Greg Sanders

Celebrating same-sex marriage victory in DC

While the news out of New York state is bad, the 11-2 vote for same-sex is quite gratifying.  I rather liked Ta-Nehisi Coates coverage on why the political leadership is more liberal than the population:

Part of this, I'd argue, comes from working, in close proximity, with people, of all stripes, who are concerned with equality. You start out thinking only about yourself--but you end up having to think about women of all colors, gays of all colors, poor and working people of all colors. Maybe I'm just projecting here, I don't know. Modern liberalism has taken its share of hits (many of them deserved) for trafficking in identity politics. But the flip-side is that you become better informed about the politics of other identities. Again this is true of people in "leadership" positions, not of the "rank and file."

That makes sense to me.  Now I’m hoping that some of that will carry over to Maryland’s Democratic leadership.  Montgomery County would totally pass such a law, but the entire state is a tougher question. I just hope we’re closer now.

Event Write-Up: Muslim Integration: Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Europe and the United States

[Download the Report]

This discussion covered some differences between American and Europe. It basically went along the lines I thought: American Muslims tend to be better integrated and more prosperous than European Muslims. This can drive radicalism. One difference a questioner pointed out is that Americans might think more of integration in a more pluralistic sense while Europeans may think of it more in a complete assimilation sense. 

That said, this can't entirely be credited to the American model, as Matt Yglesias (not finding the post) has noted the Mexican-American population is more comparable to the Muslim European population in terms of often being brought in on menial labor.  For perhaps a better analogy, one questioner, Michael Werz from Georgetown, made an between second generation radicalization in Europe to African Americans and Islam in 1968 with the Nation of Islam and such. Where the issue was really one of civil rights and affirmative action and not interfaith dialog.  Similarly, the bombers in the UK were from secular families and while radicalized in Europe had little association with local mosques.

Enough context.  Here's some interesting raw data from Ceri Peach, the specifics are often hard to get as governments often don't track religion or even ethnicity.  The Muslim population is about 21 million with a third being 'old Muslim' groups that date back to the Ottoman Empire.  The other 14 million are more tied in to the guest worker phenomenon.  The Muslim population is also younger than Europeans in general.  Not surprisingly, the population is also heterogeneous: by size there's the most Turks (mostly in Germany), secondly North Africans (mostly into France), finally South Asians into the U.K. 

After the break, more from Ceri Peach and some highlights from the other speakers:

The fate of New Orleans

The President visited the city again a few days ago, "Even in the handpicked audience for the president's Wednesday morning school appearance, some voiced skepticism mixed in with gratitude for Bush's show of support."  He can't even get a crowd of loyalists together, that pretty much says it all.

So what's the large[r] situation:

Still, only two-thirds of the pre-Katrina population of New Orleans has returned to the city, and storm damage remains visible. Only 40 percent of the city's public school students have returned, although sales tax receipts have climbed to 84 percent of pre-storm levels, according to a new Brookings Institution report.

Of those who haven't returned, some 86,000 are living in trailers that are making people sick.  So 66% of the people returned, 40% of the school students, and 84% of the tax base. In essence, this tells us that many of the poor haven't returned to New Orleans.  This gets to the "smaller footprint" issue, recently discussed in a Jonathon Yardley  review of a book on Katrina.

[The author] reverses gears and writes a sensible, unemotional chapter about the debate over whether New Orleans must remain a smaller city -- having a "smaller footprint," to use the vogue phrase -- in order to avoid having many of its citizens return to areas that cannot be fully protected against flooding and its consequences. One would expect Sothern to parrot the line that "a smaller footprint would prevent poor people and minorities from returning to their homes," but he comes out in agreement with Pierce Lewis, the author of New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (published originally in 1976), that "allowing people to return to homes in flood-prone areas [is] neither 'particularly humane' nor in accord with civil rights, when 'you know that they could drown there.' " Sothern says the real question is "whether it is possible to shrink the city . . . in a manner that achieves justice for the people displaced and a better, safer, more functional city for everyone," and he's right.

In essence, what's happening now is a de facto shrinking of New Orleans footprint without any sort of social justice for those displaced.  I tend to buy the argument that purchase of flood insurance should be mandatory (with a seller of last resort available from the Feds).  The alternative is temporarily ameliorating the housing of the poor by giving them an economic incentive to put their lives at risk from disasters.  The administration is using neglect, its favorite domestic policy tool, to force a smaller footprint without ever having to make the argument for what they feel should be done.  Thus it falls to the Dems to speak for the dispossessed, the articles shows they're trying, but time will tell whether they make a difference.

[Update: A typo fixed.]

Domestic Poverty, by the numbers

The government released its household income numbers a few days ago.  There was some wage growth due to increased hours employment, but there was also a rise in the uninsured.

Steven Pearlstein had some interesting analysis in the Post.  First he argued that really liberals should use the household income numbers after adjustment for taxation, food stamps, and the like.  I think there's some merit to that argument.  Trouble is, as Perlstein notes, those numbers don't get put out until March, so the latest numbers we have are for 2005 which is kinda stale.

If your curious how much of a difference this makes, here's the differences in household income based on method of calculation:

Anyhow, I'll try to work these numbers in the next time I do some primary source research on poverty.  For the moment though I'm going to focus on the rest of Pearlstein's argument.  He cites "The Persistence of Poverty," a book by his friend Charles "Buddy" Karelis, a professor at George Washington University.

The book argues against the idea that the marginal benefit of a $1 is highest for the poorest American households and steadily decreases as you rise in income.  This is a fairly unorthodox view, since that particularly economic rule makes a fair amount of sense.  After all, the more money you have, the smaller percentage a dollar is of your income.

But what if this iron law of economics is wrong? What if it doesn't apply at every point along the income scale? If you and everyone around you are desperately poor, maybe it's perfectly rational to think that an extra dollar or two won't make much of a difference in reducing your misery. Or that you won't be able to "study" your way out of the ghetto. Or that if you find a $100 bill on the street, maybe it's logical to blow it on one great night on the town rather than portion it out a dollar a day for 100 days.

On the other hand, maybe the point at which people are most willing to work hard, save and play by the rules isn't when they are very poor, or very rich, but in the neighborhoods on either side of the point you might call economic sufficiency -- a motivational sweet spot that, in statistical terms, might be defined as between 50 percent ($24,000) and 200 percent ($96,000) of median household income. And if that is so, then maybe the best way to break the cycle of poverty is to raise the hopes and expectations of the poor by putting them closer to the goal line.

Apparently Karelis just backs it up with anecdote and logic.  That's not necessarily a problem, this is a falsifiable theory.  One possible experiment would be to give an equivalent amount of money to people with varying incomes and then track how they spend it.  If the theory is right, then the money should be best used for long term ends by those in the lower-middle of the income spectrum.

I'm going to have to think if there's any ways to check if there's at least some correlation level support for this idea using existing statistics.  What I'd really need are some numbers that track income mobility over time.  That said, by the description by Tyler Cowen it sounds like the book gets a little deep into psychoanalyzing the poor without a lot of evidence to back it up.  There are a lot more differences than just attitude between lower income immigrants and equivalent income native born Americans.