Author Archives: JohannaG58

The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The news business has always had evergreen stories. When Time magazine asks “Why Did Jesus Have To Die?” on its cover, it’s following in its own footsteps along with hundreds of others. If it’s Easter, we have stories about Jesus.

The wonky blog world has its own odd set of evergreens. These are stories that might have been interesting the first time I read them, but which I’m now heartily sick of. So even though I’m a day late for this to be part of the Festivus airing of grievances, here are a few examples:

Does Daylight Savings Time really reduce energy consumption?
An economist explains why Christmas gift giving is inefficient.
The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really signed on July 4th.
Christmas and those crazy Asians: KFC in Japan and Spam in South Korea explained.
Scientists are adding a second to the year today. Here’s why.
The Dow is a lousy proxy for the actual state of the stock market.
Etc.

Of course, if this year happens to be the first time you see any of these evergreens, they’re fresh and new to you. It’s only the fact that I’ve seen them so many times that makes them so tired to me. So feel free to ignore my griping on this subject. In fact, feel free to mock me for it if you like.

Anyway, I was reminded of this by the inevitable spate of bloggish stories last week about why Christmas is inefficient, and then reminded again by not one, not two, but three bloggy pieces about KFC in Japan that I happened to see within five minutes of each other this morning. (Bad luck, that!) And it got me thinking: ordinary old-school evergreens all seem pretty understandable. But these wonkish blog evergreens seem….a bit odd. So I’m curious: what is it that makes a subject a bloggy evergreen? What do these kinds of stories have in common?

Once I figure it out, I plan to write a blog post about it every year. Sort of like the one I write every year about the origins of Black Friday. Are you sick of that one yet?

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The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

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How to Remove Lead From Your Home

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 26, 2013

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How to Remove Lead From Your Home

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New Study Says Poverty Rate Hasn’t Budged For 40 Years

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some good news:

Government programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance have made significant progress in easing the plight of the poor in the half-century since the launch of the war on poverty, according to a major new study….The findings also contradict the official poverty rate, which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since then.

According to the new research, the safety net helped reduce the percentage of Americans in poverty from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012.

There are certain things you always need to be aware of in different fields of study. If it’s test scores among school kids, you need to disaggregate by race and ethnic background. If it’s life expectancy and Social Security, you need to make sure to use life expectancy at age 65, not life expectancy at birth. And if it’s poverty measurements, you need to distinguish between elderly poverty and working-age poverty.

Social Security has dramatically reduced elderly poverty, so if you simply look at overall poverty rates they’re always pulled down by the success of Social Security. But what about the working-age poor? How have government programs helped them? This was the first thing I looked for in this new study, and I found it in the red line in Figure 4:

This is a lot less cheery. Poverty has still declined, but not by much, and only between 1967 and 1973. Since 1973, the poverty rate hasn’t budged. It was 15 percent forty years ago and it’s 15 percent today.

Now, there’s still some good news in this study. Using their new measurement, the researchers find that child poverty has dropped from from 31 percent to 18 percent over the past three decades. They also find that safety net programs have reduced poverty rates and dramatically reduced “deep poverty” rates. It’s also heartening that poverty rates increased only slightly during the Great Recession. Safety net programs have significantly ameliorated a human catastrophe over the past five years.

But the headline result, I think, is simple: among the working-age poor, poverty has been stuck for the past four decades. We’ve made virtually no progress at all.

This article:

New Study Says Poverty Rate Hasn’t Budged For 40 Years

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