Matt Lewis's blog

Government support for child care typically takes the form of a voucher. Income-eligible families can use the voucher generally where they want, and many millions do, but too many children get sub-standard care or none at all. Some states might be rethinking this demand-side approach, as a passage from this piece in the Urban Institute's new safety net series shows:

Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Maryland have used quality grants, bonuses, and awards to give providers incentive to move up a quality rating scale (National Child Care Information Center [NCCIC] 2006). This approach affords providers that lack the start-up funds to deliver high-quality services to get additional help covering quality-related costs (mostly pay qualified teachers) when parents cannot afford to pay higher rates.

Why not go the whole nine yards and have government only address the supply-side of the child care market instead of the voucher approach, which only hits the demand side? Governments could set up and administer child care centers, or, if they wanted less of a public presence, they could heavily subsidize them from the behind the scenes so that better-quality care becomes affordable to low-income folks.

Child care policy seems to be treated as an issue of insufficient individual income. Policy is built around the idea that people aren't making enough to pay for child care, so a voucher can pay for it. But it could also be thought of as a service that's too expensive and inaccessible. If the state lowers the cost of child care and provides more of it, then low-income families will have much greater access, and it'd even be more affordable for middle class folks.

Child care could be conceptualized the same way education is. Education is underprovided and overpriced in the market, so the state has to step in to make it affordable and accessible to everyone who wants it. And as many families do with public education, they can easily opt out by sending their kids to private day care.

Perhaps this has already been tried, and that's why everybody is so focused on vouchers as the way to increase access. But it seems to make too much sense to ignore it completely and not at least explain why it wouldn't work.

I thought I'd wrap up my posts on the safety net with a couple of points.

• Safety net language is ambiguous. Work supports are sometimes synonyms for the safety net, sometimes subsets of the safety net, and sometimes entirely different from the safety net. I've succeeded in confusing myself many times just over this basic issue of what the difference between these categories is, and it seems there's no agreement on what the difference is.

• Similarly, the values that underlie the safety net can be ambiguous and hidden beneath the surface. A lot of this hangs on definitions, and it's generally a matter of what the most persuasive value statement is. If we're talking about risk pooling, the operative value should probably be security. If it's increasing earnings or assets, opportunity and shared prosperity are probably it. If it's child development, child and family well-being make sense.
• A great deal of safety net framing is excessively focused on individuals. The "make work pay" slogan and the "work-life dilemma" are cases in point, and I'd imagine they don't encourage systems-level thinking.
• Very little narrative shapes the discussion about the safety net. But there are some good examples. I thought John's paper had a great narrative on how North Carolina's economy has changed and why this requires new policy. And Jared Bernstein's work around risk-pooling that emphasizes how "we're all in this together" is appealing too.
• Finally, not much is known about what messages work and what don't. Does the "make work pay" slogan withstand an individualistic counterargument? Do people think building up assets is about opportunity or security? I can only speculate based on the general framing literature, because I haven't seen anything that's rigorously tested these frames out. Somebody needs to see what works!

Ok, I'm done.

A new paper by UK economist Barbara Petrongolo examines how tight job search requirements effect the earnings of unemployment insurance recipients. The paper found that the new requirements resulted in people leaving the program earlier, but leavers who found a new job didn't have better earnings outcomes, and folks who left without jobs were more likely to disengage from the labor market altogether.

I'm no expert on the UK's unemployment insurance system, but the results of this study do seem to fit a pattern. Neoliberal safety net reformers tend to promise major impacts on earnings. While reforms succeed in moving more people into the workforce, they generally fail to significantly boost earnings, and neoliberals are left scratching their heads.

But these results shouldn't be that much of a mystery. Safety nets are not designed to address earnings. They serve the distinct purpose of pooling certain kinds of risk -that you'll lose your job, that you'll get sick, etc- and providing some security for situations when things fall apart. Low earnings have to be addressed by different policy.

Likewise, a boost in earnings isn't necessarily going to provide income security. A better job could always be detatched from a risk pool. It might not come with health insurance. Or it might not make you eligible for unemployment insurance. These problems are directly addressed by broadening access to risk pools.

As long as we're talking about poverty measurements, it seems reasonable to include income insecurity in addition to low earnings as distinct conditions of poverty. If you're making a decent living but can't get unemployment insurance, you're not safely in the middle class.

One of the challenges of framing the safety net is how to ground policy that directly benefits a minority of folks in univeralist terms and values. The safety net can't be special policy for "them," but in practice, it won't make an impact on most people. Taking a stab at solving this problem in the Boston Review, Bruce Western frames the growth of mass incarceration as an issue of citizenship. He argues that social inequality is a violation of the rights guaranteed by common humanity and community.

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

In the conclusion, he fleshes this idea out more.

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

Be it health care, education, or job opportunities, universal provision in any domain of public policy—and the bonds of citizenship on which that sense of universality is built—joins us to a common destiny, and might be the best chance for the redevelopment of urban schools and labor markets. If the duty of the citizen is to stay in school and go to work, then the political will to maintain good schools and promote employment is woven into the social fabric. This political logic implies that special projects targeting special populations will not do the job. If poor schools are to improve, it is more likely they will do so as a result of an effort to improve educational opportunity nationwide. If we are to promote jobs for unskilled men in the inner-city, the attempt will receive its greatest impetus from a national employment policy that aims to improve the working lives of all citizens.

He goes on to acknowledge that the day when our common citizenship and humanity is widely recognized seems far off. But every policy victory that ties our fates together will expand who's included in the mainstream community. By the same token, more special policy for special populations could make it harder to achieve larger scale change. Tactics that make sense in the short term can weaken the beliefs that favor major policy shifts.

I'm not so sure that language that explicitly addresses citizenship is the ticket- it's a bit abstract. But the basic idea seems sound. What do you think? Is this a good way to frame the safety net?

The Urban Institute this week unveiled a series of papers on how to create a new safety net for low-income families. I was going to critique the paper that introduces the series, but I think I'd only be repeating myself.

Rather, I thought I'd address something I overlooked in my earlier posts- that the safety net is consistently defined as policy for "low-income families," i.e. "the other" and "them" or people who are very different from you and me. The Urban series is a shining example of this style of defining the issue, putting the merits of the policy aside.

In addition to avoiding the traps of individualism and race, we have to make the argument that the safety net is about "us." One way to do it would be to think differently about the values that compel us to create a safety net. The predominant thinking is that it's about "well-being," the humanitarian idea that there's a level of subsistence below which nobody should fall. This segregates anti-poverty policy. It puts the poor in the same league as the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the young, etc- people whose well-being is valued per se. It's for people who are "different," the exceptions to the rule, the subjects of charity.

I'd argue that a more universal value is security, and I'd define security as controlling the chance that the institutions we rely on will fail us- that the business we work for isn't offering any good jobs, that we'll get sick without insurance, that our families won't be there to cushion our fall. We could develop a narrative that assigns responsibility to these institutions, so that all of them, collectively, as one people, should feel obligated to step in.

This frame could also address the issue of being unclear about values. Safety net policy corrects some institutional failures and mitigates the consequences of others. A different set of policies is needed to make institutions perform at a higher level and create opportunities to join the middle class. This includes better education policy, more middle class-sustaining jobs, better economic management, etc.

What would it mean in terms of policy? Take jobs, for instance. We could eliminate many extremely bad jobs by raising the minimum wage, promoting unionization in low-wage sectors, and investing in the skills of the low-wage workforce. While this may not create jobs that support a middle-class lifestyle, it would help reduce the chance that people will be forced into poverty-wage jobs. At the same time, it may be nearly impossible to eliminate all bad jobs. For instance, even if a job is paying $9 an hour, you may only get to work 25 hours a week. Programs like the EITC help mitigate the consequences of the institutional failures that we can't eliminate.

So what role does work play in this framing? And what about the safety net as an opportunity "springboard?" I'll try to tackle this in my next post.

From the Frameworks Institute, some tips for using pictures in advocacy products:

• Avoid traditional images that have dominated the news regarding your issue.

• Avoid close-up shots of individuals unless they serve your framing goals, as they tend to assign responsibility to those individuals.
• Suggest the public nature of the problem with pictures of public and community settings.
• Use sequence and placement of photos to demonstrate cause and effect, and trends instead of isolated events.

More here.

I see two ways the safety net is legitimized by work. The first is in the context of fairness and a social contract based on work, and the second is in how the policy enables people to go to work.

"Making work pay" is a slogan that has a great deal of political currency in DC. The thinking behind it goes something like this: we reformed welfare and put everybody to work, but didn’t end poverty because people took low-wage jobs. So safety net policy aims to make low-wage work pay through targeted benefits and the tax system. Low-income folks are holding up their end of the bargain, so society owes them.

What’s wrong with this frame? First, it blurs the line between job quality and the safety net, and I think confuses the public. It's not clear what making work pay is all about. Are we creating a safety net to guard to ensure income security? Or give poor people better job opportunities? Or is this about meeting people’s needs, AKA family and child well-being? It could be all these things, and I’ve seen it framed in all these ways. This lack of clarity and complexity makes it hard on the public to categorize, interpret and judge the policy.

And second, I’m not convinced that the social contract aspect of the framing appeals to an American public that still thinks poor people are lazy and out of work. Welfare reform has not changed the individualistic perception that the poor are shiftless. I’d anticipate the debate to continue to focus on whether poor people work or not, instead of a quid pro quo arrangement between the working poor and society.

Work is also central to the argument that safety net policy promotes opportunity. The policy theory is that the safety net can enable people with families to go to work; similarly, by increasing the returns to work, it makes it worthwhile for poor individuals to become employed. That’s all well and good, but this argument too blurs the lines between security, opportunity and family well-being. And instead of tilting at windmills and denying individualistic assumptions, it tries to co-opt them. It essentially admits that people don’t work by choice- that the incentives they face encourage idleness and punish work, and that they don’t work because they would rather take care of their kids.

In the left-wing version of the story, the governmental role needs to expand to promote work; in the right-wing version, it shrinks. You can see right-wingers trying to "fix the parents," who should have known better than to have to face the work-parenting dilemma. Liberals will be, once again, on defense.

So to summarize, this framing relies on a weak argument for fairness and is stuck in an individualistic frame. It will not get people thinking about systemic causes (other than policy failures) or the public’s responsibility for addressing poverty. So what could? In the next post I’ll look at a recent attempt to reframe the safety net by the Urban Institute.

Over the next few days or so, I'm going write about how to frame the anti-poverty safety net. While a great deal of research has been done on how to frame issues around programs that expand economic opportunities, much less attention has been given to the safety net. I wanted to explore the ways groups frame the safety net now, critique them, and make some suggestions for new ways forward. And being that I'm a relative newcomer to the anti-poverty world, I'd appreciate your comments and thoughts as I try to make sense of very complex stuff with a long history.

I thought I would start by critiquing the "work supports" frame, the most common way anti-poverty folks frame safety net policy. Sometimes, work support language justifies policy in the context of meeting basic needs and promoting family well-being. The National Center for Childen in Poverty defines work supports as follows:

“Work support” benefits—such as earned income tax credits, child care subsidies, health insurance, and food stamps—can help families close the gap between low earnings and basic expenses.

Let's break this down a bit. NCCP is defining the problem as inadequate income. The solution is to raise incomes or lower the cost of basic expenses. The payoff is that families will get to meet basic needs. So where's the value statement? No mention is made of the values that shape our understanding of income- like security, opportunity and independence. Rather, meeting basic needs seems to be an implicit placeholder for child and family well-being. I plan on returning to this topic later, but for now, let's leave it at the point that neither the term nor its definition leads with any of these values.

There is also no attempt to explain who or what is responsible for the gap between earnings and expenses. There’s no reference to the economy, the institutions that produce racial inequality, or even barriers to work. Neither is there any mention of the values that assign responsibility to the public for addressing social problems, like interdependence and public responsibility. I’m speculating here, but the political message I take from it is that society is not responsible for creating the problem, nor will it gain anything by solving it. We're compelled to support solutions out of compassion and generosity. It is, in sum, the “sympathy for the poor” frame that generally does badly in focus groups.

Work also legitimizes the safety net - it supports work by either “making work pay” or enabling and encouraging people to go to work. I’ll address this in my next post.

Richard Kahlenberg writing in the American Prospect asks factions of the Left that have been fighting for 40 years to find common ground on education policy. His conclusion:

Rather than listening to Brooks (who oddly finds himself advocating for Al Sharpton over James Coleman), Obama should keep two critical ideas in his head at once, as Shanker did. Teacher unions need to go along with much needed reforms of the schools to rid the system of bad teachers and connect low-income students with the very best educators. And self-styled civil-rights activists like Sharpton need to acknowledge that poverty -- not unions -- is the biggest impediment to low-income and minority achievement. A repeat of the civil-rights/teacher-union wars of the 1960s will only help the right wing and will do nothing to advance the cause of poor and minority kids.

This debate is reflective of the larger intra-left fight over how to promote equality in today's economy and political environment. For a good overview of the arguments on both sides, there's CLASP's audio conference with ES's Tony Carnevale, EPI's Jared Bernstein, and Laura Dresser from COWS.

Some measure of balance has been restored to the fiscal policy universe. Today, a coalition of moderate, left-leaning budget experts released a report directly criticizing the "Taking Back Our Fiscal Future" paper, the brainchild of an odd assortment of folks from Brookings, Urban, AEI, and Heritage that advocated severe cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The center-left crew, which includes CBPP's Robert Greenstein and Brookings' Henry Aaron, stress controlling costs in the entire health care system, modest benefit reductions/tax increases in the major entitlement programs, and the reform of regressive tax expenditures.

All decent stuff, considering the noxious alternative and the conservative tilt to the fiscal policy debate. Robert Kuttner points out what's wrong with this picture.

This debate gives you a sense of the narrow conventional wisdom a President Obama would face. The rightwing of the debate (including several centrist Democrats) says: balance the budget by gutting social insurance. The left wing says restrain deficits by raising taxes and cutting health costs. Hardly anyone says lower health costs by passing true national health insurance, and use deficits if necessary to cure what is already the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. But kudos to Greenstein and Aaron for playing hardball and asking their colleagues to think harder about just whose purposes they are serving.

Amen.

Is it possible to make significant improvements in struggling schools with large populations of students from low-income families? Some schools in Massachusetts are showing it is. Apparently, it takes quality teachers, extended school hours, intensive tutoring, and high expectations for students, among other factors.

New York City activists are gearing up to make sure the emergence of the "green" sector benefits everyone. So what exactly are green jobs? From CityLights.Org:

Most green-collar jobs are middle-skill level, requiring more education than high school, but less than a four-year degree. But jobs such as building cleaners, porters, maintenance workers, window cleaners, superintendents and stationary engineers are well within reach for lower-skilled and low-income workers – and people with other barriers to employment, such as a prison record – because they don’t require a high school diploma, as long as there is access to training programs and appropriate supports.

If those sound a lot like traditional jobs, that’s because most green-collar jobs are retrofitted regular jobs, says Jim Brown, a senior policy analyst in the state Department of Labor. There is no official number of green jobs in the NYC job market; it’s more of a concept than a specific designation. “Most of the jobs that would be created or are currently involved in ‘green’ are traditional jobs that already exist,” Brown said. “There are some environmental-specific jobs, but most of that technology is incorporated in already existing occupations.”

And how are activists going to make sure that everyone has a shot at getting them? Not everyone agrees on how to move forward.

Despite the high-energy, capacity crowd at the conference last month, advocates for the sector’s expansion still have a long way to go. “The policy may be ahead of the program. We’re moving ahead on policy, but who’s going to do the work [at these green-collar jobs]?” said Fatt. “Let’s get a handle on what’s out there now and on what more needs to be done. Otherwise you can end up training somebody for a job that doesn’t exist.”

It is not clear how, or whether, green-collar jobs will become a pathway out of poverty. “I would want to warn that green-collar jobs are no panacea out of poverty. I’m passionate about cleaning up our environment and making sure there is a workforce who can do it, but by itself it’s not a solution to poverty,” said Lurie. “People still need work-ready skills and more mechanical and technical skills than our failing education system gave them.”

Though there are fair concerns about the potential of green-collar jobs, their allure gives the city's low-income job seekers new motivation to try to climb on board. “The challenges are not on the part of people trying to get a job. The challenge is in creating the jobs themselves,” said Freilla.

The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor about Millenial activism. Her main point is that they need to build face to face activist communities in addition to the substantial online communities that already exist. She bases her argument on the supposition that online activism is more individualistic than it is offline, and that individualism must be categorically denied.

The former point is debatable (see this rebuttal at DailyKos for more). And the adversarial approach to combating individualism has its shortcomings, I think. Take this section of the op-ed:

Millennials are poised to lead us all to reject the hyperindividualism and isolation that has dominated our recent past and recognize the deep interconnectedness and mutual responsibility that is our present and future.

The lone cowboy story was a myth. Our greatest accomplishments, as individuals and as a nation, have almost always come from hitching our wagons to others and working together, not just in going it alone.

One of the interesting findings from the communications literature is that Americans tend to believe the lone cowboy story AND the story of collective action being pitched here. I'm not exactly sure how people resolve this contradiction, but nonetheless, they believe both. So while I couldn't agree more with the spirit of the op-ed, it's a losing battle to try to marginalize individualism in public and private life. To call the lone cowboy story a myth turns friends into enemies, makes people defensive, and could lead to the wrong conversation.

What's more, it's not necessary to use the rhetoric of dominance. You can argue more constructively for a change in the emphasis and role given to individualism. FDR, for instance, said "in our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people." Sen. Obama also seems to take this approach. At the end of many of his recent speeches, he makes fairly positive statements about both individual and collective responsibility, while coming down on the side of emphasizing a public role for collective action. From his speech yesterday about his economic agenda:

You know, the Americans I’ve met over the last sixteen months in town halls and living rooms; on farms and front porches – they may come from different places and have different backgrounds, but they hold common hopes and dream the same simple dreams. They know government can’t solve all their problems, and they don’t expect it to. They believe in personal responsibility, and hard work, and self-reliance. They don’t like seeing their tax dollars wasted.

But we also believe in fairness and opportunity – in an America where jobs are there for the willing; where hard work is rewarded with a decent living; where no matter how much you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, you can not just get by, but actually get ahead. That’s the promise of this country, and I believe we can keep that promise together if we change course and get to work in the months and years ahead. Thank you.

This isn't to say that the CCC needs to go around extolling the virtues of personal responsibility, as Sen. Obama does somewhat excessively. If it's an enemy progressives need, it's hyperindivualism, not individualism- the sort of adversarial individualism that rules out collective action in the public sphere. Sen. Obama doesn't do enough of this. He has yet to find his own version of FDR's "economic royalists." A more constructive vent for the last 30 years of conservative domination could be to draw the outlines of this villain.

For millions of adults, the training and education needed to achieve the American dream is unavailable, putting the strength of the economy in jeopardy, too. At at time of intense overseas competition, a lower percentage of the workforce is graduating high school than it did 40 years ago. And about half of the adult workforce doesn't have the basic skills and education that are increasingly required to get good jobs. Responding to the scale and gravity of the problem, National Commission on Adult Literacy has new vision for the adult education and skill development system (full report and summary). Its breadth of knowledge is impressive, and I think its ambition is inspiring.

Following the media coverage of the housing mortgage crisis gives me a headache. It's difficult to make sense of what's actually happening. But without a doubt there's one clear causal factor emerging from the media fog: subprime mortgages. A quick scroll through Dean Baker's blog shows just how often the media pins the crisis on subprime loans. Yet Baker, who was one of the few economists who saw all this coming, makes it clear that the subprime mortgages are just a chapter in a larger story about how housing prices got so out of line with their historical value. Why have they reduced such a complex story to this particular factor?

It's probably because "subprime" is code for minorities and poor people, always an easy target. What do you think the public hears when folks say "subprime?" You can almost see the thoughts taking shape in the public mind: "you know, if those poor people hadn't been so irresponsible with their money, we wouldn't be in this mess. They should have known better than to take out those loans." Personal responsibility being so powerful a cultural trope, it's probably trumping the narrative that places blame on Wall Street bankers.

Am I being paranoid here? I know there isn't much evidence, but in a circular way, that's the point of speaking in code. I'm open to contradictory evidence, though.