Tag Archives: three

Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’d forgotten about this even though I wrote about it two years ago, but here’s yet another chart about “deep poverty”:

In this case, deep poverty is defined as households with income under 50 percent of the poverty line (about $10,000 for a family of three). The calculation is based on more accurate measures of poverty that have since been endorsed by the Census Bureau.

Now, this is a different measure of poverty than the one used by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer that I noted yesterday. Their measure is both tighter (looking at even lower poverty rates) and looser (it counts households that are in extreme poverty even for short times). So it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, once you look at the historical numbers, it doesn’t look like the 1996 welfare reform act slowed down the growth of welfare spending, nor did it have more than a very small effect on deep poverty.

None of this is especially meant to defend welfare reform. But 20 years later, it doesn’t look like it really had quite the catastrophic impact that a lot of people were afraid of at the time.

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

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Hooray! A Brand New Site For Creating Lots of Charts About Democracy.

by Aubrey0290 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The world is awash in charts these days. It’s a great example of a simple proposition of economics: when something gets cheaper to produce, we produce a lot more of it. Just as computers turned a dozen daily pieces of mostly useful snail mail into hundreds of mostly useless emails, they’ve turned data laboriously collected by experts and then laboriously converted into clunky bars and lines by the art department into colorful masterpieces that can be created by pretty much everyone at the push of a button or a modest investment in learning Excel. Half the charts I produce for this blog come either directly from my good friends at the St. Louis Fed or indirectly by downloading their handy datasets into Excel.

There are lots of sites that produce charts these days, with new ones popping up all the time. Joshua Tucker points us today to V-Dem, which provides “15 million data points on democracy, including 39 democracy-related indices.” The V-Dem website tells us that it is “a collaboration among more than 50 scholars worldwide which is co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA.” So let’s take a look.

V-Dem is pretty easy to use: pick one or more countries, one or more variables, and a time period. Click “Generate Graph” and you’re off. So let’s take a look at a few that I drew more or less at random. Here’s #1:

That’s peculiar, isn’t it? We’re used to thinking of the United States as the king of money in politics, but we’re actually the steady blue line right in the middle. Italy apparently spends more than us and Germany spends a lot more. But in the 2000s, Germany plummeted down to middle and Sweden skyrocketed up to the middle. By 2013 we were all pretty much the same.

Of course, I have no idea what this is based on. In theory, I could download the codebook and eventually decipher the data sources, but you can probably guess what the odds of that are. So for now it remains a bit of a mystery. Here’s #2:

This one is less surprising. It tells us that in the mid-1900s American political parties weren’t very cohesive. Then around 1980 they started to become much more cohesive, looking more and more like parliamentary parties in Europe. Oddly, though, V-Dem thinks that Democrats and Republicans got a bit less cohesive around 2005. This contradicts the conventional wisdom enough that it might be worth someone’s while to look into it. #SlatePitch, anyone? Here’s #3:

Sweden and Germany are the winners here, unsurprisingly. But the US does pretty well too. We’ve gone from a distant fourth place in 1972 (among the seven countries shown) to a close tie for first. Of course, everyone else has gotten a lot better too. In fact, if you want to zoom way in for the details and take a glass-half-empty approach to things, we’re actually in last place now. We were doing pretty well until 1993, but since then we’ve made almost no progress. Once again, if this is true it would be interesting to investigate. What happened in 1993 to suddenly blunt the rise of women’s participation in politics?

So that’s that. On the upside, there’s a lot of data here and it’s pretty easy to generate colorful charts out of it. It’s interesting too. Three out of three random charts that I created instantly posed challenges to the received wisdom that might benefit from further study. On the downside, it’s difficult to figure out the source of the indices or to download the data series themselves unless you’re willing to download the entire dataset and load it into your statistical app of choice. That makes further study hard for non-experts. Nothing’s perfect, I guess.

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Hooray! A Brand New Site For Creating Lots of Charts About Democracy.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

by ElbaKuester Posted on January 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Marcy Wheeler comments today on the lead disaster in Flint: “Think about how effects of lead poisoning feeds the stereotypes about race and class used to disdain the poor.”

Yep. Lead poisoning is equally bad for everyone, but certain groups were far more exposed to lead poisoning than others. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of children who displayed elevated blood lead levels over the past four decades. The data is taken from various studies over the years that have reported data from the CDC’s long-running NHANES program:

All the rest of the data on lead poisoning is exactly what you’d expect. Not only is it higher among blacks than whites, but it’s higher in inner cities and it’s higher among low-income families. And of course, this is on top of all the social problems these kids already have from being black, poor, and living in rundown neighborhoods.

Needless to say, lead didn’t cause institutional racism. But lead sure made it worse. White children were severely affected by the postwar lead epidemic, but it produced nothing less than carnage among black kids. Before we finally got it under control in the late 80s, lead poisoning had created nearly an entire generation of black teenagers with lower IQs, more behavioral problems in school, and higher rates of violent behavior—which, as Wheeler says, feeds into already vicious stereotypes of African-Americans and the poor. The only good news is that as lead poisoning has declined, it’s declined in blacks more than among whites. The difference today between black and white kids is fairly modest.

But what about Flint? The big problem with lead is that it does its damage in children, and once the damage is done the brain never recovers. We’re seeing lower levels of violent crime today because most crime is committed between the ages of 17-25—and that age cohort was all born after 1990, when atmospheric lead had dropped close to zero. But the effects of lead continue to dog people in their 40s and 50s. Once it’s there, it’s there.

This is what makes Flint so scary: if elevated lead levels damage young children, they’ll be damaged forever. So how much damage was actually done? And how much damage is still being done?

Those are hard questions to answer for two reasons. First, we don’t have as much hard data as we’d like. Second, lead is a horror show. Nobody wants to say anything that quantifies the damage and runs the risk of minimizing it. Public health experts are dead serious when they say the only safe level of lead is zero. Because of this, they simply don’t want to publicly declare that any specific rise in elevated blood lead levels is…is…anything. I don’t want to say it either. It’s just bad, full stop, and it needs to be fixed.

That means I was surprised to see this in the New York Times today:

“Our kids are already rattled by every kind of toxic stress you can think of,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said….She emphasized, however, that not every child exposed to lead would suffer ill effects. Kim Dietrich, a professor of environmental health at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, said that based partly on the blood lead levels of children in Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s study, he did not think serious long-term health problems would be widespread.

I’ve spoken with Dietrich, and he’s not a guy who takes the effects of lead lightly. If he says the long-term effects in Flint are likely to be modest, I’d pay attention to him.

But why would the effects be modest? Three reasons. First, lead levels in Flint were elevated for about 18 months. That’s a long time, but it’s a lot less than having elevated levels for your entire childhood up to age five. Second, the use of filters and bottled water helped reduce the lead levels in the drinking water. And that in turn means that, third, the rise in kids with blood lead levels above 10 m/d was less than one percentage point—and the rise was less than three percentage points even if you use the more conservative level of 5 m/d. As recently as 2008, the levels seen during the Flint water crisis would have been cause for celebration.

And what about now? Data here is frustratingly hard to get. Marc Edwards, the water-treatment expert who first blew the whistle on Flint’s water supply, says that (a) Flint’s pipes are probably back in satisfactory shape now that water has been coming from Detroit for the past three months and is being properly treated, (b) the water is “much, much better than it was last August,” and (c) there’s a 50-50 chance it could even pass a full-bore federal testing regime. Beyond that, preliminary state data suggests that blood lead levels in children are now down to about where they were before the water crisis. That’s good news, but it’s tentative.

More recently, the US Public Health Service announced that 26 out of 4,000 water samples in Flint had lead levels above 150 parts per billion. This is important because above that level it’s possible that filters won’t work effectively. But it doesn’t really tell us much about current lead levels in Flint’s water. We can say that 99.4 percent of homes have levels below 150 ppb and are probably safe if the water is filtered. But how many are below the EPA “action level” of 15 ppb? And what’s the “90th percentile” lead level, the standard way of measuring lead in tap water? We don’t know any of that, even though 4,000 samples is enough to give us a pretty good idea. Overall, Flint’s water is obviously much improved, but it’s hard to say precisely how good or bad it still is.

Put this all together and what do we get? Several educated guesses:

At a public services level, the Flint water crisis was an unbelievable fiasco.
The long-term damage to Flint’s kids is very real, but probably not catastrophic.
The water today appears to be safe in nearly all homes that use a filter.
However, there are also a small number of homes with astronomical lead levels in their water. It’s unclear why, but these homes need to be the target of immediate crash remediation.

If anything positive comes out of the Flint debacle, it will be a better understanding of the dangers of lead. Ironically, though, it’s not lead pipes that are really the biggest problem nationwide. Thousands of towns and cities have old lead pipes, and they generally don’t cause any problems except when some bonehead decides to stop treating the water properly and the scale inside the pipes corrodes away. Rather, the biggest problems now are lead paint and lead in soil. Everyone knows about lead paint, and abatement programs are widely available. But lead in soil, the product of decades of leaded gasoline settling to the ground, just sits around forever and gets kicked back into the air every summer when the soil dries up. It remains a serious problem, and not surprisingly, it’s most serious in heavily black, urban neighborhoods that had the highest levels of lead poisoning in the first place. You can read more about this in my piece about lead and crime (scroll to the bottom) or in this recent Vox piece by Matt Yglesias specifically about lead in soil.

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Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else

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Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

by Ethan0387xepklg Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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My hometown of Orange County isn’t in the news much, so it’s a little sad that our latest brush with fame is the escape of three inmates from the central jail in Santa Ana. Here’s the long version of how they did it:

And here’s the short version: They cut out a vent cover and climbed to the roof. Then they rappelled down by tying together a bunch of sheets. This is what passes for brilliant in Orange County. Sigh.

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Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

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Hillary Clinton Will Never Let Bernie Sanders Live Down This Vote

by JohnnieVernon5 Posted on January 8, 2016

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Three weeks removed from the Iowa caucuses, with Bernie Sanders nipping at Hillary Clinton’s heels in the polls, the Clinton campaign is reminding Democrats of the Vermont senator’s most problematic vote in Congress.

In 2005, Sanders, then in the House of Representatives, voted for an NRA-backed bill to provide legal immunity to gun manufacturers if their guns were used to commit crimes. Then-Sens. Clinton and Barack Obama, by contrast, voted against the bill.

Over the last few months, as mass shootings from Charleston to Roseburg to San Bernardino have rocked the country, and under increasing criticism by Clinton, Sanders has tried to neutralize the gun issue and even walk back his support for that vote. On a Friday conference call, Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, told reporters, “I would say that there’s about zero daylight between the president and Sen. Bernie Sanders.”

So the Clinton campaign set up a conference call of its own.

“Democrats have a real choice, because standing up to the gun lobby is a real difference between Sen. Sanders and Hillary Clinton,” John Podesta, a senior Clinton adviser, told reporters on the Friday afternoon call. Podesta highlighted Sanders’ vote for immunity for gun manufacturers, calling his record very different from both Obama’s and Clinton’s. He issued a challenge Sanders to “commit today to support legislation to overturn the sweeping immunity provision he voted to confer upon the gun industry.”

The Clinton campaign’s latest broadside against Sanders on guns comes one day after President Obama raised the issue of immunity for gun manufacturers in a New York Times op-ed and promised not to support any candidate—including Democrats—”who does not support common-sense gun reform.”

Sanders has come under repeated fire from Clinton for his 2005 vote and others on guns. In response, he has said he would revisit the legislation, but has declined to say that he regrets the vote. “I hope you know that Senator Sanders has said he’d be willing to take another look at that legislation,” Sanders’ spokesman, Michael Briggs, told Politico. This week, Sanders backed Obama’s executive actions on guns, including one to expand background checks to more gun sales.

Still, the senator’s gun record is a clear blemish on his near-sterling progressive record. Don’t expect the Clinton campaign to let voters forget that.

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Hillary Clinton Will Never Let Bernie Sanders Live Down This Vote

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Flavored E-Cigarettes May Be Worse For You Than Nicotine

by YettaSummerfiel Posted on December 9, 2015

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“An exotic fusion of pineapple and coconut with champagne infused blueberries.”

“Creamy milk chocolate and rich peanut butter flavors.”

No, these are not excerpts from the dessert menu at a fancy hotel. They’re some of the latest offerings from the makers of vape pens and e-cigarettes—which are the same thing, more or less. As e-cigs gain traction (sales are expected to soar 17-fold in the next 15 years), manufacturers are having a heyday concocting flavors that can be inhaled—an estimated 7,000 to date. Public health experts warn of the addictive nicotine in e-cigs and vaping fluids, and their potential to serve as a “gateway” to tobacco, especially for teens. But a new Harvard study instead took a hard look at those tantalizing flavors—and found that a majority, at least of the samples tested, contained chemicals linked to a dangerous lung disease.

Researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health analyzed various e-cig and vape pen liquids for the presence of three related chemicals—diacetyl, 2,3-pentanedione, and acetoin—that are also used in artificial butter flavorings. By the turn of the 21st century, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had deemed diacetyl safe to eat, but little was known about what happened when a person inhales it. Then, in the early 2000s, workers at several plants that manufacture microwave popcorn came down with a nasty lung disease after prolonged exposure to the fake-butter fumes. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated cases of this so-called popcorn lung, and later released guidelines for dealing with diacetyl in the workplace, along with a list of foods that contain the chemical. “Current evidence points to diacetyl as one agent that can cause flavorings-related lung disease,” notes the CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH says it is uncertain whether the other two compounds pose health risks, but it points out their chemical similarities to diacetyl.

Now the popcorn-lung chemicals are turning up in vape pens. The Harvard researchers tested 51 e-cigarette flavorings they deemed appealing to youth—think “Cupcake” and “Alien Blood”—and found diacetyl in 37 of them. At least one of the three suspect chemicals was present in 47 of the 51 samples. The researchers could not determine conclusively that using an e-cig flavored with these chemicals is harmful. But they pointed out that “the heating, vaporization, and subsequent inhalation” creates “an exposure pathway” similar to that of the microwave popcorn workers. Two of the flavors tested—”menthol” and “tobacco”—do not appear on OSHA’s list of flavors likely to contain diacetyl.

Since they landed on the market in 2004, e-cigarettes and vape pens have been dogged by controversy. Fans claim they are far less toxic than regular cigarettes and might even help tobacco smokers quit. Public health officials counter that it’s too early to know very much about e-cigs’ health effects, especially on young people. (Their use among teens tripled from 2013 to 2014.) At least 43 states have placed age restrictions on the sale and/or possession of the products.

The FDA does not currently regulate e-cigarettes—it has stalled for years in proceeding with proposed rules that would allow it to regulate the devices as tobacco products. But given the new findings, the agency may want to take a closer look at the sweet flavors that make the nicotine go down.

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Flavored E-Cigarettes May Be Worse For You Than Nicotine

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Kevin’s Three Laws of Political Speech

by ChristoCantrell Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Following the attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic on Colorado, we are having the usual spats over what kind of political speech is and isn’t appropriate. Apropos of that, here are three things I believe. These are not universally fashionable at the moment, but I suppose that’s all the more reason to lay them out yet again.

Nazi analogies are OK. Most Americans are not great students of history, and Nazi analogies are often just the most accessible way to make a historical point that you know everyone will get. Generally speaking, comparing a bit of behavior to the Third Reich doesn’t mean you’re literally accusing someone of being Hitler, and everyone knows it. We should all stop pretending otherwise. What’s more, sometimes the comparison is actually apt. For example, pro-lifers claim to believe that abortion is murder, which makes comparisons to the Holocaust perfectly reasonable.

Obvious caveats: Don’t be an asshole. It’s easy to go overboard and trivialize Nazi horrors. This is both insulting and tedious. It also makes you look like an idiot, so have a care. Not everything deserves to be compared to Hitler.

There’s nothing wrong with politicizing tragedies. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire prompted a sea change in views of workplace safety, and I think that was just fine. The 9/11 attacks increased public support for the invasion of Iraq, and I assume conservatives think that was just fine. More generally, what’s wrong with politicizing tragedies? That’s when people are paying attention, which means it’s often the best time to mobilize public support to address the issues underlying the tragedy. That’s what politics is for, isn’t it? If liberals want to use the Planned Parenthood attack to raise public awareness of gun violence and access to abortion, they should go right ahead. If conservatives want to use it to raise public awareness of the number of abortions performed every year, they should feel free to try.

Obvious caveats: Don’t be an asshole. Wait until we actually know what happened. Show some respect for the victims and their families. Don’t lie. Never even hint that the tragedy was in some way deserved.

Talk is not responsible for extreme acts, especially by the mentally ill. Political speech is often fiery. It’s often supposed to be fiery, and there’s always a risk that a few unhinged listeners will react in extreme ways. That’s a chance we have to take. If we rein in political speech to a level where there’s literally no risk of anyone reacting badly, we’ll have nothing but pabulum. Robert L. Deer might very well have been motivated to attack Planned Parenthood because he heard about them selling fetal tissue, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong for activists to bring this to the public’s attention.1

Obvious caveats: Don’t be an asshole. If you’re doing the verbal equivalent of hoisting a pitchfork and telling people to storm the Bastille, don’t pretend to be surprised when they storm the Bastille. Directly inciting violence is both legally and morally wrong.

1It was wrong to lie about it, but that’s a whole different subject.

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Kevin’s Three Laws of Political Speech

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

by HollisDjfrzp Posted on November 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Dante Atkins on the SAFE Act:

The bill requires the specific signatures of three high-ranking officials to personally approve refugees into the United States, a burden that both Republicans and the White House believe would all but cease the flow of refugees into the United States because it is believed that said officials would be too fearful of the career implications should one of the detainees turn out to become even a mere criminal, much less a terrorist.

I have to say, this bill has me confused. After looking into it, I wrote a post a couple of days ago suggesting that it was mostly symbolic. The vetting process didn’t change, it just needed to be documented and “certified” by the White House. Beyond that, some top officials would get half a dozen refugee approvals every day for their autopen to sign. Big deal. The only real effect would be a short pause while the certification was drafted and signed off.

Since then, though, every single story I’ve read about this bill describes it on a spectrum from “tightening” requirements to virtually shutting down the flow of refugees from Syria entirely. None of them ever provide any details, though. They talk about background checks, but the FBI already does background checks on refugees from Syria and Iraq. They talk about tougher procedures, but there are no new procedures in the bill. The actual vetting process itself is left up to the executive branch.

And yet, the White House is dead set against this bill, which it probably wouldn’t be if it was mostly just symbolic. So I remain puzzled. What’s the real deal with this bill? Is it really likely that, say, the Director of National Intelligence would simply refuse to ever sign off on a refugee approval? Hell, the DNI already signs off on hundreds of things with more potential for blowback than that.

I dunno. It’s all very strange.

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How Big a Deal is the SAFE Act?

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

by ShannonEsh Posted on November 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Coffee is one of the pleasures of existence. It’s also really good for us, an ever-expanding body of research suggests. The latest: an analysis of three large population studies by a team of researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They concluded that regular consumption of between one and five cups a day is associated with significantly lower risk of dying from from cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain disorders like Parkinson’s. (For those who drink more than five cups per day, the association unravels.)

Interestingly, the benefits are roughly the same for regular and decaf coffee—suggesting that something in the beloved beverage besides caffeine is the trigger. “Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation,” the study’s lead author, Ming Ding, said in a press release. The authors make clear that their results are consistent with “numerous” previous studies.

Now that coffee’s health-giving value is well-established, we should probably think harder about an always–vexing problem: how to ensure that the people who tend and harvest this tropical crop get their fair share of the profits generated from it.

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Science Says: Drink Your Coffee

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Here Are the Ridiculous Post-Debate Overnight Online Polls

by KristieE36 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Is it worth reporting the results of the overnight online polls following the debate? Sure. Why not? We all know that online polls are mostly garbage, but we also know that if you aggregate them we can turn dross into gold. So let’s do it! The chart on the right shows you the average of three online polls from Drudge, Time, and CNBC.

Let’s also check out Betfair. Unfortunately, I’ve never been quite sure I know how to interpret their trend charts, but if I did it right this time it looks like Cruz is up, Trump is even, and Rubio, Carson, and Bush are down. Since this is probably all meaningless, I suppose it doesn’t matter much if I’m interpreting the betting results right. Still, one of these days I guess I should figure it out for real.

If this stuff has any legitimacy at all, I’d say that (a) Cruz did well, (b) Rubio might have helped his cause, (c) Carson is ebbing, (d) Jeb is toast, and (e) nobody else changed their standing much. I’m ignoring the huge number of people who thought Trump won the debate because I refuse to believe it.

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Here Are the Ridiculous Post-Debate Overnight Online Polls

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