Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.
Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.
For decades, integrating immigrants has posed a thorny challenge to the Danish model, intended to serve a small, homogeneous population. Leaders are focusing their ire on urban neighborhoods where immigrants, some of them placed there by the government, live in dense concentrations with high rates of unemployment and gang violence.
Politicians’ description of the ghettos has become increasingly sinister. In hisannual New Year’s speech,Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen warned that ghettos could “reach out their tentacles onto the streets” by spreading violence, and that because of ghettos, “cracks have appeared on the map of Denmark.” Politicians who once used the word “integration” now call frankly for “assimilation.”
That tough approach is embodied in the “ghetto package.” Of 22 proposals presented by the government in early March, most have been agreed upon by a parliamentary majority, and more will be subject to a vote in the fall.
Some are punitive: One measure under consideration would allow courts todouble the punishmentfor certain crimes if they are committed in one of the 25 neighborhoods classified as ghettos, based on residents’ income, employment status, education levels, number of criminal convictions and “non-Western background.” Another would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin — described here as“re-education trips”—in that way damaging their “schooling, language and well-being.” Another would allow local authorities to increase their monitoring and surveillance of “ghetto” families.
This is a really solid introduction to income inequality, how it’s measured, how it’s changing, and whether it matters:
How do you measure inequality?
Inequality can be defined or measured in a number of different ways.
One traditional approach was to compare the income of a relatively broad swath of affluent people — the top ten percent of the income distribution (the top decile) or the top twenty percent (the top quintile) — to the national median or average. One big advantage of this approach is that the relevant data is readily available from the Census Bureau and other survey-based sources. A major downside is that this method doesn’t tell you much of anything about the earnings of the very highest earners — people in the top 1 percent, for example.
A newer line of research pioneered by Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and their collaborators at the World Top Incomes Databasehas been to use tax records to focus on the incomes of the very top of the distribution. That lets you understand the top 1 percent, the top 0.1 percent, and even the top 0.001 percent. This work has been the basis of much subsequent discussion about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent but the even finer slices are interesting, too.
It is also at times interesting to look at the gap between the poor (say the bottom 10 percent) and the median household. Metrics that define poverty in relative terms tend to, in effect, look at this kind of inequality. So discussions of the living standards of the poor are normally framed in terms of poverty rather than inequality.
Last but by no means least, there is a widely used summary method of calculating inequality that is known as the gini coefficient. A gini coefficient of 0 corresponds to precise equality while a gini coefficient of 1 corresponds to a state of total inequality.
A useful reminder of how much standards of living increased over the past century.
Consider the “Little House on the Prairie” books, which I’d bet almost every woman in my readership, and many of the men, recalls from their childhoods. I loved those books when I was a kid, which seemed to describe an enchanted world – horses! sleighs! a fire merrily crackling in the fireplace, and children frolicking in the snow all winter, then running barefoot across the prairies! Then I reread them as an adult, as a prelude to my research, and what really strikes you is how incredibly poor these people were.
The Ingalls family were in many ways bourgeoisie: educated by the standards of the day, active in community leadership, landowners. And they had nothing.
There’s a scene in one of the books where Laura is excited to get her own tin cup for Christmas, because she previously had to share with her sister. Think about that. No, go into your kitchen and look at your dishes. Then imagine if you had three kids, four plates and three cups, because buying another cup was simply beyond your household budget – because a single cup for your kid to drink out of represented not a few hours of work, but a substantial fraction of your annual earnings, the kind of money you really had to think hard before spending. Then imagine how your 5-year-old would feel if they got an orange and a Corelle place setting for Christmas.
There’s a reason old-fashioned kitchens didn’t have cabinets: They didn’t need them. There wasn’t anything to put there.
Here’s a moderate-to-conservative think-tank-based view of poverty and poverty policies:
It would increase the productivity and reduce the heat of the Washington debate on poverty and opportunity if all sides agreed to base their understanding of poverty and mobility on the basic facts laid out above, all from reliable sources. Here is a summary of these facts:
Government spending on poor and low-income families has increased almost every year for five decades; since 1980 spending has tripled as measured on a per person in poverty basis in constant dollars
An improved measure of poverty shows that government spending focused on poor and low-income households cuts the poverty rate by about half; government spending on these programs and the Unemployment Compensation program prevented poverty from increasing during the most severe recession since the Great Depression
A CBO analysis shows that when government benefits are counted at their full value, households all along in income distribution, including those in the bottom 20 percent, enjoyed increased income between 1979 and 2007
The same CBO report shows that because income increased more the higher up we look in the income distribution between 1979 and 2007, income inequality has also increased since 1979; by far the biggest increase in inequality is between the top and the rest of the distribution
Several studies show that claims that intergenerational income mobility has slowed down in the U.S. are false; the U.S. has less income mobility that many European nations, but mobility has remained constant over the past four decades or so; nonetheless, children whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have more than a 40 percent chance of staying in the bottom themselves.
In-depth article on what Obama’s priorities and choices are like now.
Barack Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New YorkTimeson his iPad.
The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, wherehe spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days later, theBoy Scouts’ leader would apologizefor Trump’s speech.
In Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more than he expected to. He issued careful statementsdefending the Affordable Care Actandsupporting the Paris climate-change agreement, avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb.
It was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant (mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat is positioned to give.
But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet.
Here’s a terrific, in-depth investigation of how arbitration clauses, often forbidding class-action suits, have tipped the scales of power dramatically toward corporations. Highly recommended. (2015-16, NYT)
On Page 5 of a credit card contract used by American Express, beneath an explainer on interest rates and late fees, past the details about annual membership, is a clause that most customers probably miss. If cardholders have a problem with their account, American Express explains, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.”
Those nine words are at the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express deviseda way to circumvent the courtsand bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to apply for a credit card, use a cellphone, get cable or Internet service, or shop online without agreeing to private arbitration. The same applies to getting a job, renting a car or placing a relative in a nursing home.
Thought-provoking. I’d like to have this in my life.
How is a Pocket Neighborhood different than a regular neighborhood?
A pocket neighborhoodisnotthe wider neighborhood of several hundred households and network of streets, but a realm of a dozen or so neighbors who interact on a daily basis around a shared garden, quiet street or alley — a kind of secludedneighborhood within a neighborhood.
The widerneighborhoodis where you might describe “the red house on the corner of Elm and Main Street”— a local landmark that helps define and give character to a neighborhood. You may know some of these neighbors, but likely not the hundreds that live there. In most neighborhoods, streets are public, yards and gardens are private, but protected semi-public spaces are unusual.
“When we started it was just about technology,” Pahlka said. “Now it’s really about the outcomes of the operations” — outcomes like reducing recidivism or increasing the percentage of people who are eligible for food stamps who actually receive them. And improving government can make tremendous change. “The math shows that at least in safety net services, being 10 percent more effectivewould be as impactful as doubling all philanthropic spending,” she said.
Pahlka wasn’t alone in her initial technological optimism. In Mark Zuckerberg’s 2012letterdescribing Facebook’s IPO, he said the company’s tools for sharing “could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.” For most tech companies, that triumphalism continued all the way through the 2016 election, when revelations about misinformation and foreign meddling forced an industry-wide reckoning with its own power.
But it’s not as if digital tools and services have becomelessimportant in the broader world. Nor does the national political situation obviate the needs of people in local communities all across the country. Code for America now has about 75 full-time employees and 22,000 active volunteers, and in the areas where Code for America has dedicated the most resources, there is huge room for improvement.“If you are vulnerable to that cycle of poverty and incarceration, government services are awful to use and they don’t work very well,” Pahlka said. “It doesn’t have to work that way.”
…as much as this festival is a time and place to hear some great music, it’s also an opportunity for lots of folks—myself included—to dress up and see how others are presenting themselves. It’s a place to explore that means of expression.The profusion of wonderful lookshas been well-documented; in my opinion it is really much of what this festival is about.
This dress up aspect is completely emergent—nothing has been dictated or suggested- audience members have been quoted as saying that their clothing and look choices are improvised and spontaneous, (skills the black community has in abundance, as evidenced by our shared popular music, dance, comedy, sport etc)….this attitude is inclusive and admits to everyone as a creator, and, in a purely visual and sartorial way, it announces that everyone is both proud and brave, yet also vulnerable (you’re really putting yourself out there when you dress like this). To have that bravery and that vulnerability be encouraged and accepted is as a tonic in these times… at ANY time. This is display of looks infers and implies a way of being- and it says as much and maybe more than any words—words are words, but this is about how one can BE. It shows rather than tells.
