, there is a real danger that, for example, the college wage premium will increase, which in turn will exacerbate racial inequality.  I recently discussed this dynamic in a post on “The Undereducated American and U.S. Immigration Policy.” I would thus argue that raising the level of educational attainment among Latinos and African Americans is a higher priority that increasing the size of the less-skilled immigrant influx, as the former strategy will tend to mitigate interethnic economic divides while the latter strategy will tend to exacerbate them.

More broadly, I disagree with David about some fairly important issues, e.g.:

Some intelligent skeptics say that mobility is fine through the second generation but stalls by the third. It is indeed harder to rise in a more chaotic and fragmented society. But one of the country’s leading immigration researchers, Richard Alba of the City University of New York, calls the third generation stall “a statistical illusion.”

Much of the research that shows the effect compares today’s third-generation immigrants with today’s second-generation group. But the third-generation families originally came to the U.S. decades ago, at a time when segregation was prevalent, discrimination was high and immigrants were harshly treated. You’d expect those families to progress more slowly than families that came to more welcoming conditions a generation later.

It could be that segregation, discrimination, and harsh treatment are the main factors that held back less-skilled immigrants in earlier eras. But as David Autor and Melanie Wasserman document in “Wayward Sons,” their report for the center-left think tank Third Way on “emerging gender gap in labor markets and education,”

Figure 2 plots changes in real hourly wage levels by sex and education group between 1979 and 2010 for two age groups: ages 25-39 and 40-54.8 The first category corresponds to young prime-age workers, and the latter represents workers in their peak earnings years. This figure highlights two key facts about the evolution of U.S. earnings. First, real earnings growth for U.S. males has been remarkably weak. For males with less than a four-year college education, earnings fell in real terms, declining between 5% and 25%. The steepest falls are found among the least-educated and youngest males, in particular, males under age 40 with high school or lower education. Only among males with four or more years of college education do we see real earnings growth in this 30-year period.

Equally apparent from the figure is that the earnings trajectory of U.S. women has been far more propitious. Females have fared better than males in every educational category, and highly educated women have made especially sharp gains in earnings. While real earnings gains among women without any college education have been modest— especially for younger workers—the trends are at least weakly positive for seven of eight female demographics (the exception being young, high-school dropout females).

The report goes on to document declining male employment rates, which are concentrated among less-skilled workers. Note that Autor and Wasserman are writing about all U.S. workers. Even if we assume that segregation, discrimination, and harsh treatment have vanished entirely, less-skilled workers face an extremely challenging environment, even if we assume that Autor and Wasserman are overstating the case.  

David is lumping together all opponents of the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill as, among other things, opponents of assimilation, love, social mobility, skilled immigration, and ethnic diversity. This strikes me as an offbeat interpretation. The main reason I oppose the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill in its current form is that it increases the less-skilled influx beyond levels I consider wise or appropriate – at this point I accept that immigration reform will include a path to legalization for unauthorized immigrants who’ve resided in the U.S. for longer than X number of years. And as I’ve been writing in this space, the reasons I favor a bias towards skilled immigrants are legion, and they correspond neatly to David’s categories: skilled immigrants with a high level of English language proficiency have very low incarceration rates, high rates of labor force participation, high incomes, and they are more likely to assimilate and somewhat more likely intermarry. The children and grandchildren of the college-educated tend to experience more upward mobility (in absolute terms) than the children and grandchildren of the non-college-educated. Proponents of skilled immigration are pretty clear in favr of skills. And skilled immigrants come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, e.g., large numbers of skilled immigrants to the U.S. hail from sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been historically underrepresented in immigration flows to the U.S. 

So if we stick with David’s (defensible and reasonable) criteria for the things one ought to care about in an immigration reform proposal, one has pretty good reason to be concerned about the aspects of the legislation that will increase the size of the less-skilled influx — as less-skilled immigrants are less likely to assimilate and intermarry, their children are more likely to struggle in a knowledge-intensive economy and to remain in ethnic enclaves, etc. David is extremely sensitive to the importance of cultivating skills and networks, and doing it in a way that benefits the poorest and most vulnerable children. This is why he strongly supports early childhood interventions. My argument is simple: given the scale of the domestic multigenerational poverty challenge, does it really makes sense to make this challenge more difficult to solve by welcoming large numbers of non-college-educated workers to live and work in the U.S.? 

James Pethokoukis cites a new report from Potomac Research to suggest that there is at least a slim chance that the U.S. federal government will achieve a budget surplus by fiscal year 2015. Pethokoukis makes the most important political points — a surplus will make it difficult for the Obama administration to make the case for further tax increases, yet it will also undermine the case for entitlement reform. But to be cynical and political for a moment, a surplus would be even worse news for the Republican Party. Since the start of the Obama presidency, the GOP has put all of its eggs in the basket of short- to medium-term fiscal consolidation. During the presidential race, some argued that while the politics of deficit reduction were not of particularly great interest to states with high unemployment rates, it did have some resonance for middle-income and upper-middle-income voters in states like New Hampshire and Iowa. In the end, a Romney campaign that placed a fairly heavy emphasis on the importance of deficit reduction lost New Hampshire and Iowa. And questions about Romney’s commitment to the economic interests of middle-income voters contributed to the Republican defeat in states like Ohio, Florida, and Virginia, each one of which has more votes in the Electoral College than New Hampshire and Iowa combined. 

So imagine 2016 in the unlikely but not completely impossible event that a budget surplus does materialize. Republican elevation of the deficit issue will allow the Obama administration and its Democratic allies to declare “mission accomplished,” all without taking the blame for entitlement reform. The House-passed budget that promised a balanced budget within the ten-year budget window by making unrealistically deep cuts in Medicaid and domestic discretionary spending will continue to be hung around the necks of congressional Republicans. One hopes that one or several of the GOP presidential candidates will devise a more compelling economic message and reform agenda. But this will have to be done in a near-vacuum, as conservative lawmakers have been emphasizing deficit reduction above almost everything else. This is why it is extremely, extremely important that the GOP find 2014 candidates who are committed to advancing the economic interests of middle-income households, and who can address this subject in a compelling, plausible way. Ramesh Ponnuru has sketched out what this agenda might look like in National Review and Bloomberg View – the template is there, but actual candidates need to step up. Josh Kraushaar of National Journal has been writing about how gun-shy Republicans have been in key Senate races, which is not the most encouraging sign.    

To my disappointment, some advocates of less-skilled immigration are drawing on my column on ethnic attrition to suggest that concerns about less-skilled immigration are exaggerated. The theory, as I understand it, is that because ethnic attrition means that economic outcomes for the entire universe of individuals with at least (say) one Mexican-born grandparent are to some degree understated, we shouldn’t be concerned about allowing a continued large-scale influx of less-skilled immigrants. Let’s think through why this is wrongheaded:

1. We are conflating ethnicity and educational attainment, and this creates a misleading impression. When we are forced to rely on an ethnic category as a proxy for less-skilled immigration, as often happens in this discussion due to data limitations, we miss the fact that some number of Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. are skilled and some number of Asian and European and African immigrants to the U.S. are less-skilled. It is true that there is data indicating that economic progress between second- and third-generation Latinos seems to stall. Yet this data is far less valuable, in my view, than data concerning the second- and third-generation descendants of college-educated immigrants. Unfortunately, we don’t appear to have good data on the latter. Conceptually, we’d be better off placing all skilled immigrants — whether they’re from Latin America, Asia, Europe, or Africa — in one bucket and all less-skilled immigrants in another. The continued emphasis on ethnicity is, frankly, a major advantage for those who aim to increase the non-college-educated share of the future U.S. workforce, as it allows them to characterize those who believe that U.S. immigration policy should contribute to raising the average skill level of the U.S. workforce as motivated by fear or dislike of immigrants from a particular region. 

2. One of the core implications of ethnic attrition is that it appears that the second- and third-generation Americans who “defect” from identifying as Hispanic have higher levels of educational attainment than those who continue to identify as such. This could be a random coincidence. Or it could be that there are differences between Hispanics who intermarry as opposed to those who do not. For example, it could be that Hispanics with higher levels of educational attainment are more likely to intermarry, as they are more likely to have the same levels of educational attainment as native-born individuals. (Intermarriage rates might also decrease if educated members of a given ethnic group don’t have to marry outside of the group to find a partner with a comparable level of educational attainment.)

Consider the following from Matthjis Kalmijn of the University of Amsterdam: 

A common claim in the literature is that higher-educated persons are more likely to marry outside their ethnic/racial group than lower-educated persons. We re-examine this “educational gradient” with a multilevel analysis of 46 immigrant groups in the Current Population Survey. We find that there are positive effects not only of individual education on intermarriage but also of the educational level of a group. Moreover, the educational gradient declines when the aggregate level of education of an immigrant group is higher. The aggregate effect of education points to cultural explanations of the gradient that emphasize the role of interethnic attitudes. The interaction effect points to a structural explanation that explains the gradient in terms of opportunities of finding similarly educated spouses within the group.

We also have findings on people of Asian origin in the U.S. and Canada from Sharon M. Lee and Monica Boyd:

In both countries, those with less than a high school education are most likely to be in-married, a pattern that is similar for both men and women. As education increases, intermarriage also increases but the increase is not linear. The percentage inmarried increases for the two highest education categories in both the U.S. and Canada.

And then we have a report from the Pew Research Center released in February of last year:

However, these overall similarities mask sharp differences that emerge when the analysis looks in more detail at pairings by race and ethnicity. Some of these differences appear to reflect the overall characteristics of different groups in society at large, and some may be a result of a selection process. For example, white/Asian newlyweds of 2008 through 2010 have significantly higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than do any other pairing, including both white/white ($60,000) and Asian/Asian ($62,000). When it comes to educational characteristics, more than half of white newlyweds who marry Asians have a college degree, compared with roughly a third of white newlyweds who married whites. Among Hispanics and blacks, newlyweds who married whites tend to have higher educational attainment than do those who married within their own racial or ethnic group. [Emphasis added]

Later on, the report provides more detail on Hispanic intermarriage:

About one-in-five intermarried white/Hispanic couples who married in 2000 or later are college-educated. That is lower than white couples (26%) but higher than Hispanic couples (6%). A similar pattern exists among those couples who married in earlier years, but the shares are somewhat lower, especially for couples who married prior to 1980.

On the one hand, a 20 percent share isn’t extremely high. On the other hand, it is much, much higher than a 6 percent share. And one assumes that there are unobserved variables at work as well.

Taken together, we have at least suggestive evidence that intermarriage is more common among the more highly educated. If we believe that social networks are an important part of upward mobility, the fact that skilled immigrants are better-positioned to join more privileged social networks suggests that skilled immigrants and their descendants are more likely to achieve upward mobility. This in turn implies that they are less likely to rely heavily on means-tested benefits and more likely to build wealth. So the fact that attrition biases the results for third-generation Americans who identify as Hispanic is not actually a coincidence: rather, it applies that the difficulties facing immigrants who arrive with limited skills and limited English language proficiency have reverberations beyond the first generation.

3. The arguments I’ve been making about immigration are discomfiting for many. The reason, I would suggest, is that my arguments draw on recent social science findings — ably summarized by Scott Winship in National Review in 2011 — which reveal that upward mobility from the bottom of the income ladder is actually much lower than Americans have commonly assumed:

The EMP/Brookings analyses break the parent and child generations into fifths on the basis of each generation’s income distribution. If being raised in the bottom fifth were not a disadvantage and socioeconomic outcomes were random, we would expect to see 20 percent of Americans who started in the bottom fifth remain there as adults, while 20 percent would end up in each of the other fifths. Instead, about 40 percent are unable to escape the bottom fifth.[6] This trend holds true for other measures of mobility: About 40 percent of men will end up in low-skill work if their fathers had similar jobs, and about 40 percent will end up in the bottom fifth of family wealth (as opposed to income) if that’s where their parents were.

Is 40 percent a good or a bad number? On first reflection, it may seem impressive that 60 percent of those starting out in the bottom make it out. But most of them do not make it far out. Only a third make it to the top three fifths. Whether this is a level of upward mobility with which we should be satisfied is a question usefully approached by way of the following thought experiment: If you’re reading this essay, chances are pretty good that your household income puts you in one of the top two fifths, or that you can expect to be there at age 40. (We’re talking about roughly $90,000 for an entire household.) How would you feel about your child’s having only a 17 percent chance of achieving the equivalent status as an adult? That’s how many kids with parents in the bottom fifth around 1970 made it to the top two-fifths by the early 2000s.[8] In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. That’s the impact of picking the right parents — increasing the chances of ending up middle- to upper-middle class by a factor of three or four.

Advocates of less-skilled immigration, meanwhile, often fall back on the Horatio Alger myth, and the notion that today’s less-skilled immigrants are in all relevant respects identical to the less-skilled immigrants of a century ago, the ancestors of many of today’s native-born Americans. This ignores the fact that the native-born skill level is much higher today than it had been a century ago, and that assimilation and economic upward mobility are more attainable goals for immigrants who match or exceed the native-born skill level. To put this differently, opponents of an increase in less-skilled immigration rely on a realistic appraisal of how good U.S. institutions are at mitigating hardcore multigenerational poverty — not very — rather than the romantic notion that all it takes to make your way in America today is a little bit of pluck and a little bit of determination. I would argue that we ought to craft an immigration policy that identifies individuals who are likely to flourish in the United States as it really is, not as we’d like it to be. 

I recently saw, via an acquaintance, the following quote from a Richard Epstein article on the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which over 800 garment workers (and counting) have died:

Ironically, that labor agitation was itself one of the contributing causes to the collapse at Rana Plaza.

I think the idea was that I was supposed to be shocked that Epstein, a libertarian legal scholar at NYU, would suggest that organized labor might have had anything to do with the disaster, as organized labor is an unalloyed force for good. That is, Epstein’s statement was truncated in such a way as to make him look like a heartless libertarian caricature, eager to blame organized labor for a profound human tragedy. Yet when seen in context, Epstein’s observation looks rather different:

The conditions in Bangladesh are ripe for labor agitation, which in fact occurred last year in the country as workers from hundreds of factories walked off their jobs in protest demanding yet another increase in the minimum wage. That action prompted a nasty retaliation by Bangladesh’s industrial police, who were charged with controlling labor unrest and resorted to using tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons.

Ironically, that labor agitation was itself one of the contributing causes to the collapse at Rana Plaza. Quite simply, the occurrence of such disruptions—and the threat of future ones—places enormous strains on the firms that have to deliver goods to foreign purchasers in order to remain in business. The threat of a repeat protest has led many firm bosses to step up the pace of work in the factories, which in turn means longer shifts, more workers, more extensive use of heavy equipment in order to make up for lost production, and stockpiling goods. That maneuver turned into a fatal insurance policy against future labor disruptions.

The threat of massive labor market turmoil strengthens the case for the effective public enforcement of state building codes. These codes are directed only toward safety issues, and do not touch the hot-button topics of wages and working conditions. Yet, if Bangladesh could only make good on this one public commitment, it would take the safety issue off the table, which would in turn remove from local unions the one key issue that makes their activist campaign so credible in the eyes of workers.

So let’s walk through Epstein’s statement carefully:

1. He acknowledges that the conditions in Bangladesh’s garment factories are in some cases so intolerable that labor agitation is an entirely predictable response, and that the state retaliation that followed was brutal and (implicitly) disproportionate.

2. Yet he also suggests that despite the fact that labor agitation may well have been justified, the occurrence and threat of disruption threatened to undermine the relative attractiveness of Bangladeshi garment manufacturing firms. This isn’t exactly an exotic claim. If I am purchasing garments and I am in a position to choose between two locations, one in which labor agitation is commonplace and another in which it is unheard of, all other things being equal, I will presumably be inclined to choose the location in which labor agitation is unheard of, as this will make it more likely that my orders will be delivered on time, etc. In order to remain competitive, Bangladeshi firms cut corners, in many cases in violation of the law, to increase production — hence Epstein’s reference to a “fatal insurance policy against future labor disruptions.” This hardly sounds like a robust defense of Bangladeshi industrialists.

To be sure, all other things aren’t generally equal. For example, it seems plausible that countries in which labor agitation are uncommon are also countries in which wages and productivity levels are higher, etc. Unfortunately, transitioning from one equilibrium (low productivity, low safety standards, low wages) to a more favorable equilibrium (high productivity, high safety standards, high wages) is not the kind of thing that happens instantaneously. Rather, it is usually the product of a long historical process. Labor agitation can be part of this process if, for example, it fosters a good public policy response, e.g., more investment in human capital. Another scenario, however, is that labor agitation yields a bifurcated economy, like the economy of South Africa, in which a high-wage unionized sector is cordoned off from a much larger informal economy. Ideally, labor agitation would be oriented towards system-wide change. Bangladesh is an interesting case study that is not very well understood, as it has made considerable progress on social indicators — where it tends to match or in some cases exceed India’s performance, despite a much lower GDP per capita (PPP) — despite having a very weak, corrupt state, a development that some attribute to the strength of its NGO networks, many of which are organized around the idea of female empowerment.* But if anything, Rana Plaza demonstrates that NGO networks alone aren’t enough to achieve progress, which is actually Epstein’s point.

3. And finally, Epstein states that it is the obligation of the public sector to step up its enforcement of building codes, as it would address one of the core legitimate demands of Bangladeshi labor campaigners. This is a reminder that Epstein’s libertarianism is rooted in the sense that while the domain of state authority ought to be limited, the state ought to be strong and effective within its domain. 

Epstein goes on to argue that stronger safety standards might necessitate somewhat lower wages, in light of the competitive nature of the global garment manufacturing industry and the cost structure of Bangladeshi firms. In effect, higher safety levels represent a form of compensation, and higher compensation in one domain will generally mean either lower compensation in another domain or lower profits. One challenge is that Bangladesh’s garment manufacturing sector is highly competitive, and so it is not clear that profits can go much lower before large numbers of firms go bust. That might not be such a bad thing: perhaps a smaller, better-capitalized Bangladeshi garment manufacturing sector that employs fewer workers who are on average more productive would be a good thing. But one can see why some humanitarians, who see how labor-intensive export-oriented manufacturing has alleviated poverty in select parts of the developing world, might object. 

Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development and Bloomberg Businessweek offers a more optimistic take:

Improving worker safety doesn’t even need to be that expensive. The International Labor Organization and International Finance Corporation (the private-sector arm of the World Bank) has developed the Better Work program to help countries enforce labor laws while sustaining productivity growth. According to the Center for Global Development’s Kim Elliot, research in Cambodia and Vietnam suggests that the Better Work program and related efforts have improved not only working conditions but also industrial relations without reducing productivity .

The answer for companies like Disney, Wal-Mart, and PVH is to stay and do better, not run away. Caring consumers in the U.S. should be pushing for responsible sourcing but should continue buying products made in the developing world. It is one of the most powerful antipoverty techniques we know. That can improve lives—and save them—well beyond the factory floor.

Kenny leaves some questions unanswered. If improving worker safety doesn’t reduce productivity but rather keeps it constant while costing more than absolutely nothing, even that small amount will have to come from somewhere, whether it’s lower wages or higher prices. In an ideal world, improving worker safety would yield higher productivity, and perhaps this outcome will eventually come to pass. Regardless, Kenny surely agrees with Epstein on the fundamental question: while “corporate social responsibility” might yield some benefits for Bangladeshi workers, the real imperative is that the Bangladeshi state grow suficiently strong, or rather sufficiently competent, to enforce its own laws regarding public safety. 

* A friend writes in to note that human development indicators, e.g., female literacy, are also relatively strong in West Bengal, despite the fact that West Bengal has income levels slightly below the Indian average. West Bengal has been governed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for much of its existence, while political cleavages in Bangladesh tend to be more historical than ideological in nature. One possibility is that it’s not NGOs that are responsible for Bangladesh’s relatively good performance on human development, but rather that there is something about Bengali culture, on both sides of the border, that has yielded economic underperformance and social overperformance. 

Nancy DiTomaso of Rutgers argues that one of the sources of persistently high black unemployment is the fact that African Americans tend not to be part of the most privileged social networks. As most of us who have navigated a private sector job search understand, jobs are often only publicly-listed after a more informal search. Large firms will begin a search by evaluating internal candidates, and trusted employees will be asked to identify potential candidates from within their professional networks. Having well-situated relatives and friends is thus highly advantageous, as it gives you access to opportunities that you’d never know of otherwise. And so, according to DiTomaso, racial inequality is in a sense driven by inclusion (whether you belong to the right networks) rather than exclusion (an institutional determination to deny opportunities to members of a given group). But the upshot is the same. DiTomaso has just published a book, The American Non-Dilemma, on how “opportunity hoarding” among members of the most privileged racial groups can yield racial inequality in the absence of racism, which I look forward to reading.

But my tentative sense is that DiTomaso is more sanguine about racial preferences than she should be:

Seeing contemporary labor-market politics through the lens of favoritism, rather than discrimination alone, is revealing. It explains, for example, why even though the majority of all Americans, including whites, support civil rights in principle, there is widespread opposition on the part of many whites to affirmative action policies — despite complaints about “reverse discrimination,” my research demonstrated that the real complaint is that affirmative action undermines long-established patterns of favoritism.

The interviewees in my study who were most angry about affirmative action were those who had relatively fewer marketable skills — and were therefore most dependent on getting an inside edge for the best jobs. Whites who felt entitled to these positions believed that affirmative action was unfair because it blocked their own privileged access.

Another view is that the informal mechanisms we use to identify job candidates capture qualities that a narrower, by-the-numbers search would not. This matters more in some domains, like team-oriented service work, than in others, like highly autonomous work that is compensated on the basis of productivity (e.g., a salesman who works on commission). In Still the Promised City?, sociologist Roger Waldinger observed that during the early 1970s era of “white flight,” new immigrants, from the Caribbean rim and Central America, etc., tended to sort into private sector employment, like low-end manufacturing, while African Americans gravitated to the civil service. Yet because the private sector was more permeable to informal social networks — a valued immigrant employee would be encouraged to recommend friends, who tended to be coethnics — than the civil service, which hires via highly bureaucratic procedures, different patterns of the transmission of capital and skills emerged. Uplift for an individual African American climbing through the ranks of the civil service didn’t necessarily mean uplift for her wider network, while uplift for an immigrant in a position to recommend other members of her network was a more collective experience. Granted, it is also true that learning how to navigate the civil service hiring process is a skill that can be transmitted within a network, but the basic point is well taken. 

The strongest argument in favor of racial preferences is DiTomaso’s: that in its absence, entrenched networks of privilege will exclude outsiders. One of the stronger arguments against (I’d say the mismatch hypothesis is the strongest argument, in higher education at least, against large preferences) is that racial preferences represent “seeing like a state,” i.e., they are a crude tool that misses more nuanced aspects of the social landscape, like Pat Sharkey’s findings on multigenerational poverty or Matt Lawrence’s intriguing work on the value of having had a college-educated grandparent in addition to a college-educated parent. I assume that Sharkey and Lawrence are both supporters of preferences, yet their work suggests that looking at race in isolation — and not also taking neighborhood environment and family history into account — might give us too constrained a view.

So while I think the problem that DiTomaso identifies is real, we shouldn’t efface the value of informal networks — one of the reasons we rely so heavily on them, by the way, is that they raise the stakes of making a recommendation: I would be embarrassed if the person I recommended to you for a job turned out to be a bozo, and this social sanction is difficult to replicate through institutional means. Rather, we should work towards fostering more inclusive networks by, for example, reducing concentrations of poverty through more effective crime control, less restrictive zoning laws, and other measures that will yield other economic benefits as well. Firms, meanwhile, need to be attuned to the dangers of overlooking potential sources of talent. Year Up, a Boston-based social enterprise, connects urban young adults with large business enterprises to help foster the kind of relationships DiTomaso has in mind, and it seems to have met with great success.   

My latest column for Reuters Opinion argues that to understand the future of America’s Hispanic population, we need to take into account the phenomenon of “ethnic attrition“:

For example, while virtually all third-generation Mexican-Americans with three or four Mexican-born grandparents identify as being of Mexican descent, Duncan and Trejo observe that only 79 percent of those with two Mexican-born grandparents do the same. For those with only one Mexican-born grandparent, the share falls to 58 percent.

Only 17 percent of third-generation Mexican-Americans have three or four Mexican-born grandparents, so the ethnic attrition rate is quite high: 30 percent of Americans with at least one Mexican-born grandparent do not identify as being of Mexican descent. It appears, according to Duncan and Trejo, that the educational attainment of Mexican-Americans who don’t identify as Mexican is higher than for those who do.

This suggests that when we measure life outcomes for third-generation Mexican-Americans, we might be biasing the results by relying on self-identification and thus failing to include large numbers of individuals with at least one Mexican-born grandparent.

The column opens with a discussion of former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s recent suggestion that Sen. Ted Cruz shouldn’t be “defined as a Hispanic,” one of many examples of Cruz getting under the skin of a prominent liberal. Ramesh Ponnuru’s latest Bloomberg View column explores this larger theme of how liberal (and moderate) contempt for Cruz strengthens his position on the right.

David Leonhardt observes that the nonemployment rate among 25- to 34-year-olds was as of 2011 substantially higher (at 26.6 percent) than it was in France (22 percent), Britain (21.6), Japan (21), Germany (20.5), and Canada (20.2), a reversal from 2000, when the U.S. had the lowest nonemployment rate for this cohort (18.5) and Japan had the highest (23.9). One of the most striking aspects of these numbers is that the nonemployment rate in the U.S. has increased so dramatically, to a level higher than the highest nonemployment rate at the turn of the century. Leonhardt offers some thoughts as to what exactly happened over the intervening years, but he misses some of the more obvious possibilities. For example, he writes the following on higher education:

The United States, for example, has lost its once-large lead in producing college graduates, and education remains the most successful jobs strategy in a globalized, technology-heavy economy. It is no accident that the most educated places in the country, like Boston, Minneapolis, Washington and Austin, Tex., have high employment rates while the least educated, including many in the South and inland California, have low ones. The official unemployment rate for 25- to 34-year-old college graduates remains just 3.3 percent.

Leonhardt is correct: college completion rates in the U.S. are lackluster. But the nonemployment rate includes students enrolled in higher education, whether or not they are likely to complete a terminal degree. Consider the following from the National Center for Education Statistics:

Enrollment in degree-granting institutions increased by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2010, enrollment increased 37 percent, from 15.3 million to 21.0 million. Much of the growth between 2000 and 2010 was in full-time enrollment; the number of full-time students rose 45 percent, while the number of part-time students rose 26 percent. During the same time period, the number of females rose 39 percent, while the number of males rose 35 percent. Enrollment increases can be affected both by population growth and by rising rates of enrollment.

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of 18- to 24-year-olds increased from 27.3 million to 30.7 million, an increase of 12 percent, and the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college rose from 35 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2010. In addition to enrollment in accredited 2-year colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities, about 539,000 students attended non-degree-granting, Title IV eligible, postsecondary institutions in fall 2009. These institutions are postsecondary institutions that do not award associate’s or higher degrees; they include, for example, institutions that offer only career and technical programs of less than 2 years’ duration.

In recent years, the percentage increase in the number of students age 25 and over has been larger than the percentage increase in the number of younger students, and this pattern is expected to continue. Between 2000 and 2010, the enrollment of students under age 25 increased by 34 percent. Enrollment of students 25 and over rose 42 percent during the same period. From 2010 to 2020, NCES projects a rise of 11 percent in enrollments of students under 25, and a rise of 20 percent in enrollments of students 25 and over. [Emphasis added]

One assumes that this increase in higher education enrollment only accounts for a fraction of the larger increase in nonemployment, particularly since we are talking about 25- to 34-year-olds. And more recently, there has been a dip in higher education enrollment, as Richard Vedder has observed. But it is curious that Leonhardt failed to mention this substantial increase in higher education enrollment between 2000 and 2011, as there is at least some reason to believe that it is a contributing factor. Moreover, while Leonhardt touts the virtues of higher education, Vedder notes a recent estimate which found that as many as 53 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or employed in low-wage, low-skilled jobs. This suggests that the marginal college student graduate isn’t necessarily benefiting from time spent in full-time higher education, let alone large numbers of college attendees. Yet the availability of higher education subsidies might make college enrollment a more attractive option than low-end employment, at least in the short-term. In this regard, we may well be seeing a parallel to rising disability rates, which in part reflect the deterioration of the labor market position of older less-skilled workers, among younger workers.  

Edward Glaeser makes the case for financing the FAA and the TSA through user fees:

The time-honored economic principle is that efficiency requires people to pay the costs of their actions. Frequent fliers should cover the expenses that their lifestyle imposes on others, such as increasing the length of security lines. If the entire cost of the FAA and the TSA were paid for with fees for each flight segment, the segment charge would be $35, which would replace the current mixture of gas taxes and fees that rise with ticket prices.

There is a solid economic case for primarily using per- ticket charges because more-expensive seats don’t impose wildly higher costs on the TSA, the FAA or other passengers.

One concern, however, is about cost growth. In an ideal world, Glaeser’s segment charge would remain stable over time, or even decline. Assuming the FAA and the TSA are given the authority to raise the segment fees as they choose, it is not unreasonable to assume that they would choose to raise them every year rather than press for increases in efficiency. As Chris Edwards notes, Canada’s air-traffic control system is run by a nonprofit corporation, Nav Canada. Despite the fact that Nav Canada is a monopoly, growth in costs and charges have been restrained. And interestingly, Nav Canada doesn’t rely on segment charges of the kind Glaeser has in mind:

The 1996 privatization of Canada’s ATC system replaced a government ticket tax with direct charges on aircraft operators for services provided. Nav Canada’s $1.2 billion in revenues comes from charges for en route and terminal services. Thus, airlines get charged for flying through Canadian airspace and for landing at Canadian airports. For example, an airline flying an Airbus A330 from New York to Frankfurt through Canadian airspace would be charged $1,756.

As Tyler Duvall has argued, landing fees create an opportunity for innovative pricing schemes designed to minimize congestion:

In continuing with this warped pricing apparatus, the aviation system has neglected one very promising option for both reducing congestion and increasing airport revenues. Since only one plane can take off or land from a given runway at a given time (and since take-offs and landings must also be spaced out to avoid collisions), airport authorities have to allocate the use of their runways over the course of each day. They generally do this on a first-come, first-served basis, rather than by charging airlines directly for take-offs and landings (since the airlines already pay for space, overhead, the standard weight-based charge, and other costs). But if airports instead divided each day into take-off and landing “slots” (each being the amount of time a plane would require to depart or arrive), and charged the airlines for using the most coveted peak-time slots, they might be able to both manage demand and raise funds that could then be used to increase capacity and improve infrastructure.

Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that a privatized FAA could impose such a strategy on airports, which have resisted such pricing schemes in the past.

When Republican political strategists contemplate the demographic transformation of the electorate, they tend to focus on Latino voters. Yet recent trends among African American voters have also contributed to GOP woes. As Jamelle Bouie observes, John McCain and Mitt Romney fared very poorly among black voters, large numbers of whom are concentrated in politically competitive states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, and Ohio). In 2012, 93 percent of black voters backed Barack Obama, a slight decline from the 95 percent that had supported him in 2008. In contrast, John Kerry secured the support of 88 percent of African American voters in 2004 against 11 percent for George W. Bush. Bouie suggests that even a relatively a modest increase in black support for a Republican presidential candidate — to 2004 levels — would yield significant dividends. And so he suggests that a renewed GOP push for black voters might be a better use of scarce resources than a push for Latinos voters. This makes a great deal of sense. One possibility is that the sharp increase in turnout among African Americans, who went from 11 percent of the electorate in 2004 to 13 percent in 2008 and 2012, might not persist in 2016 and 2020, thus reducing the salience of the black vote. My suspicion, however, is that black turnout levels will remain relatively high.

So when Republican primary voters vet the next round of GOP presidential contenders, they ought to give at least some thought to whether the candidate in question might appeal to black voters. Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, fared relatively well among black voters in 2004 and 2008, having won 13 percent of the black vote the first time around and 20 percent the second. And 2008 was an election with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. It is a safe bet, however, that Daniels won’t run in 2016. Of the various Republicans currently being discussed as 2016 presidential candidates, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is perhaps best positioned to woo black voters. A recent Quinnipiac survey found that while Christie’s statewide approval rating was 59 percent, he had a 65 percent approval rating among white voters and a 31 percent approval rating among black voters. Though one assumes that some share of the voters who express approval of Christie’s job performance won’t back his bid for reelection, it is at least possible that he could fare as well among black voters in his state in 2013 as Daniels did in 2012. The national black electorate is obviously very different from the New Jersey black electorate. But Christie has made a concerted effort to take about issues of particular interest to the African American voters, including the quality of public education in high-poverty neighborhoods and criminal justice reform. And his willingness to distance himself from congressional Republicans might also prove appealing to black voters, or rather it make him less unappealing.  

In an excellent review of Susan Crawford’s Captive Audience, Tim Lee of Ars Technica draws an underappreciated distinction:

Crawford’s framing of the debate—between the pro-regulatory stance of the 1930s and the anti-regulatory stance of the 2000s—ignores a third option: the pro-competitive policies of the 1970s.

In 1968, the FCC forced AT&T to allow third parties to attach devices to the network, creating a market for answering machines, cordless phones, modems, and much more. In the 1970s, the FCC allowed MCI to enter the long distance market. And in 1974, the Ford administration began antitrust proceedings that would lead to the monopolist’s breakup in 1984. The result was flourishing markets for long distance service, answering machines, cordless phones, and online services. And crucially, the FCC avoided heavily regulating these relatively competitive markets, resulting in a rapid pace of innovation.

In other words, the key principle of the 1970s reforms was that monopolies should be regulated while competitive markets should not be. And this is a principle neither Crawford nor modern conservatives seem to understand. Crawford seems to regard the competitive sectors of today’s economy as just as dysfunctional, and in need of regulation, as the monopolistic sectors. Conservatives make the opposite mistake, reflexively opposing regulation no matter how concentrated an industry becomes.

And so, Tim concludes, we’re left with a counterproductive debate between the abstractions of “free markets” and “regulation,” all the while neglecting that the real question is how and how much we ought to regulate different sectors. He argues that while constraining monopolies makes sense, heavy-handed intervention in competitive sectors does not.

Michael Clemens and Robert Lynch have written a defense of less-skilled immigration. It is very carefully written. Consider the following passages:

The best, new research we have now is exemplified by the work of Economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri. Their research finds that immigration has had essentially zero net effects on the wages of low-wage U.S. workers. To the extent that it has had any effect on wages at all, the most thorough recent research suggests that immigration has had a small positive impact on the wages of lesser skilled native born Americans.

Ottaviano and Peri assess the impact of all immigration, not just less-skilled immigration. In an earlier iteration of the paper, released in 2006, the authors find that immigration has “a positive effect on wages of U.S.-born workers with at least a high school degree and a small negative effect on wages of U.S.-born workers with no high school degree.” One assumes that this finding has been superseded in their more recent research. Yet the question remains: would substituting skilled for less-skilled immigrants have a more substantially positive impact on the wages of U.S.-born workers, and in particular U.S.-born workers without a high school diploma?

Judis claims that legalizing the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. would “thrust [them] into the mainstream labor market, where they will compete with native-born workers.” But research indicates that legalizing these aspiring Americans would help our economy. Legalization would allow unauthorized workers to find jobs that best match their skills, increasing the productivity of our workforce and increasing the earnings of all Americans. Specifically, this research found that legalization adds a cumulative $832 billion to the U.S. economy over a decade, increases the earning of all Americans by $470 billion, generates an additional $109 billion in new tax revenue, and creates an average of 121,000 new jobs each year, benefits that accrue to all Americans.

The crucial question is which Americans benefit. Judis seems to be primarily interested in the impact of immigration reform on native-born U.S. workers. A category that encompasses “all Americans” is by definition not relevant to this concern, as no one doubts that unauthorized immigrants will benefit from legalization. Had Clemens and Lynch separated out the benefits to the native-born population, we’d have a clear picture of what is the best course of action. And of course one could favor legalization without also favoring a further increase in less-skilled immigration. 

In a forthcoming article, Scott Winship makes the following observation:

As the number of immigrants has increased—most of them Hispanic—so too has the share of the workforce with low education levels. These workers are undoubtedly better off than they would be in their home country, but if we add more and more below-median earners to the economy, we necessarily end up with a lower median.

It is impossible to identify immigrants in the CPS prior to 1993, but we can identify Hispanics as early as 1970. Assuming the 1969 to 1970 change was the same as for men in general, median earnings among non-Hispanic men declined not by 12 percent from 1969 to 2011 but by 8 percent. From 1969 to 2007, they rose by 2 percent. Among Hispanic men, earnings fell by 24 percent through 2011, but this decline is simply a more dramatic demonstration of how rising immigration pulls the median downward over time. Among non-Hispanics, the trend for blacks was stronger than the trend for whites, so this is not simply a story about non-Hispanic whites doing better than everyone else. [Emphasis added]

If we have it in our power to decide whether the future U.S. workforce will have a higher or lower share of skilled workers, I would suggest that we ought to choose one with a higher share of skilled workers. Immigration policy represents just such an opportunity. Cosmopolitans like Clemens will object on the grounds that the benefits that accrue to immigrants should outweigh any concerns about, for example, rising wage dispersion in the United States or rising expenditures on means-tested benefits, and that is their right. But those of us who believe that partiality towards the native-born and foreign-born individuals who already reside in the U.S. is morally sound have good reason to object. The benefits that flow from less-skilled immigration are matched and exceeded by skilled immigration, and the U.S. is in a position to shift the composition of its immigrant influx from the former to the latter.

There are reasons to favor less-skilled over skilled immigrants — if we assume that the U.S. will accept some number of immigrants that is lower than the number of skilled immigrants willing to settle in the U.S. in any given year, admitting any number of less-skilled immigrants above zero effectively represents a decision to prioritize a less-skilled worker over a skilled worker — beyond the fact that doing so will tend to alleviate global poverty. As Clemens and Lynch observe, increasing the pool of less-skilled immigrants lowers the cost of outsourcing child-rearing, meal preparation, and other household tasks, and this in turn tends to increase labor force participation among the most productive female workers. It is not obvious, however, that admitting large numbers of less-skilled immigrants is the most cost-effective strategy for increasing female labor force particpation, if that is our goal. We might, for example, reduce marginal tax rates, a strategy that would increase the after-tax returns to increased work hours, thus making it worthwhile for skilled workers to pay caregivers higher wages. To be sure, this strategy might lead to a deterioration of the net fiscal position of the government. Yet the same might be true of increasing the share of the workforce with low education levels. 

Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure of talking to Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver, a veteran of the Clinton and Bush national security teams, about the U.S. role in the Syria conflict. Among many other things, Feaver is an expert on the interaction between military strategy and public opinion, and so his recent observations on the politics of how the Obama administration has handled the Syria conflict are of particular interest:

[The president's] current policy of not intervening decisively is popular enough — the polls show at best modest support for military intervention if WMD has been used and at worst profound reluctance about shouldering additional burdens in the region. Obama, in his ambivalence, has the comfort of being aligned with the public today. But this is a cold comfort, since his policy is failing, every bit and perhaps more so than Bush’s Iraq policy during the war’s darkest days. Once the public concludes that Obama has failed in Syria, it will not matter much that they initially supported the policies that yielded this failure.

Granted, the political salience of Syria is likely to be far less significant than that of Iraq, which could be part of the implicit strategy of the Obama administration’s arm’s-length approach. Feaver observes that the president’s approach to Libya was initially very much like his approach to Syria, the main difference being that in Libya the British and French eventually forced his hand. 

The Obama administration is now inching towards intervention in Syria. As Feaver explained to me in detail, however, the prospects for an intervention are not nearly as encouraging now as they might have been earlier in the conflict. Had the U.S. government provided the Syrian opposition with extensive non-military assistance early on, U.S. policymakers would have more leverage over the opposition and more intelligence. This would have allowed U.S. policymakers to make an informed decision about providing the opposition, or rather the moderate, non-sectarian Syrian rebels, with military assistance, a stance that had been backed by the Central Intelligence Agency a year ago. President Obama decided against providing military assistance a year ago, presumably because he was concerned, not unreasonably, that doing so would mean that the U.S. would have at least partial “ownership” of the unfolding Syria crisis, and of any atrocities committed by the opposition. 

Stephen Biddle, a political scientist at George Washington University and one of the national security intellectuals who helped inspire the surge strategy, reminds us that if our goal is to end the Syria conflict as soon as possible, providing the Syrian opposition with military assistance isn’t necessarily the right way to go. When one external faction backs the opposition, another external faction might back, or increase its support for, the ruling government. The result could be that while the influx of armaments increasing the level of violence in the country, the balance of power remains the same. In Syria, the ruling government’s chief allies have been Iran and Hezbollah, and to a much lesser extent Russia and China, both of which have largely limited their assistance to diplomatic efforts designed to foil U.S.-led efforts to rally the “international community” against the Assad regime. It is possible that Iran is now providing the Assad regime with as much support as it possibly can. Yet there is good reason to believe that Hezbollah could do much more — up to and including launching terror attacks on western targets in “retaliation” for U.S. and allied support for the Syrian opposition.

Basically, the situation stinks, and one wishes that we had done more sooner. I explore some of these issues in a new subscriber-only column for the Times of London.

Back in 2008, Oregon expanded its Medicaid program. Yet the number of eligible applicants for Medicaid greatly exceeded the number of available slots, and so the state government decided to conduct a lottery to determine which applicants would receive Medicaid coverage. A team of researchers, including several of America’s most distinguished health economists, decided to compare outcomes across a number of indicators of health and well-being for individuals who secured Medicaid coverage and those who did not. The results are mixed. In an ideal world, the initial public policy decision might have been made with the interests of researchers in mind. For example, imagine if the lottery didn’t have a binary result — you either secure Medicaid coverage or you don’t — but rather that it also included a third option, i.e., some number of people who applied for Medicaid coverage would instead receive a cash transfer worth a comparable amount. Or better still, perhaps the experiment could have also included a fourth group that received a cash transfer worth less than Medicaid coverage. If our goal is to improve the well-being of low-income individuals, we’d ideally want to know whether extending insurance coverage is the best, most cost-effective strategy, particularly given the heavy emphasis our public policy conversation has placed on coverage expansion relative to work supports, wage subsidies, and guaranteed income policies. A cynical reading is that our focus on insurance coverage reflects to at least some degree the influence of medical providers, who presumably capture a much larger share of public resources devoted to insurance coverage than to, say, the earned-income tax credit. 

Regardless, many sharp people have chewed over the implications of the Oregon study and its latest results, which its authors characterize as follows:

This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

Avik Roy offers a comprehensive take on the study, and he notes a number of potential pitfalls, e.g., the study authors seem to have only measured the baseline health status of the uninsured group and not the Medicaid group. He concludes by suggesting that the results of the Oregon study (after two years) strengthen the case for having the public sector promote catastophic insurance coverage.

Let’s build a new health program for low-income Americans, one that pays primary care physicians $150 a month to see each patient, whether they are healthy or sick. That’s what so-called “concierge doctors” charge, and it would give Medicaid patients what they really need: first-class primary care physicians to manage their chronic cardiovascular and metabolic conditions. Then throw on top of that a $2,000-a-year catastrophic plan to protect the poor against financial ruin. The total annual cost of such a program would be $3,800 per person, 37 percent less than what Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion costs. Hell, put the entire country on that kind of plan, along with giving people the opportunity to use health savings accounts to cover the rest.

Megan McArdle also emphasizes that the chief benefit of Medicaid coverage appears to be that it increases income security. Peter Suderman praises left-of-center coverage expansion advocates for counseling caution in interpreting the findings of the Oregon study, yet he also expresses the hope that the same advocates had exercised caution when the initial results appeared to be somewhat more positive. Ross Douthat, in a related vein, argues that the debate over health reform would look very different if congressional Republicans embraced something like Avik’s approach. But as it stands, the GOP failure to articulate a plausible alternative to the Affordable Care Act greatly weakens their political position and, in the eyes of at least some persuadable voters, their moral standing. Josh Barro agrees that the Oregon study raises questions about the value of comprehensive insurance coverage relative to its cost. He seems convinced, however, that the Oregon findings won’t lead to a more constructive health reform conversation, as Republicans have strong incentives not to advance the kind of policies championed by Avik, Megan, Peter, and Ross, among others:

All of this makes me wish even more that conservatives had been productive partners in health reform rather than trolls. If conservatives want a consumer-directed redesign of the U.S. health-care system that forces patients to pay at the margin more often for care — in order to reveal what treatments are useful — they could have gotten it as part of the health-care overhaul. They just also had to agree to include the progressive fiscal reforms that liberals wanted: ensuring universal coverage and transferring money toward poor people who can’t keep up with the rapidly rising cost of health care.

They didn’t, partly because Republicans care more about not spending money on poor people and not changing programs that old people like than they do about making the health-care system more efficient. They also would have entered a political minefield. Nobody likes being told they’re getting too much health care. Just look at the bipartisan political outcry at the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendation that women start receiving mammograms at 50 rather than 40.

The risk-aversion of the U.S. voting public has proven a powerful weapon against the Affordable Care Act, both during the legislative debate that preceded its passage and over the course of the implementation battle. But risk-aversion is also the enemy of right-of-center health reformers who favor something along the lines of universal catastrophic coverage. One possibility is that the dysfunctional nature of the post-ACA health system will make the prospect of yet another health-system overhaul less daunting, but that’s hardly inevitable.

Ross Douthat notes that the trouble with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s efforts to get congressional Republicans to embrace a more pragmatic, problem-solving agenda is that it is vulnerable to a small number of defectors:

[T]o do anything genuinely innovative on policy, Eric Cantor (or any other member of the leadership) doesn’t just need a majority or a supermajority of his own caucus: He needs almost every single vote, which he can’t get so long as there’s a political premium to being “purer” than the leadership for conservative representatives from safe-as-houses districts. And of course the Catch-22 is that this problem would diminish if the G.O.P. had a larger House majority — but it’s hard to win a larger House majority if your policymaking is held hostage by a “no retreat, no surrender, no innovation” rump.

And so this purist “rump of a rump” can effectively set policy, which makes it more difficult for the GOP to secure marginal seats or to win popular vote majorities in presidential elections. Purists claim that moderates have been discredited by the failures of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Bob Dole as presidential candidates, and that conservatives are likely to have more success by touting a more rigorous anti-tax, anti-spending message. Back in 2011, Ramesh Ponnuru explained the distinction between establishment-oriented candidates and moderate candidates as such. In recent decades, establishment-oriented candidates have moved to the right on a wide range of issues, particularly those where conservative activists have intensely-held views:

The officials, donors and operatives who make up the Republican establishment are much more conservative than their counterparts of two decades ago. They are more likely to be pro-life, more firmly opposed to tax increases, and more skeptical of environmental regulation. And these positions are typically held sincerely, if not always passionately.

This Republican establishment is more likely to favor comprehensive immigration reform and same-sex unions than rank-and-file conservatives. But it is also more likely to favor reductions in entitlement spending and tax reform that prioritizes reductions in the top marginal tax rate over the child tax credit, stances that are not particularly popular among self-identified Republicans and conservatives in the electorate. A Pew Research Center survey from 2011 found that 47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters favored prioritizing keeping Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are over reducing the budget deficit, a share that climbed to 53 percent among GOP voters earning between $30K and $75K and 62 oercent among GOP voters earning less than $30K. GOP voters earning over $75K, in contrast, favor prioritizing deficit reduction by a similarly substantial margin of 63 percent. Note, however, that establishment-oriented candidates like Mitt Romney tend to fare well among Republican primary voters earning more than $75K. More recently, in February of 2013, the Pew Research Center found that while 21 percent of self-identified Republicans want to decrease Medicare expenditures, 24 percent would like to increase them. On Social Security, 35 percent of Republicans favored increasing spending while 17 percent favored decreasing it. Support for spending increases on education, combating crime, and veteran’s benefits was substantially stronger in this group. So the GOP establishment vs. conservative insurgent narrative suffers from a serious problem: both establishment-oriented candidates and purists endeavor to appeal to the same relatively high-income constituency, while middle-income and low-income Republicans have few visible champions who are trying to reconcile a defense of the safety net with a growth-oriented agenda. 

Ross has suggested that Republicans would be much better off if there were GOP lawmakers willing to filibuster in defense of the now-expired Social Security payroll tax cut as well (or instead) of on issues relating to gun rights and civil liberties. The purist rump of a rump pushes congressional Republicans in one direction. Yet as of yet, there is no countervailing populist rump that is pushing for Brown-Vitter-style banking reform or an expansion of the child credit or Social Security reform aimed at increasing retirement incomes or expanded work programs as an alternative to the expansion of means-tested benefits. Part of the reason is that the constituencies these Republicans might represent, in the middle-income suburbs of the Midwest and the big coastal cities, have in some cases fallen out of the reach of Republicans. Another could be that while a party-centered campaign finance system would allow national parties to back populist candidates without substantial fundraising networks in winnable seats, our candidate-centered campaign finance system is arguably biased in favor of purists. This is a challenge. 

In the latest issue of In These Times, Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, offers a political blueprint for democratic socialists. In particular, he calls on socialists to form tighter bonds with liberals, as this will create an opportunity for socialists to exploit the gap between liberal technocrats and liberalism’s mass constituency. This is, for non-socialists, the interesting part:

The different ways in which liberals assess this history reveal interesting fractures in the liberal camp. In one corner, labor-oriented liberals rightly pine for that bygone era’s economic security and still dream that someday the promise of mid-century liberalism will be realized in the form of a more robust industrial democracy. In the other corner are those aligned with the professional liberal policy class, like the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who in a January 18 blog post titled “After ‘the end of big government liberalism’ ” wrote, “The progressive project of building a decent welfare state is giving way to the more technocratic work of financing and managing it.” Hence the existing safety net must be pruned and innovated upon until it can mesh with the demands of a globalized economy.

These liberal technocrats aren’t idiots. Their understanding of the structural basis of the 1970s economic crisis that undid much of American social democracy and inaugurated neoliberalism is more sophisticated than that of their labor-Left peers. But the disconnect between the aspirations of liberal policy types and the voting blocs they rely on politically is striking. This is a divide socialists can exploit. The bloodless wonkery of Beltway liberals—the corps of writers who are heralded as the “ideas people” of American liberalism—presents the Left with an opportunity to rebuild a rapport with the broader progressive movement, an audience starved for alternatives to austerity.

Bhaskar’s invocation of the disconnect between “liberal policy types” and rank-and-file left-of-center voters brings to mind a passage David Goodhart’s exceptionally intelligent new book, The British Dream, which is unfortunately not yet available in a U.S. edition:

When I said to my neighbour, one of the country’s most senior civil servants, that I wanted to write a book about why liberals should be less sceptical about the nation state and more sceptical about large-scale immigration, he frowned and said, ‘I disagree. When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration … I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’

I was surprised to hear this from such a senior figure in a very national institution and asked the man sitting next to the civil servant, one of the most powerful television executives in the country, whether he believed global welfare should be put before national welfare, if the two should conflict. He said he believed global welfare was paramount and that therefore he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. …

These two men in Oxford reflect a powerful strand in the thinking of Britain’s educted liberal baby-boomers. They take for granted the blessings of a national welfare democracy yet are also markd by the anti-national ideology of the 1960s and 1970s, a lingering reaction against the nationalist extremes of the first half of the twentieth century.

Most people are moral particularists, believing that we have a hierarchy of obligations starting with our family and rippling out via the nation state to the rest of humanity. Charity, like our affections, begins at home. But many of the brightest and the best now reject this old homily. Their idealism is more focused on raising up the global poor or worrying about global warming than on helping out the lonely pensioner up the road. …

Many of the children of the 1960s and today’s idealistic, educated youth want to save the world by supporting the freest possible flow of people across what they regard as increasingly anachronistic national borders. The late philosopher Michael Dummett argued that open borders ought to be accepted as the norm and, by extension, that existing citizens in western countries do not have any special rights to ‘their’ rich and peaceful countries as compared to newcomers. But this offends against the democratic common sense and perhaps a deeper intuition that a society is, at least in part, a contract between generations. 

Bhaskar is a socialist and he is at least as “anti-national” as the civil servant invoked by Goodhart or the liberal policy types. And on the subject of immigration, large swathes of liberalism’s mass constituency is aligned with cosmopolitan liberal policy types, as a large segment of the U.S. less-skilled workforce is foreign-born and inclined to support the regularization of unauthorized immigrants and an increase is less-skilled immigration, particularly if it is oriented towards family unification. But this divide is one that conservatives should keep front of mind. Immigration policy is often thought of as a “culture war” issue or as an economic policy issue of interest primarily to agricultural and high-technology firms. It is better understood as an absolutely central issue, as it has bearing on the future shape not only of the U.S. labor force but of the American national community. So a debate over immigration ought to be a debate about the kind of country we want to have, and how much concentrated poverty we want or can comfortably afford to have within our borders two or three generations hence. 

There are many other ways the cleavage Bhaskar identifies can create opportunities for the center-right. Recently, I’ve been writing about how conservatives ought to approach Social Security reform (make it more sustainable but also more generous by creating a stronger safety net for the oldest seniors and emphasizing pre-funded savings) and the tangled web of multigenerational poverty and crime. These are policy initiatives that are designed to address deep-seated problems, and my sense is that they might also prove politically appealing, as they resonate with widely-held anxieties and aspirations among middle-income and low-income voters. Right now, there appears to be a limited appetite for such ideas among GOP electeds. But as the demographic and economic transformation of the electorate continues, that will change. 

I’d be remiss in not referencing the gap between conservative policy types and the voting blocs they rely on, a phenomenon that, as Sean Trende has suggested, appears to have contributed to a weak Republican performance in the 2012 presidential election. But that disconnect is obviously a central preoccupation in these parts. 

Steve Randy Waldman reminds us that while entrpreneurs really do strive to meet the needs of customers, even as they constantly invent new needs, they compete to meet needs on a purchasing-power-weighted basis. That is, the affluent U.S. consumer counts for much more than the poverty-stricken Congolese consumer. This raises an interesting possibility: abundance for a privileged minority of global consumers might lead to a satiation of wants that results in technological stagnation: “purchasing-power weighted necessity is the mother of invention, but people with needs have little purchasing power while people with purchasing power have trivial needs.” And though my guess is that investor Chamath Palihapitiya, a Facebook veteran, is not one of Waldman’s avid readers, he did recently make a closely related point:

He argued that in contrast to past decades, where tech entrepreneurs were inventing silicon chips, putting computers on every desktop, or wiring the world, we’re now “rehashing ideas from 2003.” He didn’t name a specific company, but when Palihapitiya talked disdainfully about an instant messaging app that allows you to send photos of everything from an apple orchard to your genitalia, and that the message disappears after a short period of time, it’s not too hard to decipher who he’s talking about.

“That was a bad business plan 10 years ago, and it’s a bad business plan now,” he said.

All of this seems particularly frivolous, Palihapitiya said, at a time when people are “dying left and right” and there’s significant inequality: “Everybody should be focused on these big ideas.”

What Palihapitaya surely understands, however, is that as long purchasing power is distributed very unevenly, it will take more than moralistic exhortation to convince entrepreneurs to meet the needs of the global poor. C.K. Prahalad has offered a contrary view — that there is a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid,” as the aggregate purchasing power of the global poor is very high indeed. And there is at least some reason to believe that multinationals are pursuing this opportunity, as evidenced by the efforts of various business enterprises to expand their operations in sub-Saharan Africa, where only 2 percent of the population lives on more than $10 a day. Indeed, one could make the case that there are more entrepreneurial energies directed at the global poor now than has ever been the case, in large part because of an increase in indigenous entrepreneurship as many in the developing world have made it beyond mere subsistence. (This is a develop Dayo Olopade chronicles in her forthcoming book The Bright Continent.) So while it would be a fine thing for more of America’s greatest entrepreneurial minds to be focused on meeting the needs of the global poor, as Palihapitaya explicitly and Waldman implicitly recommend, the fact that more Kenyan and Rwandan minds are being brought to bear on these challenges is arguably a much bigger deal. 

For more optimism, I recommend Annie Lowrey’s new column on progress towards the eradication of extreme global poverty for the New York Times Magazine.

Scott Winship critiques recent research by economists Ilyana Kuziemko and Stefanie Stantcheva, who find that while Americans disapprove of rising inequality, they are skeptical about using government to reverse the trend. Specifically, Winship suggests that Kuziemko and Stantcheva neglect the possibility that even if most Americans don’t think of rising inequality as a good thing, they don’t think about it as a particularly important development. A more pressing issue, in my view, is the persistence of multigenerational poverty, the subject at the heart of Patrick Sharkey’s new book, which he previewed in a recent New York Times op-ed, and which Sean Reardon and Megan McArdle and Evan Soltas, among others, have addressed from various different angles. My plan is to engage with the Sharkey thesis for some time, but for now I want to highlight one of his more dramatic findings.

Drawing on a widely-used test of reading and language skills, scaled to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which means that 70 percent of the population will fall between 85 and 115 (within one standard deviation of the mean) and 95 percent of the population will fall between 70 and 130 (within two standard deviations of the mean), Sharkey compares children across groups defined by the poverty concentration of the neighborhoods in which they’ve been raised and the poverty concentration of the neighborhoods in which they’re parents had been raised. Children raised in non-poor neighborhoods by parents raised in non-poor neighborhoods have a mean score of 110. Children raised in non-poor neighborhoods by parents raised in poor neighborhoods have a mean score of 102. Under the reverse scenario, with children raised in poor neighborhoods by parents raised in non-poor neighborhoods, the mean score is 101. And finally, children raised in poor neighborhoods by parents raised in poor neighborhoods have a mean score of 94, a score 16 points lower than for children from families in the first category — more than a full standard deviation, and a cognitive deficit that can be compared to the gains associated with four to eight additional years of schooling. 

It is often said that public schools in cities with high concentrations of poverty often spend a great deal per pupil while delivering only modest gains in educational performance. There is some evidence that charter schools can reduce per pupil spending while delivering the same educational outcomes, which is encouraging. Yet the prospect of actually closing a cognitive deficit of this scale is daunting. Some strategies, like Summer Opportunity Scholarships designed to address summer learning loss among students from low-income households, seem promising, as they directly increase instructional time. In the most expansive and optimistic scenario, two additional months of school over the twelve years of K-12 education might yield more than two years worth of cognitive gains, particularly if summer enrichment programs embrace instructional models well-suited to the needs of the student population in question. But when you recall that the gap we’ve dealing with is equivalent to four to eight additional years of schooling, it’s obviously that a school-focused strategy isn’t enough. 

As Sharkey observes, his findings strongly suggest (they do not in themselves prove) that a child’s environment isn’t all that matters, as the effects of neighborhood poverty appear to be amplified over the course of multiple generations. This ought to lend a new urgency to poverty-fighting efforts, but not to just any poverty-fighting efforts. Rather, it seems that we ought to pay closer to attention to the effects of concentrated neighborhood disadvantage. One of the more interesting findings from the economic mobility literature, highlighted by Winship, Sharkey, and others, is that while white Americans raised in middle-income or more affluent households tend to “stick” to the middle class, African Americans raised in such households are far more likely to fall out of it. Sharkey argues that this in part reflects the fact that African Americans are raised in neighborhoods with higher poverty concentrations than white Americans at any given level of income. That is, a black household earning X is likely to live in a neighborhood that is poorer than the neighborhood that is home to a white household earning X. This can be true for any number of reasons, ranging from housing discrimination to a preference for living in culturally familiar neighborhoods, or some blend of the two.

If our goal is to reduce poverty concentrations, there are a number of approaches we might take. Sharkey emphasizes that most U.S. neighborhoods that have seen a decline in poverty concentration have been magnets for upwardly-mobile immigrants. He is more cautious about the potential benefits of gentrification, in which educated middle-income and high-income residents settle in low-income neighborhoods in large numbers, as the empirical evidence on gentrification of this kind is limited. Some intuit that the main beneficiaries of gentrification are the gentrifiers themselves (this resembles George Borjas’s finding that under a standard “textbook” economic model, most of the economic gains associated with immigration flow to immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits), and that the spillover benefits to incumbent residents are limited by increases in the cost-of-living that can lead to displacement. A not-incompatible view is that neighborhood churn is always happening, but that the rising quality of life or amenity value associated with gentrification makes incumbent residents more inclined to remain in gentrifying neighborhoods. Stephen Smith has described how restrictions on housing supply exacerbate the displacement aspect of gentrification. Normally, the gradual deterioration of housing stock will decrease its value, a phenomenon known as “housing filtering.” Yet in the absence of new housing supply within easy commuting distance of the central business district, high-earners will embrace this older, close-in housing stock, leaving low-income incumbents to outlying neighborhoods that necessitate longer commutes. Through Sharkey’s lens, one could argue that efforts to increase density in gentrifying neighborhoods are an attractive poverty-fighting strategy, as they will tend to restrain housing cost growth, thus making it somewhat more likely that neighborhoods won’t simply transition from low-income to high-income as low-income incumbents are displaced, but rather that they will become stable mixed-income neighborhoods.

Granted, this gentrification dynamic might be of limited relevance to the larger landscape of poverty concentration, as it applies to a relatively small number of close-in neighborhoods in cities with robust labor markets. The larger issue is how we address the economic and social isolation of neighborhoods that aren’t currently attractive targets of gentrification. Immigration, as Sharkey suggests, might play a role. But perhaps the most obvious strategy is a greatly expanded effort to reduce urban crime rates, which, despite “the great American crime decline” of the past two decades, remain far higher than they had been at midcentury. I’ve been advocating a huge increase in the size of urban police forces for over a decade, and William Stuntz made the case more systematically in The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. As of 2004, total spending for local police stood at $68 billion. Stuntz observed that if the U.S. increased the number of local police officers by 100,000, the U.S. would have 310 police officers per 100,000 population — substantially lower than 350 police officers per 100,000 population, the number in European Union countries. Stuntz estimated that this increase would cost $15 billion, a relatively small share of the $214 billion spent on criminal justice in the U.S. in 2006. I would start by recommending that we get to the EU ratio of police officers per 100,000 population, and I would also consider several of the measures Dylan Matthews identified as effective crime control strategies in a recent Wonkbook post, including increases in alcohol taxes (which could be used to defray the cost of expanding police forces), improving foster care options, and (yes) sports education. 

Focusing on crime control has a number of virtues: it is politically unassailable; it is cost-effective, as the gains in economic activity that would flow from reduced crime rates and the reduction in the costs associated with incarceration, including its wage-scarring effects, would be substantial; it would make high-poverty urban neighborhoods less violent and thus more attractive to new non-poor residents, whether immigrants or gentrifiers; and it would have significant health and economic benefits for incumbent residents. Consider, for example, recent research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on adult health, as described by Paul Tough in How Children Succeed: a history of physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and family dysfunction, e.g., having divorced or separated parents or family members who were incarcerated or mentally ill or addicted, is strongly associated with negative adult outcomes, which can severely damage lifetime earning potential. The more ACEs experienced by an individual during childhood, the more likely the individual was to be obese, depressed, to some, or to have engaged in early sexual activity. What is more noteworthy still, as Tough explains, is that ACEs didn’t just impact behavior. Rather, they appeared to have a powerfully negative impact on health and life outcomes even when self-destructive behavior played no role. The consensus view is that ACEs have this damaging effect through the channel of the body’s stress management system, which is more likely to be overloaded in high-crime neighborhoods. 

The challenge for those of us who want to invest more heavily in making high-poverty neighborhoods safer and more attractive, and to provide children living in them with more instructional hours, etc., is precisely that these neighborhoods tend to be isolated from the most politically influential networks. Gentrification has helped mitigate this phenomenon to at least some extent in some small handful of cities, which is one of many reasons why I think gentrification is a fundamentally very beneficial phenomenon. But somehow we need to gin up more collective outrage about crime. The prison reform conversation has emphasized the importance of humaneness towards offenders, which is not an entirely bad thing, particularly if it leads us to emphasize deterrence over incarceration. Yet I worry that an emphasis on the well-being of offenders might distract us from the larger problem that violent crime destroys neighborhoods and lives in ways that sap our collective well-being. This has led me to believe that Stephanos Bibas’s approach to prison reform, which, as outlined in National Review, emphasizes the importance of restitution and prison labor as part of the process of reintegrating offenders into society, is extremely valuable.

So when we talk about concentrated neighborhood disadvantage, I suggest that we lead with crime, we pursue Summer Opportunity Scholarships as a vehicle for choice and instructional innovation in urban school districts, and we emphasize the importance of breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The beauty of this agenda, from my engaged and not detached perspective, is that it is all about strengthening civil society, my favorite right-wing fetish. But who is going to take up the mantle? 

My latest column for Reuters Opinion riffs on the Bush era.