In a previous post, I mentioned Larry Bartels' important new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Bartels is blogging about the book this week on TPMCafe. In his lead-off post, he reviews some of his key findings:

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

2. Even when public preferences are clear and firmly held, policies contrary to those preferences can persist for a very long time if powerful political elites want them to persist. For example, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by more than 40% since the late 1960s despite remarkably strong and consistent public support for minimum wage increases. (This outcome has been facilitated by the fact that the nominal minimum wage is not adjusted for inflation, but that is itself a political decision; even when Democrats have controlled the White House and Congress, they have preferred symbolic nominal increases to permanent indexing of the sort that has long been accepted for social security.)

3. There are big differences in policies between Democratic and Republican elected officials, even when they represent exactly the same constituents. Political scientists have an elegant theory explaining why this shouldn't happen: if voters choose the candidate closest to their own policy positions, Democrats and Republicans alike must move to the center in order to get elected. The only problem is, they don't. A figure in the book compares the behavior of Democratic and Republican senators representing liberal and conservative states. The difference in behavior between a Democrat and a Republican representing the same constituents turns out to be much greater than the difference in behavior between a Democrat representing the most liberal state in the country and a Democrat representing the most conservative state in the country. Party and ideology dominate constituents' preferences in shaping legislators' roll call votes.

4. Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion. Aristotle wrote that "where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth ... that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy." By that standard, America is, at best, a very unequal democracy.

Tom Schaller on the latest obstructionism by the conservative Dem bloc in the House:

... [a} story in The Hill about the obstinate-yet-conflicted House “Blue Dog” coalition is exactly the sort of problem that ought to frustrate liberals. Here you have (some) conservative Democrats who have repeatedly voted to fund a war without worrying about how to pay for it, and now all of sudden they show pangs of fiscal responsibility about not coming up with the monies to fund one program in the new war spending bill. Blue Dogs finally getting with the program: Sounds great, right?

Not so fast, because the part they are raising fiscal responsibility objectives about is…wait for it, because it’s really going to infuriate you…education benefits for veterans. Where was this sort of ethic from Blue Dogs when the Bush administration was asking for billions to be handed over to venal, wasteful, no-bid contract-winning war profiteers?

“Some of us oppose creating a new entitlement program in an emergency spending bill, whether it’s butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers,” said Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.), a founding member of the Blue Dog Coalition who serves on the House leadership team as a deputy whip. The so-called GI Bill of Rights, authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), would give veterans money for college and cost $720 million in its first two years. But critics say that could grow to billions in future years.”

No! Not billions spent without funds to pay for it -- that just never happens in defense spending!

Two comments: First, thank goodness for Webb. Second, I’m going to keep saying this until it starts to sink in: Since Reconstruction, the Blue Dog element within the Democratic Party has gone from dominant majority, to significant minority to what it is today -- a declining coalition of conflicted complainers. Among the blessings of building a non-southern Democratic majority is that there is greater intraparty ideological cohesion, thus marginalizing Blue Dogs and their hand-wringing interference with emerging liberal project.

Robert Kuttner argues that publicly subsidized human-services jobs should be good-paying jobs with benefits:

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Here is a very straightforward proposal. Let's have a national policy to make every human-service job a good job -- one that pays a living wage with good benefits, and includes adequate training, professional status, and the prospect of advancement -- a career rather than casual labor.

These, after all, are jobs caring for our parents, our children, and ourselves. Transforming all human-service work into good jobs would not merely replenish the supply of decent work. It would vastly improve the quality of care delivered to the elderly at home or in institutions; to young children in pre-kindergartens or day-care facilities; and to sick people whether in hospitals, hospices, outpatient settings, or their homes.

These are also the jobs that cannot be outsourced. Even if we succeed in reviving American manufacturing, the process of automation means that America is almost certain to become even more of a service economy over time. Good service-sector jobs can help replace for good factory jobs.

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This effort would be part of two broader labor-policy shifts that America sorely needs. First, we need to reverse the trend toward casualization of labor that has been occurring for three decades. One of the great advances of the 20th century was regularization of the employment relationship. Through successful social struggle, growth of unions, and enactment of legislation, most jobs came to provide decent wages and fringe benefits. Workers could not be fired without cause. Loyalty to the firm was reciprocated. Grievance systems were created and respected. Economists termed these jobs primary labor-market jobs. Casual, secondary labor-market jobs, which paid less and offered no such guarantees, continued to exist, but they were the exception. In recent years, however, the shift to casual jobs has become the norm, and in low-paid human-service work, casual, high-turnover jobs are the industry standard.

Second, the upgrading of human-service work would reverse another insidious trend -- the employer's habit of trying to increase the efficiency of labor by fragmenting jobs into separate tasks and paying the lowest possible wage for each task -- a strategy known as Taylorism, after the early 20th-century "efficiency expert," Fredrick Winslow Taylor, who first recommended it.

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Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, is full of fascinating insights into the politics of inequality. I hope to do a longer post on the book at some point, but until then, wanted to share one of Bartels' conclusions:

Scholars of political participation and liberal activists often seem to suppose that the cure for political inequality is to educate and mobilize the disadvantaged in support of specific progressive policies. However, the evidence of unresponsiveness to the views of low-income citizens presented in chapter 9 [of Bartel's book] and in [Martin] Gilen's work suggests that that strategy is very unlikely to be politically effective. ....

If "voice" is "likely to be futile" for people on the losing end of economic inequality, is there any hope for progress? My analysis points to two related bright spots in an otherwise gloomy picture. First, the correlation between class positions and political views is not so substantial that support for egalitarian policies is limited to "those mired in poverty." ....

[Second], my analyses suggest that the specific policy views of citizens, whether rich or poor, have less impact in the policy-making process than the ideological convictions of elected officials. .... policy choices seem to depend more on the partisan ideologies of key policy makers than on the details of public opinion. Thus, even if poor people have negligible direct influence on the day-to-day decisions of elected officials, they--and their ideological allies--may have substantial indirect influence by altering the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in the making of public policy.

In essence, reducing poverty and inequality will require more progressives in positions of power. Yet, modern-day anti-poverty advocacy is largely legislative advocacy, advocacy conducted by groups funded by non-partisan and mostly non-ideological foundations. As political scientist Andrew Rich has noted:

... the leaders of liberal think tanks are often preoccupied by deeply held commitments to producing objective research, on the one hand, and to connecting their work to issue-based grassroots activism, on the other hand. These commitments are compatible with the tenets of liberal ideology, but they are far less helpful to fighting a war of ideas.

This dominant liberal approach has met with limited success over the last few decades. Bartels' research helps to explain why.

From RAND, a new working paper finds that divorce might not so bad on kids after all.

Social scientists and commentators disagree on how much of the association between parental divorce and child well-being is causal. This paper reexamines the claim that parental divorce is detrimental to children’s emotional well-being, measured in terms of behavior problems. The author analyzed panel data from the 1986-2002 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and found that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children. However, after controlling for unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time, the effect of parents’ divorce substantially declines and its influence on their children’s emotional well-being is not statistically significant.

Via the Sloan Work and Family Research Network Blog.

An underreported finding from last Friday's jobs data is that people are increasingly being forced to take part time jobs. The numbers here already exceed their highest levels in the last recession. This chart, from a newly updated CLASP report on how the downturn is affecting low-income folks, shows what's going on.

See this NYT article for more on the people behind the numbers.

Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed and the Prospect's Ezra Klein seem to be talking past each other on education reform. I thought I'd try to clear things up a bit.

Here's Klein:

It would be good if we could really nail down what works in education. But my conclusion, increasingly, is that the best thing you could do for poor kids' educational prospects is increase their parents' economic prospects...Education reform is a piece of the war on poverty, but it isn't, by itself, a winning strategy.

And here's Carey:

So I'm just not sure who the other side of this debate about the all-encompassing power of education reform is supposed to be. The Prospect has published some persuasive arguments that education was over-valued during the 1990s as an economic curative by the likes of Robert Reich and many economists. But the value of education generally is distinct from the need for systemic educational improvement, particularly when some flaws in the public school system are so glaring. And it's not like Reich's overly narrow view of the needs of modern workers caused him to lead the war against the war on poverty. There are bad people in charge of that, and they've got plenty of other reasons to do so.

It seems like some progressives see the possibilities of educational improvement as a barrier to more comprehensive reforms, a mirage that distracts from the real journey. Are any other sustained, large-scale efforts to improve the lives of poor children regarded this way?

Klein's most likely referring to the innumerable conservatives who push education reform as the sole corrective to poverty and inequality and then do little about it. To conservatives, education reform is almost tantamount to picking yourself up by your bootstraps. When they bring it up, they more or less mean, "education is what you poor people need- so get off your duff and get one!"

Even centrists use education reform against liberals. To be sure, they differ from conservatives because actually do something about it. Still, they propose it as a substitute for more ambitious intervention in the economy, rather than as part of a package that could reduce poverty and inequality. Once again, liberal solutions get pushed off the table by education reform.

So while Carey knows about these "bad people," he doesn't seem to see that that's what liberals are responding to. That's probably not to his or his constituents' benefit. I wonder if more people like Carey took on bad-faith conservative arguments and denounced centrists who marginalize their allies' causes, education reform would make liberals much less jumpy.

A great part of Obama's speech last night:

The people I’ve met in small towns and big cities across this country understand that government can’t solve all our problems – and we don’t expect it to. We believe in hard work. We believe in personal responsibility and self-reliance.

But we also believe that we have a larger responsibility to one another as Americans – that America is a place – that America is the place – where you can make it if you try. That no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours if you’re willing to reach for it and work for it. It’s the idea that while there are few guarantees in life, you should be able to count on a job that pays the bills; health care for when you need it; a pension for when you retire; an education for your children that will allow them to fulfill their God-given potential. That’s the America we believe in. That’s the America I know.

This is not altogether different from the rationale behind the New Deal, the philosophy of shared responsibility that gave us the Golden Age of shared prosperity (albeit shared mostly among white men). FDR (with apologies to regular readers who may have seen me highlight this quote too many times already):

In every land there are always at work forces that drive men apart and forces that draw men together. 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.

This is also a break from the recent past. Clinton conditioned public action on whether people "worked hard and played by the rules." So progressives had to prove that people were doing that. The best we seemed to do was enact social policy that motivates people to "work hard." But these times call for much more ambition.

This frame could serve a progressive agenda well, I think. The central question it raises is not what "they" are doing to fulfill their end of the social bargain, but what "we" are doing for our part. Is our nation ensuring that "no matter how much money you start with or where you come from or who your parents are, opportunity is yours"? Is there a basic level of security for all Americans? This is the debate that we need to have about poverty and inequality. We can talk about "opportunity" and "security" all we like but unless the questions are about what we are doing, I don't think we'll have the conversations we want.

Moreover, this vision is rooted in a belief in national solidarity and fraternity. People who work to undermine our common bonds, in our politics and in the economy, don't share this belief. That's why this part of the speech was unsettling.

I trust the American people to realize that while we don’t need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren’t liberal values or conservative values – they’re American values.

Leaving aside the questionable and unnecessary attack on "big government." On the one hand it's probably smart to connect these values with the American creed, but couldn't he have just said that these are both liberal and American values? That progressive values are American values? As it is, he's implying that conservatives share these values. And they don't. Many of them don't believe that Americans are brothers and sisters. They hate liberals, resent minorities, and flout their responsibility to the public. Those don't sound like American values to me.

I really like Matt's "transcendent enemy" formula. Some nominations for that role: 1) "Wall Street predators", from last night's Obama speech; and 2) the "superclass", from David Rothkopf's new book, or some variation on it. The extremely wealthy or corporate CEO or similar categories by themselves aren't sufficient as transcendent enemies—it's the nexus of wealth, power, and actions driven by conservative ideology that needs to be the target.

The mortgage interest tax deduction is one of our largest government programs—it will cost almost $100 billion in 2009—contributes significantly to income and wealth inequality, and helped make the housing bubble happen. The time has come to reform it. Via Economist's View, this is a good post by Thomas Palley that includes recommendations on reform:

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First, the capital gains exemption should be abolished for all new home purchases. Instead, the base cost of houses should be indexed to inflation so that homeowners are not taxed on inflation gains. Existing homeowners should be grand-fathered under current law to discourage selling to protect unrealized gains, which would destabilize the housing market.

Second, the ceiling (currently $500,000 per taxpayer) on mortgages qualifying for interest deductibility should be gradually lowered to zero over a ten-year period. Such a gradual phase-out can actually help existing middle-class homeowners because it will make top-end homes relatively less affordable compared to mid-market homes that retain the tax subsidy. That will shift demand toward the mid-market segment, helping maintain mid-market prices and thereby mitigating the housing slump.

Third, since everyone needs housing, the Federal government should phase in a refundable housing cost tax credit available to all, regardless of whether they own or rent. That credit can be financed with revenues generated by phasing out the mortgage interest deduction. During the transition every taxpayer should have the choice between taking either the available mortgage interest deduction or receiving the housing tax credit.

Current tax treatment of housing is intended to benefit working families, but it actually creates bad outcomes. The reality is current tax law distorts the economy, promotes house price speculation, renders households over-indebted and financially vulnerable, and undermines wages and family structure. There is a better way to help working families afford decent housing, and now is a good time for policy to transition in that direction.

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Over at Half Changed World, Elizabeth asks whether policies to promote flexible work—both part-time work and more flexible hours or locations for full-time workers—"should be framed as about caregiving or not" and outlines the pros and cons:

The arguments against making this a conversation about caregiving are:

• As long as flexible work is seen as a special privilege or accommodation for a limited population, it will be stigmatized—the mommy track.
• Moreover, special privileges create resentment among those who don't get them -- this is where you hear the stories from childless workers who complain that their colleagues with kids race out the door at 5.30, and assume that they're always available to work late.
• If we truly believe that business should only care what you achieve, not when or where you do it, this should apply to everyone, regardless of the reason they desire flexibility.

....

The argument on the other side is that we shouldn't be afraid to say that caregiving is important. In the US, we often treat having children as a sort of expensive hobby -- something that people do for their own pleasure, and that doesn't incur any societal obligations. If it takes up all their time and money, they should have known what they were getting into. So, I have real misgivings about going down a path that says that it doesn't matter whether you want time off to care for a child or a sick parent or to train for a triathlon, write a novel, or sleep off your hangover.

I prefer a "targeting within universalism" approach to flexible work: all workers should have more flexibility at work, and additional protections/benefits should be available to certain categories of workers like caregivers, veterans, volunteers, etc. I don't have any problem with saying that caregiving is important, and don't believe government needs to be neutral about caregiving. But flexible work is about more than caregiving—it should be about improving people's quality of life by allowing for a better balance between work and the rest of one's life pursuits, including, but not limited to, caregiving.

Flexible work is also about "the eternal centre-left values of liberty, equality and solidarity." Liberty isn't something that stops at the door to the workplace, that's why we have a variety of basic protections for workers. As a nation's productivity and wealth increases, the freedom of its people should also increase.

Al Hunt in Bloomberg.com on Obama's message lacking a villain:

Still, the cool, cerebral freshman Senator Obama needs to reemphasize his uniqueness.

It's fine to be a uniter who shuns old partisan divides. But successful American politicians invariably build capital with voters by targeting villains, from Franklin Roosevelt's ``economic royalists'' to Ronald Reagan's ``welfare queens.''

Obama's villains are vanilla: K Street lobbyists.

Who is the progressive movement's villain? Hunt's right that there's a need for a better one. Clinton has her bullies, Obama has his pundits and lobbyists, and Edwards had his corporations. All these symbols are appealing, but none have transcendent value. They don't unite the disparate parts of the progressive movement.

FDR's "economic royalists" is an example of a transcendant enemy. It connected economic oppression to political oppression and yet didn't categorically vilify a demographic group. They were the privileged elite who exploited farmers, workers, and entreprenuers. They were for the few and against the many. They weren't "one of us."

So who is today's economic royalist? Our problems are less about exploitation and oppression, as they were in FDR's time, than division. John Edwards's "Two Americas" sums it up pretty well. The ladder of opportunity is available only to some. With prices rising and jobs being shipped overseas, fewer and fewer people have income security. And the political system only responds to lobbyists and the rich. What symbol brings these themes together? Maybe economic isolationists? Separatist economics? I'm not sure.

The difference between "character" and "issue" populism raised by Shawn's recent post was on display this weekend in North Carolina.

In the run-up to the May 6th presidential primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton aggressively has voiced such populist positions as providing health care for all Americans, providing benefits to veterans, revising trade agreements, cracking down on China and standing up to oil companies.

Ironically, despite having the "right" populist positions on key issues, Clinton has failed to convince many Tar Heels that she actually means what she says. As The Charlotte Observer wrote in a recent editorial:

Her [Clinton] tendency to tell voters what they want to hear is disturbing. Her proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer is campaign gimmickry, not leadership. Her assertion that she was a critic of NAFTA from the beginning is simply unbelievable. The record shows she was an ardent advocate of the trade deal.

Additionally, it is interesting to contrast the populist positions taken by Clinton, and to a lesser extent Sen. Barack Obama, with those of former candidate Sen. John Edwards, who ran an explicitly populist campaign.

Although much of the current political rhetoric seems lifted entirely from the Edwards' playbook, the reception has been quite different.
National elites often portrayed Edwards as an inauthentic man, but people who heard him speak in person often came away impressed by his character. Yet when Clinton and Obama say the same thing as Edwards, neither of them is criticized in the same way that Edwards was.

Perhaps that is because, when push comes to show, opinion leaders know that neither candidate is ultimately going to rock the boat and make good on the populist issues being raised late in the campaign.

After last week's disastrous election for Labour in the UK, Neal Lawson of Compass (a sort of anti-DLC of the British left) argues that Labour needs to recast itself as a party of both the middle and working class:

New Labour is now dead. The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished.

The atrocious results from last night clearly show that the Blairite strategy, revived by Gordon Brown, of targeting middle class votes while assuming the working class would back the Party come what may, no longer holds. The working class are now staying home or voting for anyone other than Labour as an alternative to the Tories. Millions still identify with the Party but won't back it because its policies and rhetoric is alienating them.

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The issue is not whether Labour is a party of the middle class or the working class. It has to be both. That was the genius of the 1997 voting bloc. The leadership of the Party must now accept that the same issues affect voters in Reading as in Rotherham; insecurity and anxiety caused by flexible labour markets, the lack of affordable housing, sharp price rises, concerns about pensions, worries about securing places in local schools, immigration and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. But while this pervasive insecurity affects everyone it is the lower social groups who pay the heaviest price. A fresh start is not just an ideological necessity but an electoral imperative.

We must have a vision and a set of policies that unite common interests and concerns. Brown said in the autumn that he would delay the election to set out his vision for the country. Six months on no one is any the wiser. Instead he has panicked and pressed the rewind button back to the failed politics of Blairism. The working class have not just been ignored but attacked on issues such as social housing, benefits and now the 10p tax rate. Trade union action in defence of workers rights and conditions have also been criticised. John Hutton says the rich should be celebrated! It is little wonder that these people don't vote for us and particularly alarming that regrettably some seem to have backed the BNP.

And when the middle class face university tuition fees, long term care costs, white collar jobs being outsourced to India and when economic good fortune turns against us - the scale of the political and electoral task facing Labour becomes clear. If Brownism is just Blairism without the economic boom then the Party is finished.

Everyone is working hard and playing by the rules but a political and economic system that prioritises the needs of the rich over everyone else is always going to disappoint.

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A new narrative for Britain must be based on the eternal centre-left values of liberty, equality and solidarity. The trick is how we apply them in the world today.

Whether or not Lawson's diagnosis of Labour's defeat is correct, it's hard to disagree with his vision for the party going forward.

Gov. Jon Corzine signed legislation earlier today that makes New Jersey the third state (following California and Washington) to provide a minimum guarantee of paid leave to workers. The law provides up to six weeks of paid leave for an employee to care for a newborn, newly adopted child or seriously ill family member and is financed by payroll tax assessment on employees.

In statements, business groups who have fought the law tooth and nail came off as selfish, sore losers:

In a statement released after the signing Friday, the New Jersey Business and Industry Association said the law "will force businesses to pay for temporary workers, overtime, or lost productivity in their workplaces," and "put [businesses] at a disadvantage with competitors in neighboring states that don't have this mandate."

By contrast, Corzine and other supporters explained how paid leave promotes the common good:

Corzine said the law "will improve family life, fill a gap in our social contract with our citizens, and attract workers to this state." Labor Commissioner David J. Socolow said the measure would especially help low-income workers, "who often have little, if any, employer-paid leave."

For more, see Corzine's Press Release, which includes a short fact sheet with info on the new law.