Why Do Teen Girls in America Want to Get Pregnant? →

Some very enlightening data, and then this:

...A variety of studies have shown that having children can lower teenagers’ involvement in crime, drug use, and delinquency—meaning that, despite the dreadful outcomes associated with teen pregnancy in most policy literature dedicated to the subject, having kids can actually be positive and stabilizing for teen mothers. Further, researchers like Kathryn Edin, author of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, have argued that putting off pregnancy simply doesn’t make sense for women who find themselves without much hope of social mobility anyway. In those cases, Edin argues, motherhood provides a sense of stability, cohesion, and purpose.

Aid in a World of Crisis →

Never in the 64-year history of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has it had to address so much human misery. At the beginning of 2014, more than 51 million people were displaced from their homes, uprooted by conflict and persecution. Many more have had to flee in the past twelve months.

Protracted wars, environmental disasters, and state failure have stretched the international humanitarian-aid system passed its breaking point. If the UNHCR and other relief agencies are to address the unprecedented amount of human need, they will have to broaden their base of support. Without a massive scaling up of private-sector involvement, both in terms of shared expertise and funding support, we will fail to provide for millions of people who have lost almost everything.

Syria is the canary in the coalmine...

Throw More Money at Education →

It’s become almost conventional wisdom that throwing more money at public education doesn’t produce results. But what if conventional wisdom is wrong?

A new paper from economists C. Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson and Claudia Persico suggests that it is. To disentangle correlation from causation, they look at periods from 1955 through 1985 when courts ordered governments to spend more on schools, from kindergarten through 12th grade. They then track how students in those areas did, up through 2011. The result is a very detailed long-term picture of the effect of spending more money on education.

The economists find that spending works. Specifically, they find that a 10 percent increase in spending, on average, leads children to complete 0.27 more years of school, to make wages that are 7.25 percent higher and to have a substantially reduced chance of falling into poverty. These are long-term, durable results. Conclusion: throwing money at the problem works.

Here’s the hitch: The authors find that the benefits of increased spending are much stronger for poor kids than for wealthier ones. So if you, like me, are in the upper portion of the U.S. income distribution, you may be reading this and thinking: “Why should I be paying more for some poor kid to be educated?” After all, why should one person pay the cost while another reaps the benefits?

Well, let me try to answer that. There are several good reasons...

Big Blizzards Have Become More Common In New York →

If the overall amount of snow has held steady while the number of snow days has decreased, that necessarily implies New York has been getting some heavy snowfalls to make up for the decreased frequency.

This isn’t a total surprise to climatologists. Severe winter weather has received less study by climatologists than other impacts of climate change. But an increasing amount of research has suggested we might expect to experience this pattern in certain climates, mostly because a warmer atmosphere can carry more moisture.

Why Did Vaccinated People Get Measles at Disneyland? Blame the Unvaccinated →

So how does that explain what happened in Disneyland? If you have a group of 1,000 people concentrated in a small space—like oh, say, hypothetically, an amusement park—about 90 percent of them will be vaccinated (hopefully). One person, maybe someone who contracted measles on a recent trip to the Philippines, moves around, spreading the virus. Measles is crazy contagious, so of the 100 people who aren’t vaccinated, about 90 will get infected. Then, of the 900 people who are vaccinated, 3 percent—27 people—get infected because they don’t have full immunity.

Now the Disneyland numbers—six vaccinated infections out of the 34 cases with known records—start to make more sense. (And considering the 16 million or so visitors the park gets every year, we might reasonably expect that number to go up.) Once vaccination levels dip below 90 or 95 percent, there aren’t enough protected people to keep the disease in check—the herd immunity that epidemiologists like to talk about so much. In the US, we’ve been doing pretty well keeping those numbers up. “But there are some fluctuations,” says Cristina Cassetti, program officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “and if vaccination levels dip down a little, you get a situation like Disneyland.”

Robert Reich on Redefining Full-Time Work, Obamacare, and Employer Benefits →

One of the U.S. Congress’s first acts of 2015? Trying to redefine what counts as full-time work, from 30 hours a week up to 40. It’s part of the latest attempt by Republicans to alter Obama’s signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, and has already passed the House of Representatives. But it has also had the perhaps unexpected effect of putting the divide between full- and part-time workers front and center in American politics.

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The House has voted to change the definition of full-time work. It seems like the Senate may as well, and Obama has threatened to veto it. Why does the definition of full-time work end up mattering so much to our politics?

It matters under the Affordable Care Act because if full-time work is defined as 40 hours a week, employers can avoid the employer mandate [to provide health insurance] by cutting the work week down to 39 hours. It’s harder for them to do that if full-time work is defined as at least 30 hours. And of course if employers can avoid the employer mandate relatively easily, that means that more workers lose employer coverage, which, in turn, means that more workers have to rely on the government with regard to their health care, either through the Affordable Care Act or through extended Medicaid. That, in turn, puts a large and potentially growing burden on the federal budget, and could cause the deficit to expand.

Especially with the rise of "temp" work, with so many people unemployed, unable to find "full-time work" as it's currently defined under the 30 hour rule.

The Foreign Policy Essay: The Kurdish Right to Self-Governance →

Editor’s Note: The question of the Kurds is one of the knottiest in the Middle East—and that is saying something. Kurdish rebellions have led to tens of thousands of deaths in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, and now the Kurds in Syria are at the heart of that country’s civil war. Michael Eppel of the University of Haifa argues that the current upheaval in the region may be creating a historic opportunity for the Kurds in their quest for independence and notes that important countries like Turkey are slowly accepting that the Kurds should have more mastery of their own fate...

Democrats Take on Wall Street With Financial Transactions Tax →

...It would apply a tax of 0.1 percent on each stock trade and 0.01 percent on trades of derivatives like options, futures, and credit default swaps. The European Commission estimated that this rate structure would generate an amount of revenue equal to 0.4-0.5 percent of GDP. In the United States, this would be between $70 billion and $90 billion a year.

The best thing about this story is that almost all of the revenue would come from the financial industry....

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To be clear, this is not a story of shutting down the financial industry. The financial industry plays a central role in sustaining a healthy economy. It provides the money families need to buy a home or start a business. It also provides businesses with the capital they need to expand. But the financial sector has grown way beyond the size necessary to fill these purposes, with the core financial sector (investment banking and securities and commodities trading) expanding five-fold as a share of the economy since the 1970s.