It might, according to some economic research.[ref]Though economists like Alex Tabarrok think too much money is spent on welfare and not enough on research.[/ref] As AEI’s James Pethokoukis explains,
Over at The Atlantic, Walter Frick offers economic literature roundup that suggests the latter. A strong safety net encourages startups by making the effort seem less risky, he argues. For instance, a 2014 paper found the expansion of food stamps “in some states in the early 2000s increased the chance that newly eligible households would own an incorporated business by 16 percent.” Another paper by the same author found that “the rate of incorporated business ownership for those eligible households just below the cutoff was 31 percent greater than for similarly situated families that could not rely on CHIP to care for their children if they needed it.”
However, he notes,
Now it is one thing to argue that a more robust safety net would be good for US entrepreneurship broadly understood — I think that would be the case in some areas, though I would be careful about eliminating welfare work requirements — and quite another to make the same claim about mimicking the Scandinavian social democracies. In “Can’t We All Be More Like Nordics?”, Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Thierry Verdier argue that “technological progress requires incentives for workers and entrepreneurs [and] results in greater inequality and greater poverty (and a weaker safety net) for a society encouraging more intense innovation.” If cut-throat, inegalitarian US capitalism became more like cuddly Scandinavian capitalism, the US might no longer be as capable of pushing the technological frontier…Indeed, the researchers have found a large per-capita gap between Scandinavia and the US when it comes to highly cited patents. The US also has a high-impact entrepreneurship rate three times as high as Sweden. (Of course, open economies benefit from innovation first produced elsewhere.) In short, the US has a pretty special thing going, and we should be careful not screw that up.
“One possible force for greater upward mobility is the welfare reforms of the 1990s,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Scott Winship in Forbes. “Hear me out, because I think the case is stronger than is generally admitted. We probably won’t know the answer for a few more years, because the oldest children born in the 1990s are only 25 years old today, and the youngest are barely 15 years old.” Nonetheless, what’s his case?
To begin with, liberals tend to believe that parental income per se is important for upward mobility. If true, welfare reform was far more effective than the War on Poverty at expanding opportunity. Child poverty, according to a carefully constructed measure developed by a Columbia University research team, was 26 percent in the peak year of 1969 and 27 percent in 1990 (also a peak). It continued rising until 1993, the year after a presidential campaign in which the winner routinely pledged to “end welfare as we know it” and the year that the Earned Income Tax Credit was substantially expanded by the new president. Child poverty then fell from 28 percent to 17 percent by 2006. It rose during the Great Recession, but not by much; 19 percent of children were poor in 2012.
Economic growth deserves some of the credit for the decline in child poverty; even without taking federal taxes and transfers into account, poverty would have fallen between 1993 and 2000. However, economic growth might not have actually lowered child poverty much if not for the work incentives built into welfare reform. The 1990s expansion was the first one since 1960 in which poverty among single-mother families responded as much to falling unemployment as it did among married-parent families, and poverty fell by more among single-mother families than their married-parent counterparts from 1996 to 2000. The strong economy of the late 1990s was fortuitous, but child poverty declined slightly even after 2000, rising only very modestly, if at all, during the two recessions since then.
…Through 1990, taxes and transfers had essentially no impact on the poverty rate they estimated. To be sure, the safety net moved some families up from deep poverty to less-intense hardship. But the Columbia poverty levels are pretty much the same from 1967 to 1990 whether or not the safety net is taken into account. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, taxes and transfers began to reduce child poverty rates below the levels they would otherwise have attained. The safety net was only effective at reducing poverty once the national mood was strongly in favor of fundamental reform and once those reforms began.
But was there an even bigger reason for the decrease in poverty? According to Winship, the answer (suggested by the evidence) has to do with intact families and a decrease in out-of-wedlock births. Check it out.
There are two naive assumptions for the price of one in David Brooks’ most recent NYT column.[ref]Correction: This article is from April 1, 2013, not April 1, 2015. My mistake.[/ref] Concluding, he writes:
The proponents of same-sex marriage used the language of equality and rights in promoting their cause, because that is the language we have floating around. But, if it wins, same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.
Brooks’ entire point rests on the idea that marriage is immutably monogamous. This hopelessly naive position is undermined by (just to name one prominent example) Dan Savage’s influential argument that infidelity should be not only tolerated but that it can be embraced within marriage. For example, speaking of the infidelity in his own marriage, he writes:
People have come into our lives as lovers and enriched and enhanced our lives. Taken us into new worlds. And exposed us to new communities. New groups of people, new groups of friends. And that’s been very rewarding, and very rich.
So not only is the monogamy/marriage link not set in stone (that was his first foolish assumption), but furthermore the rhetoric of “equality and rights” was not in some way insulated from the policy of gay marriage. (The idea that policy and and supporting arguments could be so insulated was his second foolish assumption.)
Of course homosexuals didn’t invent infidelity, and there have always been heterosexual proponents of open marriage. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to miss the the extent to which the equality and rights rhetoric–by emphasizing the benefits of marriage to the spouses as opposed to their duties and obligations to each other, to the community, and to children–have substantially eroded all the quaint, freedom-limiting aspects of marriage that Brooks is so excited about.
At least that’s what Reason‘s science writer Ronald Bailey has concluded based on various studies. “For example,” Bailey writes,
according to a study comparing outcomes in all U.S. states in the January 2014 issue of Contemporary Economic Policy by Illinois State University economist Oguzhan Dincer and his colleagues finds that reducing economic freedom actually tends to increase inequality. “On average, as the size and scope of government increases, so does income inequality,” Dincer tells Reason.
The authors go on to establish “Granger causality.” Simplistically stated, this means they show a causal feedback loop, in which economic intervention produces economic inequality, which in turn leads to more economic intervention. Politicians often react to rising inequality with policies that, on average, end up making inequality worse—say, by increasing the minimum wage. (That is not to say that some policies, such as raising the top marginal tax rate, could decrease inequality. But taken as a whole, the effect moves in the other direction.)
…A 2013 study in The Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy by economists at Ohio University and Florida State University bolsters Dincer’s findings. That study, also using Fraser state economic freedom index data, identified a Kuznets curve relationship between increasing economic freedom and trends in income inequality.Their analysis “suggests that beginning from a low level of economic freedom, increases initially generate more inequality as the upper part of the income distribution benefits relatively more than the lower part; however, as enhancements of economic freedom continue, this reverses and the lower part of the distribution experiences larger relative income gains.”
In their study, Dincer and his colleagues report that their results “support previous studies which find a positive relationship between economic freedom and per capita income.” Last November, a National Bureau of Economic Research study by the Mississippi State University economist Travis Wiseman found, all things being equal, that a one-point increase on the Fraser Economic Freedom of North America index is associated with about an $8,156 increase in real average market incomes.
Check out the whole article and the studies in full.
Income inequality is a big deal, and the biggest addition to the controversial discussion recently has Piketty’s tome Capital in the 21st Century. In very simple terms, Piketty’s argument was that when you get a greater return on capital investments than the rate at which the economy as a whole grows, then wealth invariably piles up in the hands of an elite. If true, this dire prediction means the only way to preserve equality is to implement a very progressive income tax and do it globally. Which, short of an alien invasion uniting us into one, hegemonic world government, is unlikely.
“But,” as Greg Ferenstein writes, “a 26-year-old MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, is making waves for an alternative theory of inequality: the problem is housing.” Rognlie’s reply is pretty simple, conceptually. He points out that cutting edge technology–whether its hardware or software–depreciates at a very great rate. Think of how fast the price of a brand new cell phone falls: within 4-5 years you can easily go from $1,000 to basically $0. So, since “technology doesn’t hold value like it used to, so it’s misleading to believe that investments in capital now will give rich folks a long-term advantage.”
So if technology doesn’t hold value, then what does? Land. Thus Ferenstein concludes: “If Rognlie is correct and we really care about inequality, it might be wiser to redirect anger towards those who get in the way of new housing [often local governments with austere zoning regulations to protect the home prices of rich owners in exclusive areas], rather than rely on taxes to solve our problems.”
Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has had an excellent article in The Washington Post a few days ago largely drawing on the work of Harvard’s Robert Putnam. Drawing from Putnam’s latest book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Wilcox writes,
One of the tragic tales told by Harvard scholar Robert Putnam…is that America’s churches have grown weakest in some of the communities that need them most: poor and working-class communities across the country. The way he puts it, our nation’s churches, synagogues and mosques give children a sense of meaning, belonging and purpose — in a word, hope — that allows them to steer clear of trouble, from drugs to delinquency, and toward a bright and better future, warmer family relationships and significantly higher odds of attending college…The picture of religion painted by Putnam, a political scientist and the foremost scholar of American civic life, is part of a broader canvass in his book showing that kid-friendly institutions — not just churches, but also strong families and strong schools — are withering, but almost entirely in less-affluent communities.
While Putnam attributes some of this to the decline “in employment for less-educated men, divergent incomes for college-educated and less-educated men, and a “breathtaking increase in inequality”” in the 1970s, Wilcox notes that his research finds the “dramatic declines in religious attendance began in the 1960s, well before the economic factors stressed by Putnam kicked in a decade later.” “The timing of religious declines,” explains Wilcox, “paralleled and reinforced by the retreat from marriage that also began in the 1960s, leaving more and more kids in single-parent homes — suggests that America’s religious and familial capital was suffering well before the economic shocks of the 1970s.”
Wilcox continues to draw on Putnam’s work while adding fresh insights. The whole thing is worth reading. Check it out.
I wrote a post for Times and Seasons today: Privilege and the Family. The post borrows heavily from work that Walker Wright has done right here at Difficult Run collecting research and data (like the chart above) on the impact of marriage and family for children’s outcomes, and also seeks to answer a couple of questions raised at By Common Consent recently: Who has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap about the Family? The questions are:
Why should we care about the family?
What does it mean to stand up for the family?
If that sounds like an interesting post to you, then you should check it out.
In the late 1990s and early 2000’s, first person shooter video games focused thematically on World War II with major franchises like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Battlefield. Things started to change around 2005 when the Battlefield series released Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and the change in focus was cemented with the blockbuster release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. That’s pretty much where the genre has lived for the last 10 years. Recently, however, the Battlefield franchise has decided to shift focus again with their newest title Battlefield: Hardline which release earlier this month. The disturbing twist in the newest game, which you can see in the trailer, is that instead of soldiers fighting on a battlefield we now get militarized cops.
Obviously, this is not the very first time a video game has been controversial. I’m a gamer, but there are some games that I refuse to play because the depiction of violence reaches levels that I think are a little sick. Just to give a very simple example of that: I have played just enough of the Grand Theft Auto franchise to know that it will never be allowed in my home. I also have all kinds of political issues with the Call of Duty franchise,[ref]I will resist a tirade on the self-loathing anti-Americanism of the series and merely point out that in the Modern Warfare story arc, the bad guys always end up being the Americans and the playable American characters always die.[/ref] and even though the most controversial level of that that series[ref]The level is called “No Russian,” In it, you play an undercover CIA operative helping to massacre unarmed civilians in a Russian airport.[/ref] was made by a high school buddy of mine, I opted out. And these are, relatively speaking, the tame examples of controversial video games. The really nasty stuff I won’t even go into here.
So I’m not going to hyperventilate and argue that Battlefield: Hardline is the worst thing to have happened in video games. It’s not. It’s still pretty disturbing, however, and the video game press has taken notice. Chris Plante writes in Polygon:
The creators of Battlefield Hardline, while researching the militarization of the nation’s police force, understandably began to view the devices used by Americans against Americans as novel and fun. After all, they look identical to those being used in their previous games against fictional terrorists.
Here’s the image he was linking to, btw:
Now, there are some who have gone a little farther and suggested that video games like this in some way cause police militarization. I think that’s a little silly, in much the same way that I think blaming video games for causing general violence in society is pretty silly.[ref]Biggest problem: as video games get more realistic and more violent and more popular, the actual rate of violent crime is trending downward.[/ref] Thus, I largely agree with Erik Kain’s take in Forbes:
Alan Jacobs, writing at his blog, makes the connection between the Ferguson police and Call of Duty:
“I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces — the “warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about,” writes Jacobs. ”Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances — but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games.”
Jacobs is arguing that the culture of first-person shooters—and the aesthetic—is being imprinted on our police forces. It’s not a bad argument by any means… [but] I’m not so sure.
Kain goes on to argue that the reason for his skepticism is simply that “these problems are structural rather than cultural.” He goes on:
The War on Drugs and the War on Terror are essentially the same war when it comes to beefing up law enforcement at the expense of personal liberty. The War on Drugs already provided a good excuse for law enforcement to overstep its bounds; the War on Terror has led to much better armed police forces and the sprouting up of SWAT teams all across the country.
There are now over 100 SWAT team raids a day in the United States, mostly for non-violent offenses, and often leading to horrible things like police throwing flash bang grenades into a baby’s crib, or the killing of a seven-year old girl while a SWAT team raided the wrong apartment looking for a murder suspect (who was in the apartment above and gave himself up without violence) while A&E filmed the entire event for a reality TV show.
The problems are deep and they are profound, but they are not likely to be caused by video games. On the contrary, what creeps me out about this game is simply that it reflects a kind of social nonchalance and acceptance of some pretty horrific, unnecessary police violence not to mention the systematized discrimination that goes along with it.[ref]I’ll be writing more about that very soon.[/ref] Consider what Scott Shackford had to say about gamer opinion in his piece for Reason:
The folks behind Battlefield Hardline might want to check out our Reason-Rupe analysis of poll responses by frequent gamers. We found they’re more likely to be concerned about the militarization of the police. From our survey, 70 percent of gamers think it’s too much for police forces to have access to military equipment and drones as tools for crime-fighting, compared to 57 percent of non-gamers. And nearly two-thirds of the gamers we polled believe that police officers aren’t held accountable for misconduct.
Shackford’s point appears to be something like: Hey, Battlefield, you’ve picked the wrong demographics here. Gamers are libertarian. They won’t go for this. But the logic is really kind of backwards. Gamers do tend to be left-libertarians, but that didn’t stop the game from becoming the #1 biggest selling 2015 launch (to date) in the UK. I’m not sure what the numbers look like in the US, but it’s clear millions of gamers are snatching up copies. If these guys–more suspicious of police militarization than the Average Joe–are untroubled by the game, what does that say?
So no: I don’t think violent video games lead directly to real-world violence and I doubt that a game glorifying police militarization is going to lead directly towards even more police militarization. But, even if Battlefield: Hardline is largely following a trend rather than setting one, it may still play a role in normalizing the police militarization we already have. For centuries we’ve had an American tradition of separating military and police forces, but that tradition doesn’t mean much anymore if the police and the military have become indistinguishable.
At this rate, I have to wonder if rising generations will even have a conceptual notion that there was ever a time when the police didn’t roll around in armored personnel carriers with fully-automatic weapons. And I think that just makes it a little bit harder to reverse the trajectory we’re currently on.
There were 4,428 changes to the Internal Revenue Code between 2001 and 2010, including an estimated 579 changes in 2010 alone. The tax code averages more than one change per day. The resulting complexity creates hidden compliance costs between $215 billion and $987 billion annually. To put this in perspective, total revenue collected by the federal government in 2012 was $2.5 trillion.
That’s bad enough, but a new article got me thinking about this issue in a different light. In The Income Tax is Immoral and Unconstitutional – and Not (Just) for the Reason You Think, Robin Koerner points out that the $2,000 he had to shell out to his accountant in order to generate 149 pages of tax documentation for his simple, small private business[ref]Koerner has no employees and the business revenue is small enough that he qualifies for major income-based subsidies[/ref] constitute a highly regressive tax burden. That’s the immorality of the tax code. The unconstitutionality, in Koerner’s view, comes from the fact that there is no practical way that a private US citizen is capable of filling out their taxes. Thus:
Finally, and most importantly – to any Constitutional attorney: I can’t pay you (see above), but I have a tax return that will make your eyes bleed. Get me in front of a jury or, better yet, the Supreme Court, and let us ask 12 or nine reasonable people if the burden of completing this particular tax return – a requirement I must meet to retain my liberty and my property – is reasonable or not. And if just one of the jury or bench believes that a reasonably educated person could accurately complete my tax return in a reasonable period, I’ll be happily defeated – as long as he shows me how.
Koerner is right. The American system of taxation is so monumentally and colossally stupid that no person could deliberately have concocted a scheme this awful. So why does it continue? Several reasons. Inertia is a big one. The fact that any attempt to reform gets mired in partisan gridlock is another. And then there’s the fact that the most sophisticated players in the world like it this way. It gives competitive advantages to large companies who can afford the expertise to fully leverage the tax code to their advantage, and also gives politicians one of their most prized trade goods to offer to backers in return for their support.
Oh, and Koerner isn’t kidding about the complexity. Last year, three different accountants tried to do my family’s taxes. All three failed to get them done correctly. When three different professional accounting firms can’t figure out how to pay your taxes for you, then you know the system has become a joke. Too bad it’s a joke that will have the severest repercussions for those least able to afford the punchline.
The New York Times has a brand new article on “safe spaces” in college. Judith Shulevitz defines these spaces as “an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material…In most cases, safe spaces are innocuous gatherings of like-minded people who agree to refrain from ridicule, criticism or what they term microaggressions — subtle displays of racial or sexual bias — so that everyone can relax enough to explore the nuances of, say, a fluid gender identity.” While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, “the notion that ticklish conversations must be scrubbed clean of controversy has a way of leaking out and spreading. Once you designate some spaces as safe, you imply that the rest are unsafe. It follows that they should be made safer.” And this brings us to the heart of the matter:
…while keeping college-level discussions “safe” may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?
Is this “safe” mentality on college campuses a good idea? Should students, say, be banned from participation due to controversial views? Check out the article and give it some thought.
Over at The Atlantic, Walter Frick offers economic literature roundup that suggests the latter. A strong safety net encourages startups by making the effort seem less risky, he argues. For instance, a 2014 paper found the expansion of food stamps “in some states in the early 2000s increased the chance that newly eligible households would own an incorporated business by 16 percent.” Another paper by the same author found that “the rate of incorporated business ownership for those eligible households just below the cutoff was 31 percent greater than for similarly situated families that could not rely on CHIP to care for their children if they needed it.”
To begin with, liberals tend to believe that parental income per se is important for upward mobility. If true, welfare reform was far more effective than the War on Poverty at expanding opportunity. Child poverty, according to a carefully constructed measure developed by a 
…A 2013 study in The Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy by economists at Ohio University and Florida State University 
The New York Times has a