Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Things Aren’t Looking So Good for the Graduating Class of 2013

May 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Stacey Kalivas should be celebrating her graduation from college later this week. Instead, the 22 year-old is getting ready to move back home with broken dreams and in debt. Kalivas is a member of the class of 2013, the fifth successive wave of students to enter into a stubbornly weak U.S. labor market—marked by high unemployment, a large number of part-time workers, and many who have given up the hunt for jobs. "It's kind of tough to be graduating and not having anything," said Kalivas. The finance major will graduate from Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, on May 18. It has ... Read More

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Austerity Is Hurting Our Health

April 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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LONDON (Reuters) - Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in Europe and North America, driving suicide, depression, and infectious diseases and reducing access to medicines and care, researchers said on Monday. Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health. In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression ... Read More

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Can Australia Keep Beating the Economic Odds?

March 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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LAST JUNE, AUSTRALIA completed its twenty-first consecutive year of economic growth. That’s a record, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan pointed out, no other advanced economy can come close to matching. It’s even more impressive given that this performance has spanned the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, the dot-com boom and bust, and the international financial cataclysm triggered by Lehman Brothers’ fall in 2008. During each of these economic calamities, local and international doomsayers were quick to predict that, this time, Australia’s good run would come to an ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2013
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The Strange Game Theory of the Sequester

February 27, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Barring the biggest Washington miracle since Dolly Madison ferreted paintings out of a burning White House in 1812, sequestration—the automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense, discretionary and certain health programs totaling $85 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, and $1.176 trillion over the next decade—will take effect March 1. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that these cuts will cost 750,000 jobs in 2013, and reduce gross domestic product for 2013 by up to 0.5%. The effects stand to be disastrous: that much is clear. But when it comes to the politics of the ... Read More

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Analysis: We Should Rethink Who Funds Basic Services

January 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Facing a dire revenue shortfall, Providence, Rhode Island, has taken drastic measures to save money, providing only basic services to those in need. (PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

Barrington may be the only community in Rhode Island that not only did not cut back on library hours and services in 2011—it expanded them. What’s more, in 2012, it has continued to increase library funding. The nearby city of Providence closed seven of its nine public libraries for a week this September because it needed to close a budget shortfall. Even before that closure, budget constraints had limited the hours at Providence libraries, making it difficult for people with full time jobs and their families to use this public service on most days. This is just one example of how ... Read More

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Credit, the Recession’s Culprit

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The more leveraged they come, the harder they fall. A new analysis from the Federal Reserve of San Francisco argues that the severity of the recession and the uneven pace of recovery has more to do with the amount of credit accumulated pre-recession over other factors. The paper, by Fed researcher Oscar Jorda, points out that the higher a country’s ratios of private lending to GDP, and the larger its financial sector, the slower employment and investment have recovered. Jorda looked at 140 years of data in 14 advanced economies and concluded: "Countries that experienced the ... Read More

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Recession Forces Mobile Americans to Stay Put

November 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
On the Brookings website, William Frey offers this chart showing the decline in mobility in the U.S. Click here to visit the website.

By many accounts, social mobility in America has been on the decline for several decades. Families are increasingly marooned in their income class. Or worse, some adults actually seem to be falling out of the tax brackets in which they were raised (which is decidedly not the kind of mobility most of us have in mind). New Census data suggest we’re losing mobility of a different kind: around and across the country, not just up and down its income scales. Americans are literally less mobile than they’ve been at any time since World War II. And this is a troubling trend, too. Some of the ... Read More

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Old Money Caught in the Great Redistribution

September 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Older Americans are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn, the most severe since the Great Depression, economists say. Between mid-2007 and early 2009, when stocks and real estate values collapsed to their lowest point, U.S. households aged 60-69 experienced a decline in net worth of $312,000, on average, compared to an average decline of $177,000 for households overall. That's according to "Intergenerational Redistribution in the Great Recession," a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a deep recession, households approaching the end of their life cycle (there's a ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, September-October 2011
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Welfare Rates Almost Unchanged During Recession

August 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Not surprisingly, participation in government support programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance has soared in the United States during the recession. Those services kicked in, as the very concept of a social safety net implies, just when people have needed them the most. But there is one odd exception to this trend: Caseloads for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — the program created by the signing of welfare reform 15 years ago this week — have barely crept up nationwide since 2007. In 13 states, caseloads have dropped even as local unemployment as much as ... Read More

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What’s So Funny About Tightwad’s Money?

November 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The 70 or so inhabitants of Tightwad — Tightwadians, as it were — dispute the exact origination of the name of their west-central Missouri village. There is general agreement that it occurred during the early 1900s and had something to do with a store clerk, a postal official, a watermelon, by some accounts a chicken, and 50 cents. Regardless of its exact genesis, Don Higdon, formerly president of Reading State Bank, a small Kansas-based institution with one office 160 miles west of Tightwad, Mo., saw financial potential in the name. Enough so that Higdon made what in the very ... Read More

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