Browsing PBH By Articles

You’re Not As Busy As You Say You Are

The Article: You’re Not As Busy As You Say You Are by Hanna Rosin in Slate.

The Text: Are you too busy? You should be, and you should let people know in a proud but exasperated tone. Like this, from an old colleague I recently asked for advice: “I would like to help but I can not. I am desperately trying to finish a screenplay and a talk I need to give in Milan. Once I get an assistant I will be happy to help!” Or this, from the website of a researcher I know: “I work roughly 100 hours a week and am getting more and more behind as the years go by. I am simply unable to keep up with demands on my time let alone handle more requests. I feel extremely guilty about this, but it’s important that I push folks away so that I can continue to produce research and do the work that I do.”

Desperate and need to give a talk in Milan. Unable to keep up and do the work that I do. The art of busyness is to convey genuine alarm at the pace of your life and a helpless resignation, as if someone else is setting the clock, and yet simultaneously make it clear that you are completely on top of your game. These are not exactly humble brags. They are more like fretful brags, and they are increasingly becoming the idiom of our age. In her new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte calls this cultural epidemic the “overwhelm,” and it will be immediately recognizable to most working adults. “Always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.” Muting the phone during a conference call so no one can hear soccer practice drills in the background, stepping over mounds of unfolded laundry, waking up in a 2 a.m. panic to run over the to-do list, and then summing up your life to your friends—in the two seconds you dedicate to seeing your friends—as “crazy all the time” while they nod in agreement.

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So, What Exactly Happens To The Long Term Unemployed?

The Article: Only 11% of the long-term unemployed find work again a year later by Ricardo Lopez in the Los Angeles Times.

The Text: In a sobering new study, three Princeton economists found that only 11% of the long-term unemployed in any given month found full-time work a year later.

The paper, presented Thursday at a Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, offered a comprehensive look at the profile of the long-term unemployed. The lead economist behind the study is Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.
The economists tested the hypothesis of whether a low supply of jobs or discrimination by employers contributed to long-term unemployment.

The answer? Probably both.

“The demand-side and supply-side effects of long-term unemployment can be viewed as complementary and reinforcing of each other as opposed to competing explanations,” the economists wrote. “[S]tatistical discrimination against the long-term unemployed could lead to discouragement, and skill erosion that accompanies long-term unemployment could induce employers to discriminate against the long-term unemployed.”
One of the paper’s finding is that long-term unemployed people exert little pressure on parts of the economy such as wages and inflation.

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The Conservative Myth Of A Social Safety Net Built On Charity

The Article: The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity by Mike Konczal in The Atlantic.

The Text: Ideology is as much about understanding the past as shaping the future. And conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again.

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy. It existed in the 1980s, when President Reagan announced, “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern,” and called for voluntarism to fill in the yawning gaps in the social safety net. It was made explicit in the 1990s, notably through Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, a treatise hailed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and William Bennett, which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” It’s what Utah Senator Mike Lee references when he says that the “alternative to big government is not small government” but instead “a voluntary civil society.” As conservatives face the possibility of a permanent Democratic majority fueled by changing demographics, they understand that time is running out on their cherished project to dismantle the federal welfare state.

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Meet The Rich People Who Live Paycheck To Paycheck

The Article: Are the Suburbs Making People Live Paycheck to Paycheck? by Matthew O’Brien in The Atlantic.

The Text: Most people living paycheck-to-paycheck aren’t actually poor. They make a decent amount, and they have a decent amount of wealth.

And, believe it or not, this makes sense.

Now, you might expect that people without any liquid savings like cash or checking accounts wouldn’t have any illiquid savings like housing or retirement accounts, either. Basically, that everyone follows Suze Orman’s advice, and builds up an eight month emergency fund before putting any money into investments.

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America’s War On Immigrants

The Article: America’s War On Immigrants by Belén Fernandez in Al Jazeera.

The Text: As the interminable debate in Washington over immigration reform wears on, undocumented migrants in the U.S. continue to exist at the mercy of law enforcement efforts that defy all pretenses of justice and legality.

Earlier this year, Al Jazeera America reported on the stop-and-frisk-style raids being conducted in New Orleans by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to boost migrant deportation quotas. In that article, a Honduran immigrant recounts his experience of being handcuffed and shackled in the back of an ICE vehicle, which had been deployed to round up undocumented people using racial profiling techniques, saying, “I heard one of the agents say to another, ‘This is like going hunting.’ … And the other responded, ‘Yeah, I like this s—.’”

Also mentioned in the article is the fact that ICE agents in New Orleans “use mobile fingerprinting devices similar to those used by the U.S. military during its counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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