Ezra Klein

By Dylan Matthews

Today, John suggested that media figures may be responsible for Americans thinking Obama is a Muslim, Suzy explained the debate around the E-Verify employment verification system, I talked to Edward Zigler about why passing child care legislation is so hard, and Justin taught us how to make melon soup.

1) More bad economic news from the BLS displaced workers' survey.

2) Is "The Great McGinty" the best political movie ever? It's hard for me to see anything topping "Election."

3) A new CBPP report on Social Security.

4) It's only slightly related to the issues I'm talking about in my early education/child care posts, but Pamela Paul's piece on major depression in preschoolers is outstanding.

By Suzy Khimm

Immigrants to America may no longer be as eager to Anglicize their names upon arrival. So says the New York Times in a story today that explains why new arrivals and their children are more likely to retain names from their homeland, feeling less pressure to conform and assimilate in a more diverse society. The data pool is a bit limited and anecdotal, but the findings are still intriguing:

The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia.…

Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today (think the Kardashian sisters or Renée Zellweger, for instance, who decades ago might have been encouraged to Anglicize their names), and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who, arguably, may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.

Another sociologist quoted in the story points out that it's simply a natural historical progression, pointing out how it was once de rigueur for Italians and Jews in the film industry to Anglicize their names to hide their ethnic identities. Not only is there less pressure now to conform to a homogeneous Anglo culture, outwardly diverse origins can also now be as much an asset as a liability in an increasingly globalized society. The path to becoming an American, culturally speaking, has shifted away from a monolithic norm and toward discovering and establishing one's identity as a unique, authentic individual. And the personal evolution of our own president from "Barry" to "Barack" during his own coming of age is just one example.

My own parents came to the United States from South Korea about 40 years ago and, in keeping with the times, adopted Western first names after they decided to settle in the States. But my father also decided change the spelling of his last name from "Kim" to "Khimm," effectively making it seem even more foreign and exotic. He says that he made up the spelling to distinguish himself from all of the other Korean-Americans who shared his name -- a move that, in retrospect, seems borne out of a distinctly American impulse. As for me, I plan on keeping my last name, regardless of my marital status -- not only as a hat tip to my Korean heritage, but also to my family's more recent history of becoming American.

Suzy Khimm is a political reporter for the Washington bureau of Mother Jones.

By Suzy Khimm

Immigrants to America may no longer be as eager to Anglicize their names upon arrival. So says the New York Times in a story today that explains why new arrivals and their children are more likely to retain names from their homeland, feeling less pressure to conform and assimilate in a more diverse society. The data pool is a bit limited and anecdotal, but the findings are still intriguing:

The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia.…

Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today (think the Kardashian sisters or Renée Zellweger, for instance, who decades ago might have been encouraged to Anglicize their names), and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who, arguably, may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.

Another sociologist quoted in the story points out that it's simply a natural historical progression, pointing out how it was once de rigueur for Italians and Jews in the film industry to Anglicize their names to hide their ethnic identities. Not only is there less pressure now to conform to a homogeneous Anglo culture, outwardly diverse origins can also now be as much an asset as a liability in an increasingly globalized society. The path to becoming an American, culturally speaking, has shifted away from a monolithic norm and toward discovering and establishing one's identity as a unique, authentic individual. And the personal evolution of our own president from "Barry" to "Barack" during his own coming of age is just one example.

My own parents emigrated from South Korea to the United States in the 1960s and, in keeping with the times, adopted Anglo first names after they decided to settle in the States. But my father also decided change the spelling of his last name from "Kim" to "Khimm," effectively making it seem even more foreign and exotic. He says that he made up the spelling to distinguish himself from all of the other Korean Americans who shared his name -- a move that, in retrospect, seems borne out of a distinctly American impulse. As for me, I plan on keeping my last name, regardless of my marital status -- not only as a hat tip to my Korean heritage, but also to my family's more recent history of becoming American.

Suzy Khimm is a political reporter for the Washington bureau of Mother Jones.

By Dylan Matthews

cummije5 asks:

Since the CBO makes 10 year projections, I would like to see how much more spending over what was projected in 2000 happened, and how much less revenue under what was projected in 2000 happened.

As cummije5 says, the CBO's 2000 Budget and Economic Outlook, released in January of that year, provided predicted revenue (see table 3-2) and spending figures, both in nominal terms and as a percentage of GDP, from 2000 to 2010. Given as we now know, of course, what revenue and spending were for 2000 to 2009, it's useful to see how accurate the predictions were. Here's how the projected and real figures compare:

The discrepancy here does not prove that the CBO is wrong or bad at making these kinds of predictions. It just shows that they don't know what Congress is going to do over the course of the decade. For one thing, the outlays estimates assume that discretionary spending will grow at the rate of inflation, which they obviously did not.

But more important, the CBO in 2000 did not know that we were going to invade and occupy two foreign countries. They did not know two major tax cuts representing trillions in lost revenue would be passed. They did not know Medicare would start covering prescription drugs. They definitely did not know that the financial sector would collapse in upon itself, leading to a dramatic drop in revenues and necessitating trillions in spending to fuel a recovery. Policymaking is messy and unpredictable, and those sorts of thing just can't be factored in ahead of time.

Which is all to say that while CBO estimates are very useful, especially when discussing specific policies and trying to isolate their effects, Doug Elmendorf is not a precog. The next 10 years is a long time for Congress to pass new spending programs, cut old ones, raise some taxes, cut others and so forth, and while we have to operate off of something, it's likely in 10 years we'll look back at the budget discussions we're having now and find the budget outlook we're working with preposterous.

By John Sides

By now, you've probably heard of the Pew Center poll that found that fewer Americans believe Obama is a Christian and more believe he is a Muslim or simply don't know what his religion is.  The question is: Why have people's beliefs changed?

One hypothesis proffered by Newsweek and Jack Shafer is that some Americans are just dumb.  They believe in stuff like ghosts and astrology, so why not this about Obama?

That doesn't get us very far.  It seems hard to imagine that Americans suddenly got dumber between March 2009 and August 2010, when the Pew polls were conducted.

A second hypothesis comes from political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who notes that there have been numerous attempts by some media commentators and political leaders to insinuate that Obama is Muslim.  He writes:

Rather than faulting the public for the weaknesses of human psychology, we should identify the elites who deceive citizens with false information and hold them accountable for their role in fostering this myth. It's time to stop blaming the victims.

If Nyhan's hypothesis is true, we would expect to see sharper changes over time among people who are, first, predisposed to believe bad things about Obama.  This implicates Republicans, and, indeed, Pew found that Republicans registered the sharpest increase in the belief that Obama is Muslim.  Second, among Republicans, we should see especially sharp changes among those who pay attention politics and the news, because these people who would be more likely to watch, read, or hear any commentators and leaders suggesting that Obama is Muslim. 

By Suzy Khimm

Embroiled in the ongoing immigration debate, a growing number of states and municipalities are rushing to embrace E-Verify, a federally created system that determines whether potential employees are legally permitted to work in the U.S. About 13 states, along with a dozen or so municipalities, have made the system mandatory for some or most businesses. Now even more states are trying to climb on board with the system, which verifies new hires with databases from the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security.

New Jersey is considering legislation that would make E-Verify mandatory for all businesses that employ more than 100 workers, and Pennsylvania is debating bills that would require all state contractors and subcontractors, and all construction companies to use the system. Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court agreed to review a case contesting a sweeping 2007 Arizona law that requires all businesses to use E-Verify and imposes sanctions on companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants, even going as far as revoking their business licenses.

The growing popularity of E-Verify isn't surprising, given the continuing failure of the federal government to enact comprehensive reform, despite its commitment to ramping up immigration audits on employers. The problem is there are serious questions about how accurate E-Verify is, whether it's fair to impose the cost of using such a system upon businesses, and what the negative repercussions might be for workers. Earlier this year, an independent review found that the system wrongly clears illegal workers 54 percent of the time -- a finding that shouldn't be terribly encouraging to those who were hoping the system would help curb illegal employment. On the flip side, 7 percent of U.S. citizens and legal immigrant workers were wrongly determined to be ineligible to work. A similar study from 2006-2007 found that error rates were 30 times higher for foreign-born workers and almost 100 times higher for naturalized citizens, raising questions whether the system is inherently discriminatory.

By Dylan Matthews

Edward Zigler is a Sterling Professor of Psychology, emeritus, at Yale University. He was one of the founders of Head Start, and served as head of Office of Child Development and the U.S. Children's Bureau during the Nixon administration. He lead Nixon's effort to pass a national, comprehensive, center-based child care program to complement his Family Assistance Plan, a welfare reform proposal that would have provided a guaranteed minimum income to welfare recipients who work. The effort ended with Nixon, at the urging of his adviser Pat Buchanan and the religious right, vetoing a comprehensive child care bill that had passed through Congress.

Zigler has been involved with the debate over child care ever since, including the late '80s and early '90s fight over the Act for Better Child Care Services (ABC) bill, which ended in the passing of the Child Care and Development Block Fund, which provides money for states to subsidize child care. He most recently co-authored the book "The Tragedy of Child Care in America," which tracks the history of efforts to pass a national child care policy and proposes solutions going forward. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

There seems to have been two main pushes for a comprehensive child care bill: the one you were involved with in the Nixon administration, and then the ABC/block grants debate in the late '80s, early '90s.

EZ: The ABC was a fairly decent bill but what they finally settled on was the Child Care and Development Block Fund. I always have to support it because something is better than nothing. These people need some subsidies. But it’s, in my estimation, not offering a real solution.

By Justin Fox

Dylan has lamented the lack of food-related content in Ezra's absence. So, after making it for dinner last night and being reminded of its amazing late-summer goodness, I need to talk about melon soup. I learned the recipe sometime in the late 1990s from an issue of Martha Stewart Living; I don't have the original anymore, but no matter. Here's what you do:

1. Buy a melon, preferably a locally grown one (more flavorful than the ones shipped from afar). I'm not sure exactly what kind of melon I used yesterday. The flesh seemed cantaloupish, but the exterior didn't. Honeydew and other similar sorts will also do. Watermelon won't.

2. Put the melon on the kitchen counter and forget about it. Notice a few days later that liquid is starting to ooze out of it. Slice off any oozy, gross part. If it's going to be a while before you make the soup, put the rest of the melon in the fridge. (You don't really have to wait for the oozing liquid, but it is crucial that the melon be ripe verging on overripe.)

3. Cut the melon in half and scoop out the seeds while trying to scoop out as little melon juice as possible. Pour the juice and scoop out the flesh of the melon into a food processor (a blender would probably work, too).

4. Squeeze the juice of two oranges and pour that into the food processor/blender.

5. Peel and then grate some fresh ginger root into a fine mesh strainer (cheese cloth and other straining devices, and possibly even just your hands, will work as well) and squeeze the juice out of the grated ginger into the food processor/blender. How much? That's really up to you. I'd recommend grating and squeezing maybe an inch or so of ginger root into the soup, blending it up and tasting it before adding more. You want a little kick from the ginger, but not enough that it overwhelms the melon. Actually, that's what I want. You can decide for yourself.

6. Chill the soup in the fridge. This step is of course unnecessary if the melon has already been in the fridge all day.

7. Consume. At our house we pour it into soup bowls and eat it with a spoon, but you could just as easily pour it into cups and drink it right up.

Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of "The Myth of the Rational Market."

By Dylan Matthews

All good things must come to an end, and Research Desk is no exception. My last day working full time at The Post is tomorrow, and that means this will be the last Research Desk solicitation thread, at least for the time being. But the work goes on, the charts endure, the time series still live, and the data shall never die, so post your last requests below.

Dylan Matthews is writing Wonkbook while Ezra is on vacation.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to announce the Fed's course of action in a speech Friday. Meanwhile, despite FinReg, banks will still be allowed to make risky bets that could destabilize the economy at large. And the SEC has adopted new rules giving shareholders greater power in electing corporate board members, in a move that could serve as a check on executives.

Welcome to Wonkbook.

Top Stories

Bernanke will announce the Fed's course of action in a speech in Wyoming following the release of revised GDP data Friday, reports Neil Irwin: "Neither Bernanke nor those who are closest to him -- such as New York Fed President William C. Dudley and governors Donald L. Kohn and Kevin M. Warsh -- have made a public appearance to explain the rationale for the move or indicate the likelihood of more aggressive steps to support growth...Rather than criticize or call out colleagues for bringing the Fed's internal debates into the public sphere, Bernanke has subtly encouraged this airing of opinions, praising points that some of his colleagues have made in Federal Open Market Committee meetings or private e-mails."

Bets creating potentially systemic risk will still be allowed under FinReg, report Nelson Schwartz and Eric Dash: "Though these trades were made on behalf of clients, they subjected the banks to the kind of risk that Congress sought to curtail when it devised the Volcker Rule, which banned banks from speculating with their own money. That practice is known as proprietary trading. ... But for all the talk of shutting down trading desks and reassigning employees to prepare for the Volcker Rule, proprietary-style trading will probably survive, if under a different name."

The SEC is giving shareholders more power over corporate boards, reports Zachary Goldfarb: "Supporters point to the financial crisis as evidence that shareholders need new powers, saying boards failed to conduct rigorous oversight of pay practices and business decisions at banks and other financial firms...In the case of the financial crisis, Canada represents an example of where greater empowerment of shareholders works well, said James C. Allen, of the CFA Institute, a nonprofit group that represents investment professionals. Canada has allowed shareholders to directly nominate board members to boards since 1997."

By Dylan Matthews

Today, Suzy highlighted problems with poorly regulated private prisons, John noted that prison hurts civic engagement, I talked to James Heckman about the payoffs from investing in childcare, and Justin took apart Intel CEO Paul Otellini's comments on the economy.

1) Jacob Hacker explains how health-care reform happened and what it means for political science. Hacker fans will appreciate the title reference.

2) "A young person following the news for the first time would probably think that an economist is someone who gets on television to say how surprised he is by the economy."

3) College and universitites are worried that health-care reform will endanger their student health-care plans.

4) Janice Nittoli on providing relief to blue-collar workers as the economy shifts.

Since the blog has been low on food-related content this week, here are some delicious-looking Parisian pastries.

By Suzy Khimm

While President Obama has moved away from the controversial workplace raids that characterized the Bush era of immigration enforcement, the Obama administration has ramped up audits on employers that hire illegal immigrants. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is now relying heavily on civil complaints and fines to threaten companies found to hire significant numbers of illegal immigrants.

In a prominent case last year, American Apparel ended up firing some 1,800 immigrant employees -- about a quarter of its workforce -- after an ICE investigation found irregularities in identity documents. The rationale is that such crackdowns will help deter companies from hiring illegal immigrants -- and curb exploitative labor practices that result in low wages and poor working conditions for immigrants.

In line with the rest of Obama's broad-based crackdown on immigration, workplace audits have actually increased 50 percent since the Bush administration, with fines tripling to nearly $3 million and executive arrests on the rise as well. Nevertheless, some anti-immigration conservatives are up in arms about the fact that actual workplace arrests of illegal immigrants have plummeted under the current administration.

This week, Fox News seized upon a new report that arrests and deportation of illegal immigrations taken into custody at work sites has dropped more than 80 percent from George W. Bush's last year in office. Fox News cites one former Bush official who slammed the approach as "de facto amnesty," accusing the Obama administration of "turning a blind eye to entire categories of aliens" fand failing to arrest and deport the illegal immigrants who turn up on these workplace audits.

By Justin Fox

Intel CEO Paul Otellini's dinner remarks Monday in Aspen have been making the rounds. Not having witnessed them, I can't say for sure, but they seem to have been a mix of the same things that Intel CEOs have been saying about U.S. competitiveness for the past few decades plus a bit of the Obama-bashing currently fashionable in business circles. Naturally, it's the latter that's getting all the attention, which is somewhat unfortunate given that Otellini's take on current events was partisan and off-the-cuff, but his views on U.S. competitiveness seem well-informed (if of course self-interested) and probably right.

"I think they're flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working," Otellini said of Washington Democrats. Um, really? The experiment in Keynesian economics undertaken in the U.S. over the past couple of years -- and it was well under way in 2008, before Obama was elected -- has almost certainly worked in the sense of preventing even bigger job losses, as Dylan Matthews explained earlier today. It just hasn't worked miracles.

Otellini also launched into a favorite complaint of businesspeople lately: that it's uncertainty, much of it the fault of Washington, that's keeping corporations from doing anything productive with their big cash stashes. I don't doubt that there's lots of uncertainty, but blaming the current occupants of the White House or Capitol Hill for it strikes me as a little weird, given that the biggest government-related uncertainty right now has to do with the November elections. The real complaint here seems to be with the occasional direction changes inherent in a democracy. Which is one reason why businesspeople like China so much. And why they liked the Washington gridlock of the mid- to late 1990s.

But some of Otellini's other, less of-the-moment arguments made sense. The U.S. corporate income tax rate -- at 39 percent, it's the second highest in the developed world after Japan's, and Japan's may be about to drop -- is counterproductively high. It's probably the only tax in the U.S. these days that's conceivably on the wrong side of the Laffer curve; if we lowered the rate, we might take in more money. Our immigration laws are ridiculously unfriendly to talented workers from overseas (actually, that was Carly Fiorina's argument at the same event, but I'm sure Otellini would agree). As a nation, we sometimes seem to be actively discouraging R&D; and locating manufacturing facilities here. But none of that's new to the Obama presidency, or even to the 2000s. I think it's been going on since at least the 1980s, when Washington policymakers and corporate chieftains began to fall under the thrall of financial markets and the financial sector (book recommendation of the day: Gerald Davis's “Managed by Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America).” Got a plan for what to do about that, Mr. Otellini?

Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

By Dylan Matthews

jimjinphx asks:

Has anyone done a side-by-side comparison of the results (GDP growth, employment, etc,)of the Obama administration economic policies (stimulus, etc) and the policies advocated by the Republicans (spending freeze, no stimulus, etc.)?

I can't account for the effects of a spending freeze, but the CBO's latest estimate (PDF) of the effect of the stimulus, used in conjunction with BLS unemployment figures and BEA GDP data, we can compare the unemployment and GDP growth rates with and without the stimulus. First let's recall Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein's famous graph from January 2009 predicting the unemployment rate with and without a recovery package:

The actual data, of course, is worse than that. The blue line is the actual unemployment rate, the red is unemployment without the stimulus under the CBO's lower estimate of the stimulus' effectiveness, and the yellow is unemployment without the stimulus under the CBO's higher estimate:

The stimulus still made a substantial difference, even if the unemployment rate is not actually falling, and the current 9.7 percent unemployment rate is nothing to celebrate. Here's the same comparison on GDP data:

Again, this isn't an encouraging graph; GDP growth is falling, and isn't where it needs to be to get unemployment to a reasonable level. But it's still substantially higher than it would have been without the stimulus.

By Dylan Matthews

James Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Much of his recent work has focused on the economic gains to funding early childhood education. In particular, he has studied the Perry Project, which provided preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., for a group of 3-year-old children chosen at random from 1962 to 1967. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation, on Perry and related topics, follows.

One of the most interesting things about your research, particularly the Perry preschool intervention and your work on that, is that care that’s very expensive in the short run -- the numbers I saw was that Perry was $10,000 a year in current dollars -- still yield enough benefits in the long run to overwhelm the costs. Is there some correlation, in that if you’re paying more you’re likely to get higher-quality care, which will yield more dividends?

Be careful. You say it’s expensive. First of all, it’s more like $7,000 to $8,000 a year, in real terms. Maybe $8,500. And if you compare with the amount of money spent in the budget, per capita, for secondary school education in public schools, it gets pretty close to that. The national average is pretty close to that. So it’s not extraordinarily expensive.

If you compare it to something like Head Start, it is expensive, but the structure is very different. There are other programs that are much more expensive, but that’s not one of them, relatively speaking. I would put it in context, because we’re spending a lot more on that.

The really important thing to understand is that you want to look at what the rate of return is. The rate of return is somewhere between 6 to 10 percent per annum. So no matter what the costs are, it’s going to earn a rate of return that says for each dollar invested, I give six cents back for the life of the child.

So you put in those $8,000, you’re going to get multipliers of more than 100 at age 65 in real dollar terms. I once did a calculation, it’s whatever 1.06 is to the 60th power. It’s a huge number, I promise you. I think it’s very shortsighted to talk only about the costs. You want to look at the returns.

Is there anything that differentiates programs based on rate of return? Are there certain types of programs where you see greater percent per annum numbers and certain ones where you see less?

I was looking at Perry. But I do believe the structure is similar for other programs. We’re in the middle of evaluating those other programs. For example, I haven’t yet done a study of the Nurse-Family Partnership Program.

Those people are a little bit too young to really make a strong case one way or other, but we are in the middle of conducting an evaluation of the so-called ABC project that was conducted in North Carolina some 30 years ago. There are a lot of studies that are underway.

If you were to ask what’s the best possible structure, I can’t tell you for sure. What I can say is there are a lot of different structures out there, and that some of them seem very promising. Some have long-term evaluations, like Perry. ABC will have one shortly. So it’s to be determined. It’s a subject very much under development.

One the main takeaways from some of the work you’ve done on this is on what, exactly, the value provided by these programs is, and one of the points you make is not that it helps students develop intellectually, though it helps with that, so much as that it helps these non-cognitive skills. Can you talk a little about what goes into that and why that’s helpful later on?

Look, what did Perry do? Perry took these kids in for 2 ½ hours a day, five days a week, and then had a home visit that went with that, once a week. They did two things. They talked to parents, something about parenting and encouraging the child, but they also taught the child a lot of things that had to do with coming in, showing up, and then what they call a “plan, do, review” sequence. So you plan what you’re going to do that day, you do it and then you review it.

So what you’re learning is self-discipline, to stay on task, you’re learning social relationships, because you’re doing this assessment collectively, and you’re building a set of life skills that turn out to be important. So we looked at what the consequences were of these changes early in life for the child. And we see that those patterns are there.

It leads to less aggression, more socialization, what sometimes psychologists call externalizing behavior, and it promotes a lot of productivity down the line. So you’re changing the character of these children.

A lot of them are intuitive, but what are some of the ways these non-cognitive skills can show up, say, in the workforce or later on in life?

Showing up on time for a job, for example, or learning the importance of getting on with others. Or self control and controlling your anger, respecting the rights of others, various kinds of aspects that you think of as character formation, which we typically take for granted, really shouldn’t be taken for granted for large groups of people in the society. And we can address those deficits with these kinds of programs.

Obviously, your work stresses that these programs aren’t very expensive in the long term.

If I tell you there’s a minimum cost of $8,000, $9,000 to build a device, and that device will pay off 6 to 10 percent per annum every year after, most would consider that a pretty good return. It’s better than the rate of return on equity between 1945 and 2008, so it’s a much higher rate of return than we’re typically used to getting. As an economist, you want to look at opportunity costs and what the benefits are, and you compare the costs relative to the benefits. And the costs are far less than the benefits.

But even if you have this great device that has this amazing rate of return, you still need the initial capital, and you still need a way to invest initially. That’s where a lot of states run into problems with this. Is there anything that looks promising to you as a way of providing that, of getting the process up and running?

There’s a sense in which states are spending a huge amount of money on worthless programs. So, for example, we know that one of the payoffs of these programs is reduced incarceration. So if the state took a long haul, instead of just thinking about what will balance the budget next year or this year, and thought about how they’re going to be solvent in forty years, this is going to dramatically improve financial solvency.

Prison is costing $50-60,000 a year to house a prisoner in a state prison. We see dramatic changes in crime, which is one of the reasons the rate of return is so high. So in this kind of analysis you actually see a huge payoff. The long-term fiscal burden is alleviated. That’s point one.

The second part of it is that the structure even in the short run, the burden on the schools, on special education and a bunch of other burdens that we typically think of as associated with problem children and so forth, these get substantially reduced. So there is a payoff. In some sense, the underlying premise is wrong to think that it’s just cost. It’s cost and return.

My hope was the Obama administration would actually think more broadly about these things. They’ve been under such a gun because of the problem with the economy in the last couple of years that they haven’t been able to do it. But the whole architecture of these programs is producing what should be long-term productivity.

Look, President Eisenhower built the highway system. President Obama could build the child production system if he wanted to. It would have a much higher payoff than a lot of the programs that are currently there. If you do a cost/benefit analysis of the rate of return for job training, if you talk about early convict rehabilitation programs or literacy training for adults, the rates of return on those programs are generally quite low, very low. It’s just a question of using the same dollars wisely.

Last week there was a great op-ed piece in the New York Times by Paul Tough. He pointed out that we’re spending billions, $8.2 billion a year on Head Start, and Head Start is not a very effective program.

If you had an enriched version of Head Start and invested the same amount of money, you’d get much higher payout in the long run. Each of these programs has a political barnacle connected with it. People are promoting it because they see some advantage, but at the same time there’s really no value in those programs. The point is it’s not a question of raising new money, it’s a question of using existing money wisely.

What specifically would you want to have changed? What do you mean by a more efficient program than Head Start, a more effective program?

Well, higher-quality people teaching in the program. Higher standards, better facilities and a more rigorous curriculum, and focusing on developing soft skills and training character for children. Head Start should be much better in terms of targeting children and producing an effective child, instead of just processing a bunch of kids.

You mentioned being disappointed with Obama on this, and if I’m not mistaken you consulted a bit with his campaign on these issues.

I did, on this very issue.

If somehow the economy gets to a place where they can move on to other issues, what would a good first step, federally, be, in moving toward high-quality early education?

What you do is move beyond the Harlem Children’s Zone focus that seems to have gripped the administration. That’s fine, but it hasn’t really been evaluated in any serious way yet and it’s not clear that’s the answer.

The key idea is to encourage more experimentation across a broader range of projects, targeting a larger range of people and providing a refocus of what these programs are all about, which is teaching aspects of self-confidence and teaching these soft skills which are typically ignored in a lot of social and political life.

So I think they could play a great leadership role. It’s not a question of just raising money, but they could certainly raise money as well. They could certainly put a lot more resources into this, but could also try to create a greater emphasis.

Instead of putting money into community colleges and putting money into high schools, to actually understand that there should be a major reemphasis toward the early years and producing children who are going to be productive.

It really would require intellectual leadership. He could do it with a stroke of a pen or a few speeches. He’s started. I don’t want to quarrel with him, and he’s got a lot of other things on his plate, so I’m not faulting him. But I do think the structure has been a little disappointing, to put it mildly.

Do you want to make a final point?

I would just emphasize a couple of things. The first is economic productivity. The second is that the argument that has typically been made for these programs in the past has been that it’s the right thing to do. It’s an emotional argument or a political argument. That may be or may not be true depending on your politics.

But the case for it is also a family-values argument. It’s an argument about recognizing that the American family is in deep trouble, that a lot of kids are not getting the kind of environments that other kids get, and that that environment makes a big difference, and that the structure of the whole program of American society is oriented too much around support for remediation and much less around prevention. That’s true for health, and it’s true for education.

This kind of program has much broader implications. It’s a health program, and it is an education program. It’s also a crime program. If you recognize the multiple benefits that come from promoting both the cognitive and soft skills of these children, especially disadvantaged young children who are being produced at much greater numbers now, because the American family is more in shambles than probably ever before, at least in recent time, the last 40-50 years.

So I think that there’s a strong economic productivity argument to be made. The societal impact is much, much greater than is typically viewed. People have to get out of these very narrow policy conceptions, out of the idea that this is the province of the Education Department or HHS. It’s a way to improve quality of life across a number of dimensions. It means people can live bigger lives, greater lives.

by John Sides

It is well known that the percentage of Americans in prison or on parole has increased dramatically.  But we know far less about how incarceration -- and interaction with law enforcement generally -- affects political attitudes and behaviors.  A new paper (pdf) by political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman addresses this question.

Weaver and Lerman argue that experience with police and prisons is an important contact -- indeed, perhaps the only contact -- between many citizens and their government.  This contact then socializes people to have particular attitudes toward that government.  And these attitudes are far from democratic ideals. Consider this graph, drawing on a portion of Weaver and Lerman's data:

It shows the apparent effect of contact with the criminal justice system on whether people are registered to vote, actually vote or participate in at least one civic organization.  People are far less likely to do any of these things as their contact with police and prisons ranges from no contact to being questioned, arrested, convicted, serving time in prison or serving at least one year in prison ("serious time").

Meanwhile, distrust in all levels of government increases as contact with the criminal justice system increases:

By Suzy Khimm

Earlier this week, I questioned whether private prisons are actually more cost-effective and better run than public facilities, pointing to an Arizona study showing how the industry has fallen short of its promises. In response, Will Wilkinson argues that he would oppose private prisons "especially were they more efficient" (his emphasis). Writing for the Economist, Wilkinson points out that there are inherently perverse incentives guiding for-profit prison companies:

From an economic point of view, we should expect firms that compete for and rely on government contracts, such as weapons manufacturers and prison operators, to maximise the spread between the amount billed and the actual cost of delivering the service. If contractors can get away with providing less value for money than would the government-run alternative, they will. Moreover, contractors have every incentive to make themselves seem necessary.…The great hazards of contracting out incarceration "services" is that private firms may well turn out to be even more efficient and effective than unions in lobbying for policies that would increase prison populations.

If there were a robust watchdog to ensure that private prisons were delivering as promised -- without skimping on value and jeopardizing public safety -- Wilkinson might have less cause for worry. Unfortunately, in Arizona and elsewhere, there's very little oversight to determine whether private prison operators are cutting corners to help their bottom line. In Arizona, private contractors aren't required to build prisons to state specifications, and they don't even need to share data with the state government about escapes or crimes committed within their facilities.

A 2008 bill drafted by then-governor Janet Napolitano would have strengthened regulation and oversight of the industry, making privately run facilities more accountable to the public. But the legislation was successfully defeated by the powerful private prison lobby -- which, as Wilkinson surmises, has proved enormously effective at persuading lawmakers to support unchecked growth of private facilities and the prison population as a whole.

If public officials actually wanted to save money on incarceration, they might do well to heed Adam Serwer's advice:

The way to save money on prisons isn't to give contracts to private companies that will lowball costs and cut corners, it's to be less punitive, more willing to consider alternatives to incarceration like geriatric release and outpatient imprisonment, and to adopt anti-recidivism measures that actually work. In other words, the way to save money on corrections is to have fewer people in prison.

Suzy Khimm is a political reporter in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones.