Senior Fellow & Director, Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility @AEI. Previously Exec Dir, Joint Economic Committee. Beatles fanatic. Personal account
Aug 14, 2018 • 35 tweets • 8 min read
Some thoughts on this week's WaPo op-ed on welfare reform by @sanfordschram@rfording and @jbsoss . Per usual, let me stipulate that I think welfare reform was a success because it reduced poverty, which is the thing we all profess to care about. /1
There are 6 points the authors make. #1 is that caseload reduction is the wrong metric for success. I agree with that, and most conservative reformers would agree with that too. (I know most of the most prominent ones personally.) But... /2
Jul 19, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
OK, @coldxman picked a bad day for his essay arguing that black culture is "primarily" to blame for the black-white wealth gap, as I'm home with my sick kid and need a break from Teen Titans. /1
First, let me applaud him, as he is apparently an undergrad writing a decently sophisticated argument and an African American, which makes his contrarianism on the topic that much more risky. But a few thoughts in no particular order /2
May 7, 2018 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
.@AndrewCherlin is the latest to argue that economics is at least as important as culture in explaining Trumpism, saying that “The economic distress of the white working class has been building since the 1970s.” /1 nytimes.com/2018/05/06/opi…
These kinds of statements are too rarely backed up by stats, so here are some hourly wage trends by race and sex. These are for the 20th percentile—the worker (within race and sex) that is poorer than 80% of workers—and the median. /2
Jan 9, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
New research fr Treasury & JCT economists indicates top 1% share of pre-tax & -transfer income rose not from 9% to 20% 1979-2015, but fr 10 to 15. Add transfers: fr 9 to 13. Account for taxes: fr 8 to 10. Increase fr 1989-2015 just from 9.5 to 10.1. davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-…
Which econ journalist will write it up first?
Dec 11, 2017 • 13 tweets • 8 min read
Just out! “Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing,” the latest from @SenMikeLee ‘s Social Capital Project within @JECRepublicans (If you gagged at the title, that’s all me.) /1 lee.senate.gov/public/index.c…@SenMikeLee@JECRepublicans We suss out why the share of births to unmarried couples jumped from 5% in 1960 to 40% today. Half of all births begin as an unwed pregnancy, including 2/3 of first births to women under 30. /2
