The Earned Income Tax Credit isn't super well-known, but it's one of the best tools the federal government has for fighting poverty. It functions as a wage subsidy for the working poor, providing an average of $2,982 a year to families with children come tax season. The results are impressive. According to the Census Bureau, refundable tax credits like the EITC and the similarly structured Child Tax Credit cut the poverty rate (correctly measured) by 3 percentage points in 2013 — that's 9.4 million people kept out of poverty.
Josh Barro has a piece at Upshot about increasing work hours. In it, he plays the irritating game of describing certain institutional choices that help to determine how many hours people work as "distortions" and also wrongly downplays the degree to which the US truly is a bizarrely overworked country.
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Normally, when a country increases its per-hour productivity, it reduces the amount of work it does. This is because life is not all about maximizing total GDP for the sake of it, but also occasionally includes such things as spending time with family and friends and pursuing personal projects. Relative to the general tendency across countries, US workers put in 462 more hours per year than the US level of GDP/hour would predict. For Ireland, that same number is 358 hours. For South Korea (whose GDP/hour is the same as Greece's), it's even lower at 274 hours.
All three of these countries are well above the norm, but none more so than the US:
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It's not just these one-year comparisons either. Consider change over time since 1970 for the countries whose data runs back that far.
Despite doubling our GDP/hour over this period, the US only cut 114 hours off its work year, a 6% reduction. Every other country cut hours further, with the top being France whose workers cut 518 hours off its work year, a 26% reduction.
Given our high GDP/hour, there is absolutely no reason the US needs to be working as much as we currently do, and certainly no reason why we need to be working more. While I can't speak for Barro obviously, to me, the idea that we shoud be trying to reshape our institutions so as to claim an even greater share of workers' scarce lives for toil is unthinkable...
Grusky and Pablo Mitnik, his co-author and colleague at the Center on Poverty and Inequality, use a new data set provided to them by the IRS to show that in the U.S., roughly half of parental income advantages are passed onto the next generation in the form of higher earnings. This proportion increases for the wealthier: For people whose parents are between the 50th and 90th percentiles of earners, about two-thirds of this parental edge is perpetuated. (It’s also worth noting that two-thirds of 90th-percentile earnings is substantially more money than two-thirds of 50th-percentile earnings.)
A few months ago, I wrote a post about a drone that can fire a paintball gun with great accuracy. I concluded, "If this is what's doable by hobbyists today, think about what will be possible five, ten, or 20 years from now."
After decades of worsening diets and sharp increases in obesity, Americans’ eating habits have begun changing for the better.
Calories consumed daily by the typical American adult, which peaked around 2003, are in the midst of their first sustained decline since federal statistics began to track the subject, more than 40 years ago. The number of calories that the average American child takes in daily has fallen even more — by at least 9 percent.
The declines cut across most major demographic groups — including higher- and lower-income families, and blacks and whites — though they vary somewhat by group.
In the most striking shift, the amount of full-calorie soda drunk by the average American has dropped 25 percent since the late 1990s.
Alanna Whitney was a weird kid. She had a strange knack for pronouncing long words. Anchovies on pizza could send her cowering under a table. Her ability to geek out on subjects such as Greek mythology and world religions could be unsettling. She drank liquids obsessively, and in her teens, her extreme water intake landed her in the hospital.
Years later, she found a word that explained it all: Autistic. Instead of grieving, she felt a rush of relief. “It was the answer to every question I’d ever had,” she recalled. “It was kind of like a go-ahead to shed all of those things I could or couldn’t do and embrace myself for who I am.”
So it came to be that Whitney, 24, was arranging strawberries and store-bought cookies on platters at the Queensborough Community Center for a celebration of “Autistic Pride Day,” her shoulder-length hair dyed mermaid green to match her purse and sandals. A bowl of orange earplugs sat nearby in case any of the guests found the ambient sounds overwhelming.
Whitney is part of a growing movement of autistic adults who are finding a sense of community, identity and purpose in a diagnosis that most people greet with dread. These “neurodiversity” activists contend that autism — and other brain afflictions such as dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — ought to be treated not as a scourge to be eradicated but rather as a difference to be understood and accepted.
There’s no denying that Clinton is among the most polarizing figures in American politics, with staunch opposition from almost every Republican in the country. Add modest Democratic discontent—evidenced by the surprising popularity of Sanders—a series of highly publicized scandals, and Clinton’s legitimate problems with secrecy, and you have a recipe for her low ratings.
But that, I think, is as far as we can go. Beyond a few generalities about Clinton’s present media narrative and the overall landscape of the race, these polls just don’t tell us much. If anything, the breathless media coverage of the results is a good reminder of how not to interpret polls and what everyone should have learned from coverage of the 2012 presidential election.
The big thing is that this early in an election cycle, polls don’t tell us anything. They aren’t predictive or especially useful. For example, at roughly this point in 2011, Barack Obama was a goner. With a net negative job approval rating, he was behind in key swing states and losing to a generic Republican in a nationwide matchup. But the election came, and the picture changed: Discontented Democrats returned to his corner, and the race tightened to a virtual tossup. With economic growth on his side, Barack Obama won, with a victory that matched those fundamentals.
The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years -- another Earth.
