Tag Archives: welfare

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. There’s a new evaluation out of the Northern Ghana site of the famous expensive Millennium Villages project most associated with Jeff Sachs. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, the theory is that an intensive big fix (building new institutions like hospitals and many other things at once) could fix the interdependent problems of poor areas.The thing is that Sachs insisted he knew it would work, and it didn’t need an...

The concept of human development views wellbeing as being affected by a wide range of factors including health and education. This column examines worldwide long-term wellbeing from 1870-2015 with an augmented historical human development index (AHHDI) that combines new measures of achievements in health, education, material living standards, and political freedom. It shows that world human development has steadily improved over time, although advances have been unevenly distributed across...

In 1795, the parish of Speen, in Berkshire, England, embarked on a radical new system of poor relief. Due to the ruinous French wars and a series of poor harvests, grain prices were rising sharply. As bread was the staple food of the poor, rising grain prices increased poverty and caused unrest. Concerned by the possibility of riots, the parish decided to provide subsistence-level income support to the working poor. The amounts paid were anchored to the price of bread. Each member of a...

This post originally appeared on Pieria in July 2014. Roger Farmer has a blogpost in which he shows that labour markets don’t clear. Specifically, employment varies with the business cycle, whereas the labour force participation rate and hours worked only show long-term secular trends. During cyclical downturns, therefore, we must conclude that there is more labour available than there are jobs. New Keynesians say that the reason for this is sticky wages. If only nominal wages could fall...

I haven't written a post for a while. I wanted everyone to read the post I wrote in November about my niece Annie's suicide. Writing new posts drops older ones down the list, and I didn't want her memorial post to disappear off the radar until after her funeral. Annie's funeral was last Tuesday, 18th December, the day after her 29th birthday. Now, it is time to write again.But not yet to move on from the issues that Annie's death highlights. This post is about the link between mental ill...

The desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain's repeated attempts to "categorise the poor". For centuries, successive British...

Some Republican policymakers continue to propose basing eligibility for assistance programs on participants’ ability to meet strict work requirements — most recently with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway’s proposal to reauthorize SNAP (formerly food stamps)[1] — despite a lack of credible evidence that the requirements would work as intended.[2]To build support for work requirements that take away assistance from adults who cannot work a set number of hours per month,...

Here is a quote from John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1933: If I had the power today I should surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards of which the citizens of each were individually capable, convinced that what I could create, I could afford – and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For with what we have spent on the dole in England since the...

I am posting this NPR Fresh Air radio article here because it talks about a part of our society that has not been talked about much.  When it comes to discussion of taxation, social programs, how our economy works, the basic premise of free market misses an awful lot. From the page: For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. First, the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy has a new Obama Scholarship, which will pay (full tuition plus, travel costs and living stipend) for professional policy folks from anywhere in the world to get a 1-year mid-career masters there. It’s open to people from all sectors working for the public good with 3-5 years of work experience and a strong track record. Please forward to colleagues and friends who...