“The real news” youtube chan­nel has a report claim­ing. an excess of 58,000 seniors and dis­able froze to death last year due to aus­ter­i­ty. Yet the CEO of a gas co. got a 12,000.000 retire­ment bonus.

“The real news” youtube vid was about Britain’s aus­ter­i­ty.

HSBC’s chief econ­o­mist, Steven King, just wrote a book about how the West­’s “enti­tle­ment cul­ture” is unsus­tain­able because it depends on end­less eco­nom­ic growth and that “soci­ety will have to reduce these claims and go back on their promis­es”. Appar­ent­ly devel­op­ing bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy, liv­ing sus­tain­ably, dis­trib­ut­ing what’s pro­duced more fair­ly and gen­er­al­ly try­ing to cre­ate that Star Trek utopia of a hap­py plan­et is not an option (banksters tend to pre­fer dif­fer­ent types of Star Trek utopias). King is also wor­ried that the ongo­ing ten­sions in Europe are lead­ing the peo­ple to search for scape­goats. I sup­pose when you’re a bankster try­ing to ped­dle a bru­tal glob­al cor­po­ratist par­a­digm as the only pos­si­ble option to avoid mass glob­al pover­ty (cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion is gen­er­al­ly real­ly low with those types of sales) AND your bank just got kid-glove treat­ment for its glob­al drug/terror mon­ey-laun­der­ing activ­i­ties), the search for a scape­goat might be might be on your mind:

A Slug­gish Europe Is ‘Search­ing for Scape­goats’

Pub­lished: Mon­day, 20 May 2013 | 11:36 AM ET
By: Kiran Mood­ley, spe­cial to CNBC.com

As West­ern economies come to terms with a sus­tained peri­od of low growth and an inabil­i­ty to afford its social com­mit­ments, nation­al­ist and iso­la­tion­ist move­ments will increas­ing­ly come to the fore­front, HSBC’s chief econ­o­mist Stephen King told CNBC on Mon­day.

King argued that the ben­e­fit cul­ture of West­ern coun­tries is only sus­tain­able through con­tin­ued eco­nom­ic expan­sion — some­thing he said was high­ly unlike­ly.

“We’ve been liv­ing beyond our means,” King said. “From ben­e­fits through to finan­cial claims — includ­ing those on pieces of paper, like bonds — soci­ety will have to reduce these claims and go back on their promis­es.”

For King, with growth far weak­er than that expe­ri­enced in the 20th cen­tu­ry, peo­ple will have to be stripped of enti­tle­ments — such as pen­sions, health­care ben­e­fits and social secu­ri­ty — which will cre­ate social upheaval.

King’s argu­ment is out­lined in his lat­est book, “When the Mon­ey Runs Out”. He said that while the stim­u­lus reac­tion of most coun­tries in response to the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis ensured a major depres­sion was avoid­ed, there has been naive belief from many that a recov­ery would be quick.

“Pol­i­cy mak­ers felt they could avoid a depres­sion and then return us to a sit­u­a­tion pri­or to the finan­cial cri­sis quick­ly,” King told CNBC. “For a nor­mal recov­ery, for exam­ple, the U.S. has an extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ty to bounce back. So the fact that we are hav­ing a debate at the moment about whether the U.S. will see gross domes­tic prod­uct of 2 or 3 per­cent — that is where the prob­lem comes from. The nature of the recov­ery is unusu­al­ly mut­ed.”

The econ­o­mist argued that the baby-boomer gen­er­a­tion’s enti­tle­ments must be scaled back, but that this will cause prob­lems. He also spoke about the cur­rent debate over Britain’s involve­ment in the EU.

“Some of the mood music com­ing through is of a typ­i­cal nation­al­ism in response to stag­na­tion: you want some­one to blame, whether its the Euro­peans or the immi­grants. It’s a blame game. It’s not just eco­nom­i­cal­ly wor­ry­ing but polit­i­cal­ly wor­ry­ing too,” he said.

“I was con­cerned with the lessons of his­to­ry where a per­sis­tence of eco­nom­ic weak­ness forces peo­ple to find scape­goats — even, for exam­ple, to the rise of anti-Semi­tism at times dur­ing the last cen­tu­ry. These are exam­ples of where a sys­tem­at­ic fail­ure that no one can con­trol leads to cul­tur­al blame and mis­trust. Those lev­els of mis­trust lead to sus­pi­cion in soci­ety, which under­mines mar­kets, as they rely on trust,” he said.

...

Okay...

Huff­in­g­ton Post
Okla­homa Sen­a­tors Jim Inhofe, Tom Coburn, Face Dif­fi­cult Options On Dis­as­ter Relief

Post­ed: 05/20/2013 7:50 pm EDT | Updat­ed: 05/21/2013 3:23 pm EDT

WASHINGTON — As fran­tic res­cue mis­sions con­tin­ued Mon­day in Okla­homa fol­low­ing the cat­a­stroph­ic tor­na­does that ripped through the state, it appeared increas­ing­ly like­ly that res­i­dents who lost homes and busi­ness­es would turn to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment for emer­gency dis­as­ter aid. That could put the state’s two Repub­li­can sen­a­tors in an awk­ward posi­tion.

Sens. Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn, both Repub­li­cans, are fis­cal hawks who have repeat­ed­ly vot­ed against fund­ing dis­as­ter aid for oth­er parts of the coun­try. They also have opposed increased fund­ing for the Fed­er­al Emer­gency Man­age­ment Agency (FEMA), which admin­is­ters fed­er­al dis­as­ter relief.

Late last year, Inhofe and Coburn both backed a plan to slash dis­as­ter relief to vic­tims of Hur­ri­cane Sandy. In a Decem­ber press release, Coburn com­plained that the Sandy Relief bill con­tained “waste­ful spend­ing,” and iden­ti­fied a series of items he object­ed to, includ­ing “$12.9 bil­lion for future dis­as­ter mit­i­ga­tion activ­i­ties and stud­ies.”

Coburn spokesman John Hart on Mon­day evening con­firmed that the sen­a­tor will seek to ensure that any addi­tion­al fund­ing for tor­na­do dis­as­ter relief in Okla­homa be off­set by cuts to fed­er­al spend­ing else­where in the bud­get. “That’s always been his posi­tion [to off­set dis­as­ter aid],” Hart said. “He sup­port­ed off­sets to the bill fund­ing the OKC bomb­ing recov­ery effort.” Those off­sets were achieved in 1995 by tap­ping fed­er­al funds that had not yet been appro­pri­at­ed.

In 2011, both sen­a­tors opposed leg­is­la­tion that would have grant­ed nec­es­sary fund­ing for FEMA when the agency was set to run out of mon­ey. Send­ing the funds to FEMA would have been “uncon­scionable,” Coburn said at the time.

...

Well, at least Sen­a­tor Coburn should­n’t have too much trou­ble get­ting rec­om­men­da­tions from oth­er folks Con­gress about which Fed­er­al pro­grams are in need of a cut.

With Greece’s exper­i­ment in rac­ing to the bot­tom con­tin­u­ing to hit new lows we appear to now see a flood of Greek pen­sion­ers seek­ing employ­ment just to eek by. That should do won­ders for the Greek youth unem­ploy­ment cat­a­stro­phe and the long-term recov­ery prospects:

Deutsche Welle
Lit­tle hope for Greece’s job­less youth
Date 21.05.2013
Author Jan­nis Papadim­itri­ou, Athens / bk

Near­ly two-thirds of young Greeks are cur­rent­ly job­less. The unem­ploy­ment rate in the coun­try has reached a record 27 per­cent. Experts are warn­ing of dra­mat­ic con­se­quences for Greek soci­ety.

Before Europe’s debt cri­sis set in, young Greeks com­plained of poor­ly-paid jobs and described them­selves as the “1,000-euro gen­er­a­tion.” Today, a sit­u­a­tion like that would be par­adise — cur­rent­ly more than 60 per­cent of young peo­ple have no jobs at all, and ana­lysts and unions are warn­ing of grave social con­se­quences.

“A whole gen­er­a­tion of well-edu­cat­ed young peo­ple feel like they’ve sim­ply been set aside, espe­cial­ly because many of them are long-term unem­ployed,” says Ilias Kat­soulis, pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy and polit­i­cal sci­ences at Athens Uni­ver­si­ty. He thinks that soci­ety could face seri­ous prob­lems. “In a cri­sis, our soci­ety needs these peo­ple espe­cial­ly,” he says. “But soci­ety hard­ly offers them any oppor­tu­ni­ties to use their qual­i­fi­ca­tions, and that makes the cri­sis worse.”

It’s a vicious cir­cle, but Kat­soulis, who has been ana­lyz­ing the upheavals and reforms in the Greek job mar­ket for the past ten years, still sees some hope for the future. After all, he rea­sons, the Greeks cur­rent­ly leav­ing the coun­try will all return at some point, and then they will bring their exper­tise and expe­ri­ence back with them.

Import­ed exper­tise or brain-drain?

Inter­na­tion­al stud­ies have shown that coun­tries of ori­gin prof­it just as much as do the coun­tries to which the emi­grants move, says Kat­soulis. But many com­men­ta­tors in Greece dis­agree, lament­ing the “brain-drain” of young Greeks to north­ern Europe, the US, or Arab coun­tries. Econ­o­mist and news­pa­per pub­lish­er Gior­gos Kyrt­sos, who him­self stud­ied in the US, is also con­cerned.

On Athens-based TV net­work Skai, Kyrt­sos crit­i­cized politi­cians both inside and out­side Greece for pre­scrib­ing a dras­tic cure for the coun­try’s econ­o­my, and then com­plete­ly ignor­ing its social con­se­quences. It has led, he said, to the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Greek mid­dle class­es. “That means we can no longer finance the aging of our soci­ety,” he warned, point­ing to the record lev­els of Greeks mov­ing to Ger­many. “The 3.7 mil­lion peo­ple with an income are faced with three mil­lion pen­sion­ers — soon every sin­gle one of them will have to finance one pen­sion­er. What if the much-vaunt­ed recov­ery actu­al­ly comes and there’s no one left in Greece to prof­it from it?”

Accord­ing to the experts, it’s only the tra­di­tion­al­ly strong sol­i­dar­i­ty with­in Greek fam­i­lies that has pre­vent­ed a social rev­o­lu­tion so far, for it’s still con­sid­ered nor­mal in Greece for old­er fam­i­ly mem­bers to sup­port their chil­dren and grand­chil­dren finan­cial­ly.

Tra­di­tion meets real­i­ty

But that gen­eros­i­ty is now fac­ing a grim real­i­ty, believes Athens-based eco­nom­ic jour­nal­ist Babis Papadim­itri­ou. The most recent job mar­ket data shows that reg­is­tered unem­ploy­ment in the 65+ age group has mul­ti­plied by a fac­tor of ten in the past five years. That means that more and more Greeks of pen­sion­able age are seek­ing paid work in order to con­tribute to their fam­i­lies.

...

“A lot of young peo­ple are stand­ing utter­ly help­less in front of the patron­age sys­tem that still dom­i­nates Greek pol­i­tics,” says Kat­soulis. Greeks are tra­di­tion­al­ly very reserved about state insti­tu­tions, he argues, and the record unem­ploy­ment rate in the past few years has only strength­ened that.

“They have no chance of get­ting on and maybe get­ting a good job in the admin­is­tra­tion, unless they belong to a polit­i­cal par­ty,” he said. “They would like to trust the state insti­tu­tions, but they know that it’s all clien­tele pol­i­tics.” That, he added, was also the rea­son why many Greeks have vent­ed their anger in recent weeks by giv­ing their votes to extrem­ist par­ties.

Guess what: when you impov­er­ish some­one you might be starv­ing them too:

The Atlantic
Near­ly a Quar­ter of Peo­ple in Greece and the U.S. Can’t Afford Food
Hunger has grown dra­mat­i­cal­ly in Europe since 2007
Olga Khaz­an May 23 2013, 1:09 PM ET

No mat­ter where you’re from, not hav­ing enough to eat is the ulti­mate sig­ni­fi­er of eco­nom­ic dis­tress. Food is the base of Maslow’s hier­ar­chy. It’s the first con­cern in dis­as­ter zones. It’s usu­al­ly the last thing to go — after the car and the nice apart­ment — when you lose your job.

If you can’t afford food, there’s real­ly nowhere to go but up. That’s why it’s so shock­ing just how many more hun­gry peo­ple there are now in what were for­mer­ly known as the world’s well-off nations. Accord­ing to a new Pew report released today, almost a quar­ter of peo­ple (24 per­cent) in the Unit­ed States and Greece answered “yes” to the ques­tion, “Have there been times dur­ing the last year when you did not have enough mon­ey to buy food your fam­i­ly need­ed?”

The lev­els in oth­er West­ern coun­tries weren’t quite that high, but the rate at which hunger has swept the euro­zone since 2007 is still real­ly dra­mat­ic:

[see graph­ic]

Ger­many, which has been rel­a­tive­ly shel­tered from Europe’s eco­nom­ic woes, bucks the trend: only 8 per­cent of Ger­mans can’t afford food, few­er than the 10 per­cent who said so in 2007.

Some East­ern Euro­pean coun­tries also seem to be doing bet­ter: Hunger plum­met­ed in Poland from 35 per­cent in 2002 to 16 per­cent this year, and in Rus­sia from 50 to 23 per­cent in the same time­frame. (We’ve writ­ten before about how cur­ren­cy depre­ci­a­tion had a big role in Poland’s rel­a­tive eco­nom­ic suc­cess.)

These num­bers are par­tic­u­lar­ly stark when you think about them in terms of coun­tries that are his­tor­i­cal­ly not as wealthy. In Lebanon, only 1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion said they could­n’t afford food (down from 12 per­cent in 2007), and in Chi­na, it was just 8 per­cent.

Of course, Europe obvi­ous­ly does not have it as bad as most of Africa and parts of the Mid­dle East. In Ugan­da, Kenya and Sene­gal — some of the poor­er coun­tries sur­veyed — the major­i­ty of respon­dents said food is hard to come by.

...

Not that this should­n’t have been expect­ed, but in case you were curi­ous, that recent chat­ter about a shift away from aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies in the EU is all ass-cov­er­ing bull­shit:

Analy­sis: Europe’s aus­ter­i­ty-to-growth shift large­ly seman­tic

By Paul Tay­lor

PARIS | Mon May 27, 2013 1:55am EDT

(Reuters) — To lis­ten to some Euro­pean lead­ers, espe­cial­ly in France, you would think the era of aus­ter­i­ty was over and the euro zone was going full steam ahead to revive eco­nom­ic growth.

In a strik­ing change of tone, Euro­pean Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Jose Manuel Bar­roso said last month that aus­ter­i­ty — the pol­i­cy of cut­ting pub­lic debt by reduc­ing spend­ing and rais­ing tax­es — had reached the lim­its of pub­lic accep­tance.

In real­i­ty, the shift is more in words than deeds. The rhetoric has changed but there has been no pol­i­cy U‑turn.

To be sure, the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion is grant­i­ng gov­ern­ments more time to reduce their bud­get deficits to EU lim­its, chiefly because reces­sion had made those tar­gets unat­tain­able.

Euro zone states have a breath­ing space because bond mar­kets have ceased to pan­ic since the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank said last year it would act deci­sive­ly if nec­es­sary to pre­serve the euro.

The EU empha­sis is now on reduc­ing “struc­tur­al deficits” — an elas­tic mea­sure meant to take account of the eco­nom­ic cycle — and on reform­ing labor mar­kets and pen­sion sys­tems, open­ing up more sec­tors to com­pe­ti­tion and eas­ing busi­ness reg­u­la­tion to improve coun­tries’ growth poten­tial.

Small ini­tia­tives are in the works, amid great polit­i­cal fan­fare, to com­bat the scourge of mass youth unem­ploy­ment which threat­ens south­ern Europe with a lost and alien­at­ed gen­er­a­tion.

The ECB is explor­ing ways to ease lend­ing to small­er busi­ness­es in the hard­est-hit periph­er­al coun­tries of the euro zone. But while it is keep­ing the liq­uid­i­ty taps to banks open, it has no inten­tion of fol­low­ing the U.S., British and Japan­ese cen­tral banks into mas­sive mon­ey print­ing to try to spur growth.

“It is not that we are let­ting aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies go,” said Carsten Brzes­ki, Euro­pean econ­o­mist at ING in Brus­sels. “It’s only about the pace of adjust­ment and a shift towards struc­tur­al reforms to avoid end­ing up in a down­ward spi­ral of aus­ter­i­ty.”

While the ECB could per­haps do a bit more to increase the sup­ply of cred­it to busi­ness in depressed south­ern Europe, the main inhibitor to invest­ment there was the lack of demand, for which there was no easy solu­tion, he said.

EU pol­i­cy­mak­ers and cen­tral bankers say high­ly indebt­ed coun­tries will have no alter­na­tive for sev­er­al years to curb­ing pub­lic spend­ing and shrink­ing the state, how­ev­er polit­i­cal­ly unpalat­able that may be.

“Growth is the key to get­ting out of the cri­sis, we all agree on that,” Ger­man Bun­des­bank chief Jens Wei­d­mann, the ECB’s lead­ing hawk, said in a speech to French busi­ness­men last week. “But renounc­ing bud­get con­sol­i­da­tion will not bring us clos­er to that objec­tive.”

POLITICAL LIMITS

Bar­roso’s April 22 recog­ni­tion of the polit­i­cal lim­its of aus­ter­i­ty recalled his pre­de­ces­sor Romano Prodi’s 2002 com­ment that the EU’s bud­get rules were “stu­pid” because they were too rigid.

“While I think this pol­i­cy is fun­da­men­tal­ly right, I think it has reached its lim­its,” Bar­roso said. “A pol­i­cy to be suc­cess­ful not only has to be prop­er­ly designed, it has to have the min­i­mum of polit­i­cal and social sup­port.”

To some, that sound­ed a bit like the pope ques­tion­ing the exis­tence of God. It prompt­ed glee­ful “aus­ter­i­ty is over” head­lines in coun­tries such as Ire­land that have endured harsh cuts, and irri­tat­ed sev­er­al Euro­pean gov­ern­ments.

In Brus­sels, a senior offi­cial in reg­u­lar con­tact with nation­al lead­ers said Bar­roso had “mis­com­mu­ni­cat­ed” and there was no alter­na­tive to aus­ter­i­ty, even if the word was avoid­ed.

“The idea that there will now be deficit spend­ing, that the age of aus­ter­i­ty is fin­ished, is mis­lead­ing,” the offi­cial said, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty because of the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of his posi­tion.

“On the mar­gins, we can post­pone bud­get con­sol­i­da­tion by a year, or by two years, but it’s not real­ly the answer. The answer is growth, and that is only going to come through struc­tur­al reform and improved pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.”

Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel, who has used Berlin’s finan­cial clout since the start of the cri­sis to press for fis­cal dis­ci­pline, made clear that aus­ter­i­ty and growth were not oppo­sites and that bud­get sav­ings must con­tin­ue.

In a veiled crit­i­cism of close ally France, which has so far raised rev­enue rather than cut pub­lic spend­ing to nar­row its bud­get gap, Berlin says gov­ern­ments should avoid increas­ing the tax bur­den because that harms growth.

Two events in the eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sion have sapped the the­o­ret­i­cal case for so-called front-loaded aus­ter­i­ty — mak­ing dras­tic pub­lic spend­ing cuts at the start of an eco­nom­ic adjust­ment pro­gram.

First IMF chief econ­o­mist Olivi­er Blan­chard acknowl­edged that cut­ting gov­ern­ment spend­ing may have had a big­ger impact than pre­vi­ous­ly cal­cu­lat­ed on reduc­ing eco­nom­ic out­put. Then U.S. econ­o­mists found flaws in data under­pin­ning the influ­en­tial the­o­ry of Har­vard econ­o­mists Ken­neth Rogoff and Car­men Rein­hardt that pub­lic debt above 90 per­cent of GDP stunts growth.

That leaves the eco­nom­ics of aus­ter­i­ty murki­er today than when the euro zone debt cri­sis struck in 2010, while the pol­i­tics just keep get­ting hard­er.

...

For­mer Chair­man of the Fed­er­al Reserve Paul Vol­ck­er is think­ing about start­ing “The Vol­ck­er Alliance”, a new group set up to rein­still the pub­lic’s trust in gov­ern­ment and its abil­i­ty to actu­al­ly solve prob­lems and address the issues of the day. We always have to be a lit­tle wary about new orga­ni­za­tions that sud­den­ly pop up an claim that “sen­si­ble cen­trist” man­tle giv­en the his­to­ry of seem­ing­ly non-par­ti­san think-tanks that end up just pro­vid­ing a bipar­ti­san veneer for far-right poli­cies. But at the same time, there’s no short­age of issues so maybe this will actu­al­ly be a good thing? Hope­ful­ly?

For­mer fed chair Vol­ck­er aims to boost gov­ern­ment trust with new group

By Susan Heavey

WASHINGTON | Wed May 29, 2013 9:00am EDT

(Reuters) — For­mer Fed­er­al Reserve Chair­man Paul Vol­ck­er, most recent­ly known for his efforts to rein in Wall Street’s risky lend­ing habits, is now tar­get­ing Wash­ing­ton with a non­par­ti­san pol­i­cy group aimed at bol­ster­ing pub­lic trust in basic gov­ern­ment ser­vice.

The Vol­ck­er Alliance will spon­sor stud­ies on gov­ern­ment per­for­mance, make rec­om­men­da­tions on pub­lic poli­cies, and work to improve the imple­men­ta­tion of gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy at fed­er­al, state and local lev­els, the group said in a state­ment.

Vol­ck­er cit­ed cit­i­zens’ declin­ing trust over the past few decades. “Too often gov­ern­ment, at all lev­els, in the eyes of its cit­i­zens, has been unable to respond effec­tive­ly to the chal­lenges of the day,” Vol­ck­er said in a state­ment.

...

Vol­ck­er, who led the Fed’s charge to end high infla­tion in the 1970s, was tapped by Oba­ma in 2008 to lead a two-year advi­so­ry board to help steer an eco­nom­ic recov­ery plan. He is also known for the name­sake rule under the 2010 Dodd-Frank over­haul of Wall Street to pro­tect tax­pay­ers from bank bailouts.

The so-called Vol­ck­er rule would bar banks from bet­ting their own mon­ey on finan­cial mar­kets, but it is unclear when the rule will be final­ized and some have said it does not go far enough.

His new group aims to rekin­dle tax­pay­er con­fi­dence in gov­ern­ment, as well.

Unlike oth­er Wash­ing­ton “think tanks” that focus “on issues of ‘high pol­i­cy,’ Vol­ck­er said his effort “will endeav­or to rekin­dle intel­lec­tu­al, prac­ti­cal, and aca­d­e­m­ic inter­est in the imple­men­ta­tion of pol­i­cy — the ‘nuts and bolts’ of gov­er­nance.”

It will be run by Shel­ley Met­zen­baum, an expert in mea­sur­ing pub­lic sec­tor per­for­mance who has worked in Wash­ing­ton and at var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ties. Its board includes for­mer U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion chair­man Bill Don­ald­son and for­mer Fed­er­al Reserve Vice Chair­man Alice Rivlin, among oth­ers.

Well, at least on the sur­face this does­n’t appear to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly scary sound­ing new group. Heck, maybe it’ll even come up with some great new pol­i­cy-pro­pos­als using the ‘nuts and bolts‘ approach to pol­i­cy-analy­sis. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, if his speech before the Eco­nom­ic Club of New York on Wednes­day is any indi­ca­tion of what kinds of ‘thoughts’ we should expect to emerge from this think-tank, the Vol­ck­er Alliance looks like it might be anoth­er mem­ber of the glob­al Aus­ter­ian Alliance. This prob­a­bly. should­n’t be sur­pris­ing. It’s where we’ve been for a while. But it’s still a bad sign for the Let’s-Not-Inten­tion­al­ly-Destroy-Soci­ety Alliance:

Bloomberg
Vol­ck­er Cau­tions Fed­er­al Reserve May ‘Fall Short’
By John Detrix­he — May 29, 2013 2:56 PM CT

For­mer Fed­er­al Reserve Chair­man Paul Vol­ck­er said today the cen­tral bank will prob­a­bly “fall short” by being asked to do too much.

“It’s fash­ion­able to talk about a dual man­date, that pol­i­cy should some­how be direct­ed toward two objec­tives, of price sta­bil­i­ty and full employ­ment,” Vol­ck­er told the Eco­nom­ic Club of New York. “Fash­ion­able or not, I find that man­date both oper­a­tional­ly con­fus­ing and ulti­mate­ly illu­so­ry.”

With unem­ploy­ment lin­ger­ing at 7.5 per­cent — still high­er than before the last reces­sion — the Fed­er­al Open Mar­ket Com­mit­tee announced May 1 that it will increase or decrease the pace of its month­ly bond pur­chas­es in response to changes in infla­tion and the labor mar­ket. The pol­i­cy mak­ers agreed to main­tain month­ly buy­ing of $40 bil­lion in mort­gage secu­ri­ties and $45 bil­lion of U.S. Trea­suries in a bid to boost employ­ment.

“Asked to do too much, for instance to accom­mo­date mis­guid­ed fis­cal poli­cies, to deal with struc­tur­al imbal­ances, to square con­tin­u­ous­ly the hypo­thet­i­cal cir­cles of sta­bil­i­ty, growth and full employ­ment, then it will inevitably fall short,” Vol­ck­er said. Those efforts cause it to lose “sight of its basic respon­si­bil­i­ty for price sta­bil­i­ty, a mat­ter that is with­in the range of its influ­ence.”

Vol­ck­er, 85, served as chair­man of the Fed from 1979 to 1987. He helped cut the unem­ploy­ment rate to an eight-year low of 5.7 per­cent in 1987, his last year as Fed chair­man, after revers­ing inter­est-rate increas­es that brought infla­tion down from as high as 15 per­cent.
Rewrit­ing Reg­u­la­tions

He has pro­vid­ed advice to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on eco­nom­ic issues as well as the rewrit­ing of reg­u­la­tions for finan­cial insti­tu­tions. The law enact­ing those reg­u­la­tions includ­ed the so-called Vol­ck­er rule, which would ban pro­pri­etary trad­ing at banks and restrict their invest­ments in pri­vate-equi­ty and hedge funds.

“The Fed­er­al Reserve, any cen­tral bank, should not be asked to do too much to under­take respon­si­bil­i­ties that it can­not respon­si­bly meet with its appro­pri­ate­ly lim­it­ed pow­ers,” Vol­ck­er said. He said a cen­tral bank’s basic respon­si­bil­i­ty is for a “sta­ble cur­ren­cy.”

“Cred­i­bil­i­ty is an enor­mous asset,” Vol­ck­er said. “Once earned, it must not be frit­tered away by yield­ing to the notion that a lit­tle infla­tion right now is a good a thing, a good thing to release ani­mal spir­its and to pep up invest­ment.”

“The implic­it assump­tion behind that siren call must be that the infla­tion rate can be manip­u­lat­ed to reach eco­nom­ic objec­tives,” accord­ing to Vol­ck­er. “Up today, maybe a lit­tle more tomor­row and then pulled back on com­mand. Good luck in that. All expe­ri­ence demon­strates that infla­tion, when fair­ly and delib­er­ate­ly start­ed, is hard to con­trol and reverse.”

Part of what’s so sad about see­ing Vol­ck­er’s call for a repeal of the Fed­er­al Reserve’s “dual man­date” (which is anoth­er way to call for aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies) is that it appears to be root­ed in some sort of intel­lec­tu­al capit­u­la­tion over the inter­twined nature of mon­e­tary pol­i­cy and social objec­tives. The duel man­date of price sta­bil­i­ty and full employ­ment is just too hard to imple­ment accord­ing to Vol­ck­er. It’s “both oper­a­tional­ly con­fus­ing and ulti­mate­ly illu­so­ry,” and this is the guy that used to be the chair­man of the Fed!? Was he a clos­et-Rick Per­ry all these years? I mean, yeah, the dual man­date is inher­ent­ly tricky but that’s because eco­nom­ics and finance are inher­ent­ly tricky top­ics. Call­ing for the aban­don­ment of the dual man­date is like say­ing “Hey, I heard Judges have to fac­tor both the needs of soci­ety AND the needs of the indi­vid­u­als before the court. OMG, we total­ly need to sim­pli­fy that!” Or, “Hey, IRS agents have to pre­vent ram­pant polit­i­cal mon­ey-laun­der­ing/­tax-fraud while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly adher­ing to the prin­ci­ples of free­dom of speech and equiv­a­lence before the law while attempt­ing to inves­ti­gate financial/political fraud. We should sim­pli­fy that!”

Some­how we almost nev­er-ish hear calls to just ‘sim­pli­fy’ some­thing like jus­tice sys­tem by just ignor­ing entire dimen­sions of its nature but for some rea­son “price sta­bil­i­ty” in eco­nom­ics has this mag­i­cal qual­i­ty that jus­ti­fies the aban­don­ment of oth­er vari­ables like employ­ment. Why is that? Mon­ey is tricky. Finance is tricky. Weird inter­nal con­tra­dic­tions can pop up all the time in an econ­o­my because our eco­nom­ic sys­tem is imper­fect but also vital and must ful­fill a diverse num­ber of social needs. Isn’t that why we have econ­o­mists?! To study tricky stuff and try to make the tough judg­ment calls? We wed­ded our fates and futures to this weird “finance” thing quite a long time ago and the com­plex­i­ty of this sys­tem isn’t exact­ly unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry. But this is our sad state of affairs: Paul Vol­ck­er announces his plans to start a new, nov­el think-tank that will take a ‘nuts and bolts‘ approach to imple­ment­ing nov­el pol­i­cy-solu­tions and one of the first pro­pos­als we see from him soon after­wards is a call to dumb-down our cen­tral bank. The zom­bies real­ly do have immense strength in num­bers.

Rein­hart and Rogoff — the dynam­ic duo that hap­pened to pub­lish a now-dis­cred­it­ed aca­d­e­m­ic paper that pro­vid­ed the intel­lec­tu­al back­ing for aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies — have been wag­ing a bit of a counter-attack of late against the grow­ing cho­rus of crit­ics, tak­ing par­tic­u­lar offense at Paul Krug­man’s “spec­tac­u­lar­ly unciv­il behav­ior”. The defen­sive tac­tic appears to be ‘hey, Paul is being mean and we’re not wrong any­ways’ so it’s more of Jedi mind-trick attempt. So Rei­hart and Rogoff are dou­bling down on their con­clu­sions, Krug­man is con­tin­u­ing to point out their irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty, and more stud­ies are com­ing out rais­ing fur­ther doubts on their valid­i­ty of their pro-aus­ter­i­ty find­ings. So the Reinhart/Rogoff/Krugman aus­ter­i­ty saga does­n’t appear to be going away any time soon. And if Stan­ley Fis­cher’s com­ments are any indi­ca­tion of what to expect, it’s look­ing like the Reinhart/Rogoff paper of 2010 that was so handy in jus­ti­fy­ing mind­less aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies is about to be replaced with a new Reinhart/Rogoff pub­li­ca­tion. The ‘Paul Krug­man is a meanie’ let­ter is actu­al­ly serv­ing as a kind of pro-aus­ter­i­ty ral­ly­ing cry of sorts. This is where we are:

Bloomberg
Fis­ch­er Defends Rein­hart, Rogoff Against ‘Unfair’ Attacks (1)
By Alisa Oden­heimer and Simon Kennedy
June 04, 2013

Bank of Israel Gov­er­nor Stan­ley Fis­ch­er defend­ed Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty econ­o­mists Car­men Rein­hart and Ken­neth Rogoff against crit­i­cism from fel­low aca­d­e­mics.

A 2010 paper by Rein­hart and Rogoff used to jus­ti­fy aus­ter­i­ty in the U.S. and Europe is at the cen­ter of a storm in eco­nom­ics and pol­i­cy mak­ing after flaws were revealed. While acknowl­edg­ing mis­takes, Rein­hart and Rogoff say their basic find­ings hold and last week accused Nobel lau­re­ate Paul Krug­man of “spec­tac­u­lar­ly unciv­il behav­ior” in his cri­tique.

“The attack on these two out­stand­ing econ­o­mists is com­plete­ly wrong, unfair and unac­cept­able,” Fis­ch­er said in a speech today to econ­o­mists in Tel Aviv, with­out men­tion­ing the crit­ics by name. “You can’t behave this way.”

Rein­hart and Rogoff last week hit back at Krug­man for assert­ing in an arti­cle pub­lished in the New York Review of Books that they had with­held data from their research. Krug­man then said the two have done lit­tle to dis­pel what he called a mis­con­cep­tion gen­er­at­ed by their paper — that economies fal­ter when debt lev­els exceed 90 per­cent of gross domes­tic prod­uct.

Fis­ch­er and Krug­man both taught at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in the 1980s and 1990s. Krug­man is now a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and in Feb­ru­ary said Fis­ch­er would be “high­ly qual­i­fied” to lead the Fed­er­al Reserve.

No Love

Fis­ch­er, who spoke at an Israel Eco­nom­ic Asso­ci­a­tion meet­ing, said he is often helped by his knowl­edge of cen­tral-bank­ing his­to­ry, since lessons from the past can aid in fram­ing cur­rent pol­i­cy. Fed­er­al Reserve Chair­man Ben S. Bernanke’s famil­iar­i­ty with the lessons of the Great Depres­sion led him to make dif­fer­ent pol­i­cy choic­es in the cur­rent cri­sis, with a bet­ter out­come for the U.S. econ­o­my, he said.

Fis­ch­er said that Rein­hart and Rogoff have made an “impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion” to under­stand­ing the con­nec­tion between var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal finan­cial crises. While econ­o­mists have fre­quent­ly dis­agreed, they have kept their dis­putes civ­il and should do so for the good of the dis­ci­pline, he said.

...

Get ready for the era of “Paul Krug­man is a meanie and that’s why [insert awful aus­ter­i­ty pol­i­cy here] is total­ly jus­ti­fi­able”. With the real­i­ties of the aus­ter­i­ty-deba­cle pil­ing up around the globe these kinds of argu­ments are all they have left.

The IMF is again admit­ting that its calls for aus­ter­i­ty in Greece might have made a bad sit­u­a­tion a lot worse. Well, bet­ter late than nev­er ever, although that rule does­n’t apply to every­thing. Some things are bet­ter nev­er ever tried:

The Amer­i­can Prospect
A Ger­man Tea Par­ty?

Chase Gum­mer

May 31, 2013

What the pop­u­lar rise of a new anti-euro polit­i­cal par­ty says about fray­ing nerves in Europe’s eco­nom­ic pow­er­house.

A new anti-euro polit­i­cal par­ty, AfD (Alter­na­tive for Ger­many) is gain­ing ground in the polls, threat­en­ing Angela Merkel’s rul­ing cen­ter-right coali­tion just as the cam­paign sea­son heats up ahead of gen­er­al elec­tions in the fall. While the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment in Berlin is only begin­ning to take this new brand of con­ser­v­a­tive pop­ulism seri­ous­ly, the rise of the AfD is sure to entrench aus­ter­i­ty pol­i­tics at a time when the oppo­site is need­ed. Ger­many just got its own Tea Par­ty.

At the AfD’s first par­ty con­ven­tion this past April, there was lit­tle of the pageantry we’ve come to asso­ciate with the Tea Par­ty: no Colo­nial-era uni­forms, no pow­dered wigs, no effi­gies of chan­cel­lor Merkel burn­ing in the hotel foy­er, only a few guys in T‑shirts depict­ing the Euro­pean Union as a Stal­in­ist dic­ta­tor­ship (“(E)USSR”) and one gen­tle­men with a nation­al­ist tri­col­or sash of gold, red, and black. Most of the 1,300 del­e­gates, a vast sea of wiz­ened, grey-haired men, looked exceed­ing­ly prim and mid­dle-class, as if they had come to dis­cuss their retire­ment plans or maybe the future of den­tistry.

What the AfD does share with the Tea Par­ty, how­ev­er, are uncom­pro­mis­ing and, many would say, illu­so­ry polit­i­cal goals. In the U.S. that means dis­man­tling the wel­fare state; in Ger­many, get­ting rid of the euro. “The main­stream par­ties are exhaust­ed ... we have seen this cri­sis and the way in which par­lia­men­tar­i­ans have giv­en in to this gov­ern­ment with­out a thought, only because they thought there was no alter­na­tive to the bail-out poli­cies,” said AfD par­ty leader, Bernd Lucke, in his open­ing speech at the con­ven­tion. “But there is an alter­na­tive. It’s now here!” Because all of the main­stream nation­al par­ties sup­port the euro, the AfD has been able to gain momen­tum since the party’s found­ing in Feb­ru­ary of this year. The par­ty recent­ly cracked the 5 per­cent hur­dle in nation­al polls, which would give it seats in the Ger­man par­lia­ment, the Bun­destag, if elec­tions were held today.

...

Euro-skep­tics have long exist­ed on the fringes of con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics in Europe. They usu­al­ly come from the nation­al­ist right, with xeno­pho­bia not far behind. Yet what is remark­able about the AfD is the degree to which they have avoid­ed the trap of the far right and instead aimed for the cen­ter. So far the par­ty has kept known right-wing extrem­ists out of key posi­tions. It’s tried to appeal to main­stream sen­ti­ments by not demo­niz­ing South­ern Europe fo its own fail­ings, mere­ly claim­ing that the cur­ren­cy union is a bad deal for all involved. Even on immi­gra­tion, the AfD strikes a cen­trist chord, argu­ing for “smart” poli­cies based on the Cana­di­an points sys­tem and main­tain­ing Germany’s his­toric posi­tion as home to those seek­ing polit­i­cal asy­lum. This is not your typ­i­cal “Ger­many first” type of crowd.

Per­haps one rea­son why the AfD has done well in shield­ing itself from far-right extrem­ism is the lib­er­tar­i­an­ism many in the par­ty lead­er­ship share. Where­as the Ger­man far right tends to use the col­lec­tivist appeal of nation­al­ism and race to find sup­port, the AfD’s lead­er­ship is more at home in the eco­nom­ics and busi­ness fac­ul­ties of Ger­man uni­ver­si­ties, where rad­i­cal pro-mar­ket ideas have often found a home. Par­ty chair­man Bernd Lucke, for exam­ple, is a pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics in Ham­burg. Oth­er promi­nent sup­port­ers like Hans Olaf Henkel, a busi­ness­man and main­stay on the Ger­man talk- show cir­cuit, is also a noto­ri­ous sup­ply-sider and oppo­nent of state inter­ven­tion, who has long been crit­i­cal of the euro as well as the mas­sive fis­cal response in the Unit­ed States to the cri­sis.

At a time when many econ­o­mists believe that Ger­many needs to be dial­ing back its push for aus­ter­i­ty and focus on stim­u­la­tive mea­sures, it is the AfD’s com­mit­ment to lib­er­tar­i­an ideas of non-inter­ven­tion­ism that could prove most trou­bling. The party’s sud­den suc­cess is already forc­ing the main­stream par­ties to push back, espe­cial­ly in the con­ser­v­a­tive camp, where even a small num­ber of par­ty defec­tions could result in a loss in the Sep­tem­ber gen­er­al elec­tion. The AfD’s ascent has already pulled the debate fur­ther to the right; many polit­i­cal observers think that the impor­tance of aus­ter­i­ty could grow in the short run as con­ser­v­a­tives try to keep vot­ers from drift­ing toward the AfD.

If the cen­ter-right coali­tion does not hold, then a grand coali­tion between the Chris­t­ian Democ­rats and their main rival on the left, the Social Democ­rats, is the like­li­est sce­nario. They would no doubt be able to enact mean­ing­ful leg­is­la­tion on the domes­tic front, but fear of fur­ther vot­er dis­af­fec­tion to the anti-Euro fringe could keep such a coali­tion from doing any­thing dra­mat­ic to get Europe grow­ing again, like slow­ing fis­cal con­sol­i­da­tion in South­ern Europe. With Ger­man growth expect­ed to be slight­ly pos­i­tive for the rest of 2013 and recent polls sug­gest­ing that 70 per­cent of Ger­mans are hap­py with the cur­rent state of the euro, a grand coali­tion would have lit­tle incen­tive to alter the sta­tus quo. The Euro­zone will no doubt sur­vive, but it will not thrive.

Some­how, at this point, is almost seems fit­ting that the ris­ing stars of Ger­man polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion to the euro­zone mad­ness would be a bunch of pro-aus­ter­i­ty Teabag­gers. How could it be any oth­er way?

Uh oh, the Nether­lands has a grow­ing deficit in spite of its aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies. Time for more aus­ter­i­ty!

main­ly macro
Tues­day, 11 June 2013
Does the Dutch cen­tral bank employ any macro­econ­o­mists?
Simon Wren-Lewis

Did you think that the pol­i­cy of fight­ing reces­sion by increas­ing aus­ter­i­ty was now intel­lec­tu­al­ly bank­rupt? No one seems to have told the Dutch cen­tral bank. (Hence the delib­er­ate­ly provoca­tive title of this post.) The lat­est fore­cast by the Bank says

— The econ­o­my will shrink by 0.8% this year, fol­lowed by growth of 0.5% next, “accel­er­at­ing” to 1.1% in 2015
— The unem­ploy­ment rate will rise sharply, reach­ing a peak point at 7.2% of the labour force mid­way through 2014.
— The bud­get deficit will increase from 3.5% this year to 3.9% next.

What should the gov­ern­ment do about this? The cen­tral bank says ““The fore­cast course of the fac­tu­al and struc­tur­al deficit in 2014 does not meet the rec­om­men­da­tions giv­en in May by the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion to cor­rect the exces­sive bud­get deficit in the Nether­lands. Extra con­sol­i­da­tion mea­sures are there­fore nec­es­sary.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the cen­tral bank is being entire­ly pre­dictable in con­tin­u­ing to urge aus­ter­i­ty as the econ­o­my weak­ens. In ear­li­er posts (here and here), I not­ed how the cen­tral bank’s advice was rather dif­fer­ent from the Dutch CPB (Bureau for Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Analy­sis), which clear­ly does employ macro­econ­o­mists. What is just so depress­ing is that the cen­tral bank seems obliv­i­ous to the increas­ing­ly over­whelm­ing evi­dence that aus­ter­i­ty dur­ing a reces­sion is the com­plete oppo­site of what you should be doing in a coun­try with­out its own mon­e­tary pol­i­cy. Unlike some oth­er Euro­zone coun­tries, there is no mar­ket pres­sure forc­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers’ hands in the Nether­lands.

...

It’s easy to see why every­one loves aus­ter­i­ty. While aus­ter­i­ty might seem like an already-failed pol­i­cy since they’ve been try­ing it for a while. But they’re total­ly not failed. At all. Don’t ask why that is. Just accept it:

Dutch finance min­is­ter defends aus­ter­i­ty approach
June 11, 2013

The Hague, NETHERLANDS (AP) — Dutch Finance Min­is­ter Jeroen Dijs­sel­bloem defend­ed his strat­e­gy of cut­ting gov­ern­ment spend­ing and increas­ing tax­es to reduce the coun­try’s bud­get deficit — despite a lengthy reces­sion in the Nether­lands that some econ­o­mists believe is being wors­ened by the gov­ern­men­t’s aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies.

Speak­ing to reporters in The Hague Tues­day along­side Olli Rehn, the Euro­pean Union’s top mon­e­tary affairs offi­cial, Dijs­sel­bloem said he expects the Nether­lands deficit to fall below 3 per­cent of annu­al gross domes­tic prod­uct, the lim­it man­dat­ed by Euro­pean rules, in 2014.

“The approach is not fail­ing,” he said.

...

Aus­ter­i­ty is total­ly not at all fail­ing. It’s us, the peo­ple, that are fail­ing aus­ter­i­ty. Right Jeroen?

ECB mem­ber Joerg Asmussen reject­ed the recent calls for the end to the IMF/EU/ECB “troi­ka”, argu­ing that not only was there no alter­na­tive but that the troi­ka is actu­al­ly doing a good job. Just look at how well things are going in Athens:

ECB’s Asmussen rejects call for troi­ka to be abol­ished

FRANKFURT | Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:46am EDT

(Reuters) — Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank pol­i­cy­mak­er Joerg Asmussen reject­ed on Wednes­day a call from the EU jus­tice com­mis­sion­er for the “troi­ka” of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, ECB and Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to be dis­solved.

Com­mis­sion­er Viviane Red­ing, said on Tues­day “the time of the troi­ka is over”, argu­ing that in future Europe must resolve its prob­lems with­out the IMF.

But Asmussen, a mem­ber of the ECB’s Exec­u­tive Board, said there was no oth­er imme­di­ate option.

“There is, in the short-term, no func­tion­al alter­na­tive to the Troi­ka,” he told news­pa­per Rheinis­che Post’s online edi­tion.

“The Troi­ka also works very well togeth­er, as one sees on the ground in Athens, for exam­ple,” he said. “There is no rea­son, in the mid­dle of the cri­sis, to change this proven struc­ture.”
...

Yes, why on earth would one want to dis­rupt this proven struc­ture. Just look at Athens:

Greece bans protests dur­ing Schaeu­ble vis­it
July 17, 2013

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The Greek police has banned pub­lic protests in cen­tral Athens on Thurs­day, when Ger­man Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schaeu­ble will vis­it, a deci­sion the left-wing oppo­si­tion par­ty described as ‘‘fas­cist and unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic.’’

A police state­ment Wednes­day said a cor­don would be set up around the city cen­ter in which ‘‘pub­lic gath­er­ings and ral­lies’’ would be banned between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. (0600–1700GMT).

The cor­doned area includes par­lia­ment and the city’s main Syn­tag­ma Square, focal points of scores of anti-aus­ter­i­ty demon­stra­tions.

‘‘This action is fas­cist and unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic. It is incon­ceiv­able to have a demon­stra­tion and to exclude Syn­tag­ma Square. It is incon­ceiv­able for any Euro­pean city,’’ Panos Skourletis, a spokesman for the left-wing main oppo­si­tion par­ty, Syriza, told the AP.

‘‘If we can’t go there, where are we sup­posed to go? Vark­iza?’’ he added, refer­ring to a sea­side resort near Athens.

Schaeuble’s vis­it is his first since the Greek cri­sis broke out more than three years ago and it fol­lows three days of mas­sive protests against gov­ern­ment plans for mass fir­ings and trans­fers of pub­lic ser­vants.

Greece’s two largest unions said they had no plans to demon­strate Thurs­day, but Skourletis said mem­bers of his par­ty would join protests if any take place.

With results like that it’s almost sur­pris­ing that more coun­tries fac­ing tough economies aren’t ask­ing for a troi­ka of their own. Just think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties:

Greece Lays Off 25,000 Even Though One In Four Greeks Is Unem­ployed

By Alan Pyke on Jul 18, 2013 at 4:04 pm

The Greek gov­ern­ment approved a new round of pub­lic work­er lay­offs required by the country’s ongo­ing bailout, affect­ing 25,000 employ­ees. Unem­ploy­ment in the coun­try is near­ly 27 per­cent, accord­ing to the most recent fig­ures, with the youth unem­ploy­ment rate more than dou­ble that.

The Euro­pean author­i­ties admin­is­ter­ing Greece’s bailout insist­ed upon the new job cuts before they would release the next $9.2 bil­lion in res­cue funds. As a result, 15,000 jobs will be elim­i­nat­ed, and anoth­er 10,000 will not have their con­tracts renewed when they expire lat­er this year. The job cuts mean thou­sands more with­out dis­pos­able income in a coun­try already three years deep in a vicious eco­nom­ic cycle dri­ven by aus­ter­i­ty.

The Greek econ­o­my has been so bad for so long that it was recent­ly down­grad­ed by one invest­ment firm from a “devel­oped” coun­try to an ‘emerg­ing mar­ket,’ a move that is with­out prece­dent. Cuts to pub­lic ser­vices have not spared the health care sec­tor, lead­ing to a surge in the rate of still­births. While the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund has acknowl­edged it was far too opti­mistic when it pre­dict­ed the cuts would spark eco­nom­ic growth, the country’s cred­i­tors have not eased the bailout require­ments.

The Greek expe­ri­ence should be a cau­tion­ary tale for Amer­i­can pol­i­cy­mak­ers, though not in the ways deficit hawks claim. The ini­tial U.S. response to the eco­nom­ic cri­sis – cen­tral gov­ern­ment spend­ing to buoy the econ­o­my – has giv­en way to the same sort of cut-and-grow think­ing that has been so harm­ful for Greece. Recent­ly, the IMF crit­i­cized the ongo­ing Amer­i­can spend­ing cuts as “exces­sive­ly rapid,” and warned that con­tin­u­ing with seques­tra­tion will hurt U.S. growth in both the short and long terms.

ECB mem­ber Joerg Asmussen reject­ed the recent calls for the end to the IMF/EU/ECB “troi­ka”, argu­ing that not only was there no alter­na­tive but that the troi­ka is actu­al­ly doing a good job. Just look at how well things are going in Athens:

ECB’s Asmussen rejects call for troi­ka to be abol­ished

FRANKFURT | Wed Jul 17, 2013 10:46am EDT

(Reuters) — Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank pol­i­cy­mak­er Joerg Asmussen reject­ed on Wednes­day a call from the EU jus­tice com­mis­sion­er for the “troi­ka” of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, ECB and Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund to be dis­solved.

Com­mis­sion­er Viviane Red­ing, said on Tues­day “the time of the troi­ka is over”, argu­ing that in future Europe must resolve its prob­lems with­out the IMF.

But Asmussen, a mem­ber of the ECB’s Exec­u­tive Board, said there was no oth­er imme­di­ate option.

“There is, in the short-term, no func­tion­al alter­na­tive to the Troi­ka,” he told news­pa­per Rheinis­che Post’s online edi­tion.

“The Troi­ka also works very well togeth­er, as one sees on the ground in Athens, for exam­ple,” he said. “There is no rea­son, in the mid­dle of the cri­sis, to change this proven struc­ture.”
...

Yes, why on earth would one want to dis­rupt this proven struc­ture. Just look at Athens:

Greece bans protests dur­ing Schaeu­ble vis­it
July 17, 2013

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The Greek police has banned pub­lic protests in cen­tral Athens on Thurs­day, when Ger­man Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schaeu­ble will vis­it, a deci­sion the left-wing oppo­si­tion par­ty described as ‘‘fas­cist and unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic.’’

A police state­ment Wednes­day said a cor­don would be set up around the city cen­ter in which ‘‘pub­lic gath­er­ings and ral­lies’’ would be banned between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. (0600–1700GMT).

The cor­doned area includes par­lia­ment and the city’s main Syn­tag­ma Square, focal points of scores of anti-aus­ter­i­ty demon­stra­tions.

‘‘This action is fas­cist and unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic. It is incon­ceiv­able to have a demon­stra­tion and to exclude Syn­tag­ma Square. It is incon­ceiv­able for any Euro­pean city,’’ Panos Skourletis, a spokesman for the left-wing main oppo­si­tion par­ty, Syriza, told the AP.

‘‘If we can’t go there, where are we sup­posed to go? Vark­iza?’’ he added, refer­ring to a sea­side resort near Athens.

Schaeuble’s vis­it is his first since the Greek cri­sis broke out more than three years ago and it fol­lows three days of mas­sive protests against gov­ern­ment plans for mass fir­ings and trans­fers of pub­lic ser­vants.

Greece’s two largest unions said they had no plans to demon­strate Thurs­day, but Skourletis said mem­bers of his par­ty would join protests if any take place.

With results like that it’s almost sur­pris­ing that more coun­tries fac­ing tough economies aren’t ask­ing for a troi­ka of their own. Just think of the pos­si­bil­i­ties:

ThinkProgress
Greece Lays Off 25,000 Even Though One In Four Greeks Is Unem­ployed

By Alan Pyke on Jul 18, 2013 at 4:04 pm

The Greek gov­ern­ment approved a new round of pub­lic work­er lay­offs required by the country’s ongo­ing bailout, affect­ing 25,000 employ­ees. Unem­ploy­ment in the coun­try is near­ly 27 per­cent, accord­ing to the most recent fig­ures, with the youth unem­ploy­ment rate more than dou­ble that.

The Euro­pean author­i­ties admin­is­ter­ing Greece’s bailout insist­ed upon the new job cuts before they would release the next $9.2 bil­lion in res­cue funds. As a result, 15,000 jobs will be elim­i­nat­ed, and anoth­er 10,000 will not have their con­tracts renewed when they expire lat­er this year. The job cuts mean thou­sands more with­out dis­pos­able income in a coun­try already three years deep in a vicious eco­nom­ic cycle dri­ven by aus­ter­i­ty.

The Greek econ­o­my has been so bad for so long that it was recent­ly down­grad­ed by one invest­ment firm from a “devel­oped” coun­try to an ‘emerg­ing mar­ket,’ a move that is with­out prece­dent. Cuts to pub­lic ser­vices have not spared the health care sec­tor, lead­ing to a surge in the rate of still­births. While the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund has acknowl­edged it was far too opti­mistic when it pre­dict­ed the cuts would spark eco­nom­ic growth, the country’s cred­i­tors have not eased the bailout require­ments.

The Greek expe­ri­ence should be a cau­tion­ary tale for Amer­i­can pol­i­cy­mak­ers, though not in the ways deficit hawks claim. The ini­tial U.S. response to the eco­nom­ic cri­sis – cen­tral gov­ern­ment spend­ing to buoy the econ­o­my – has giv­en way to the same sort of cut-and-grow think­ing that has been so harm­ful for Greece. Recent­ly, the IMF crit­i­cized the ongo­ing Amer­i­can spend­ing cuts as “exces­sive­ly rapid,” and warned that con­tin­u­ing with seques­tra­tion will hurt U.S. growth in both the short and long terms.

Accord­ing to Greece’s “Min­is­ter of Admin­is­tra­tive Reform” (the aus­ter­i­ty czar), they dra­mat­ic cuts to the pub­lic sec­tor aren’t even about sav­ing mon­ey. No, it’s about “cre­at­ing a pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion that is effec­tive and serves the needs of the Greek peo­ple”:

The Los Ange­les Times
Fac­ing the chal­lenge of par­ing back Greece’s pub­lic work­force
Kyr­i­akos Mit­so­takis, Greece’s min­is­ter of admin­is­tra­tive reform, dis­cuss­es the gov­ern­men­t’s plan under which 25,000 civ­il ser­vants will be moved out of their cur­rent jobs.

By Anthee Caras­sa­va

August 1, 2013, 4:00 a.m.

ATHENS — Greece’s Par­lia­ment last month approved the first offi­cial culling of the coun­try’s bloat­ed pub­lic sec­tor. The move, opposed by gov­ern­ment work­ers but viewed by many econ­o­mists as long over­due for an indebt­ed econ­o­my, will push 25,000 civ­il ser­vants into a “mobil­i­ty scheme,” giv­ing them eight months to find work in anoth­er state depart­ment or get fired.

Kyr­i­akos Mit­so­takis, the young Har­vard-cum-Stan­ford edu­cat­ed econ­o­mist who fills the coun­try’s least cov­et­ed gov­ern­ment job — as min­is­ter of admin­is­tra­tive reform, a stuffy-sound­ing title that puts him in the thick of con­tro­ver­sy — spoke last week to The Times about efforts to pare back pub­lic employ­ment, the con­tro­ver­sial clo­sure of the state broad­cast­er and the tough aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures demand­ed by inter­na­tion­al lenders.

State sta­tis­tics show about 1,000 pri­vate sec­tor employ­ees los­ing their jobs dai­ly since the start of the cri­sis in 2009. How many have been forced out of the pub­lic sec­tor in that same peri­od?

The pub­lic sec­tor has been reduced sig­nif­i­cant­ly. The gov­ern­ment has been apply­ing a 1‑to‑5 attri­tion rule [one per­son hired for every five who retire]. At the same time, it has reduced tem­po­rary con­tracts and has not renewed fixed-term con­tracts. We are on track to achieve a reduc­tion in the num­ber of civ­il ser­vants by 150,000 by 2015.

So, no one to date has been fired from the pub­lic sec­tor?

That is absolute­ly cor­rect.

You’re being asked to deliv­er on some­thing that three pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ments did not do, even on a small­er scale, in the past three years. Can it real­is­ti­cal­ly be done?

I was appoint­ed to this posi­tion in order to imple­ment long-over­due reforms in Greek pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion, and I want to assure you that I have embraced this task with deter­mi­na­tion and resolve.... It is true that we missed the end-June tar­get for trans­fer­ring the required 12,500 employ­ees to the mobil­i­ty scheme.

In order to get back on sched­ule regard­ing pub­lic sec­tor mobil­i­ty, we will place 4,250 ordi­nary employ­ees in the mobil­i­ty scheme by end-July and 8,250 by end-Sep­tem­ber. Anoth­er 12,500 will be placed by end-Decem­ber 2013.

Do the 2,700 employ­ees who were sacked in the sud­den clo­sure of the state broad­cast­er fit into this scheme?

They were fired. Some will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to apply for rehir­ing, but there are no cer­tain­ties.

Just last month the gov­ern­ment near­ly col­lapsed when it shut down the state broad­cast­er. Do you think the gov­ern­ment can sur­vive anoth­er, pos­si­bly even big­ger back­lash?

There is a silent major­i­ty in Greece that under­stands that we can no longer sweep the mis­takes of the past under the rug. For a long time, there was a sense in this coun­try that bad habits would with the ben­e­fit of time just dis­ap­pear. Today, the major­i­ty under­stands very dif­fi­cult deci­sions must be tak­en and that vital reforms can no longer be put on the back burn­er.

Whether the employ­ees are rehired or not, 25,000 jobs will be ter­mi­nat­ed by the end of the year, as the bill says, cor­rect?

This is not true. Pub­lic sec­tor employ­ees placed in the mobil­i­ty scheme will have their wages reduced by 25% and will go through an assess­ment process, with­in an eval­u­a­tion frame­work to be estab­lished by end-Sep­tem­ber, before being real­lo­cat­ed to new posts. Only a frac­tion of employ­ees placed in the mobil­i­ty scheme will be des­tined to exit the pub­lic sec­tor.

How does that make the pub­lic sec­tor more effi­cient? Are these under­per­form­ing, polit­i­cal hires?

Through­out the past decade, I have repeat­ed­ly spo­ken open­ly and clear­ly about the need for admin­is­tra­tive reform in the pub­lic sec­tor, not only to make it more effi­cient per se but to help it pro­mote com­pet­i­tive pri­vate sec­tor econ­o­my.

This mes­sage is ever more rel­e­vant today, as Greece is paving its way out of reces­sion, try­ing to cre­ate eco­nom­ic growth and new job oppor­tu­ni­ties. Set­ting up a trans­par­ent and mer­it-based appraisal frame­work should help improve indi­vid­ual per­for­mance and increase account­abil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy in the civ­il ser­vice.

With offi­cial unem­ploy­ment at 27%, how wise is it on behalf of lenders to be demand­ing this from Greece now, and you like­wise to be accept­ing it?

First of all, this is not a new demand; it goes back to com­mit­ment the Greek gov­ern­ment signed up to in Feb­ru­ary 2012. Sec­ond­ly, for every one of the 15,000 who exit the pub­lic sec­tor, anoth­er one will be hired, adding new tal­ent and skills to the Greek civ­il ser­vice.

Third­ly, dis­missals due to dis­ci­pli­nary offens­es will be one of the main pools for the direct exit from the civ­il ser­vice, and this is some­thing long over­due. Those pub­lic sec­tor employ­ees fac­ing dis­ci­pli­nary review, or who entered pre­sent­ing fake cre­den­tials, or who have abused legal loop­holes to make tem­po­rary posi­tions into almost per­ma­nent, have to go, and I believe that the Greek soci­ety will embrace this move.

How much will this cost the state, and how much does it stand to save?

As I men­tioned ear­li­er, it is not a mat­ter of achiev­ing sav­ings, but cre­at­ing a pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion that is effec­tive and serves the needs of the Greek peo­ple.

...

So are the Greek health­care cuts also about bet­ter serv­ing the needs of the Greek peo­ple? Because, while it’s debat­able as to whether or not the Greeks need more malar­ia and HIV, these kind of cuts don’t look the types of “reforms” that will actu­al­ly save mon­ey in the run. Dis­ease, unfor­tu­nate­ly, hap­pens to be very pro-aus­ter­i­ty:

The Atlantic
Malar­ia and HIV Spike as Greece Cuts Health­care Spend­ing
The nasty down­side of aus­ter­i­ty.
Michael Scatur­ro May 15 2013, 9:00 AM ET

One day in late March, Euro­pean finance and health min­istry offi­cials met at the OECD’s Paris office to dis­cuss how health­care sys­tems are far­ing in times of aus­ter­i­ty.

On the sec­ond day of the two-day con­fer­ence, Greek finance min­istry offi­cial Evdox­ia Andri­anopoulou read from a series of brown-col­ored Pow­er­Point slides rid­dled with details of attri­tion and sav­ings. Greece’s cuts were deep, of the sort com­mon­ly seen in a cor­po­rate turn­around — but rarely on a gov­ern­men­t’s bal­ance sheet, and almost nev­er to health­care expens­es.

The take­away from the meet­ing — accord­ing to two peo­ple who attend­ed it — was that Greek offi­cials knew that these huge cuts would result in the cur­tail­ing of essen­tial ser­vices for their peo­ple. But the offi­cials were work­ing under the stress of hav­ing to meet a finan­cial tar­get set by their tri-par­ty group of cred­i­tors: the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion, the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, and the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank. And so they deliv­ered.

Accord­ing to an Aus­tri­an finance min­istry offi­cial who attend­ed the meet­ing, par­tic­i­pants in the room “were in a state of shock” after Andri­anopoulou con­clud­ed her talk. Anoth­er attendee who asked that he not be quot­ed said “a pin-drop silence” filled the room.

Mean­while, across the Chan­nel in Lon­don, aca­d­e­mics were prepar­ing to release a study in “The Lancet” on the health­care cri­sis that has fol­lowed deep bud­get cuts in South­ern Europe.

One of that work’s prin­ci­pal researchers, David Stuck­ler of Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, warned that not just Greece, but also Spain and Por­tu­gal, faced a poten­tial health­care dis­as­ter due to their own steep bud­get cuts.

Yet of the three cri­sis-strick­en coun­tries, Greece seems to have suf­fered the most.

“Greece is an exam­ple of per­haps the worst case of aus­ter­i­ty lead­ing to pub­lic health dis­as­ters,” Mr. Stuck­ler explained in a tele­phone inter­view.

“After mos­qui­to spray­ing pro­grams were cut, we’ve seen a return of malar­ia, which the coun­try has kept under con­trol for the past four decades. New HIV infec­tions have jumped more than 200 per­cent,” he not­ed.

Malar­ia returned because munic­i­pal gov­ern­ments lacked the funds to spray against mos­qui­toes. HIV spiked because gov­ern­ment nee­dle exchange pro­grams ran out of clean syringes for hero­in addicts. By Stuck­ler’s esti­mate, the aver­age Greek junkie requires 200 clean nee­dles in a giv­en year.

“But now they’re only get­ting three a year each,” Stuck­ler said.

Athen­ian drug addicts shar­ing nee­dles or malar­ia-car­ry­ing mos­qui­toes bit­ing Spar­tans have put Greece in the media spot­light over the past few months. But a decid­ed­ly less head­line-grab­bing fact is this: cuts tak­en over the last two years could look even worse a few years from now.

“The thing about health­care sys­tems,” the OECD’s Ankit Kumar explained in a tele­phone inter­view, “Is you cut the mon­ey today, and start to see the cuts’ impact at least three to four years from now. You know that peo­ple aren’t get­ting their med­ica­tions. But it takes a cou­ple of years before this man­i­fests itself in high levers or sick­ness, few­er peo­ple being able to work, and more peo­ple fac­ing short­er lives. Giv­en the con­se­quences of what has hap­pened in Greece, these out­comes are just going to get worse and worse.”

Some experts have sug­gest­ed that Greece’s bud­getary ax fell undu­ly hard on its health­care sec­tor, which was slat­ed to grow at around 4 per­cent annu­al­ly, but which has instead been jolt­ed by a series of wage freezes, fir­ings, and drug rationing pro­grams. Econ­o­mists around the world warned of the cuts’ con­se­quences — but it was the Greeks them­selves who opt­ed for deep gash­es to their health­care sys­tem.

“IMF does­n’t say ‘you have to cut 10 per­cent of your econ­o­my, but you can’t close hos­pi­tals or schools.’ Where the cuts are made remains a coun­try’s sov­er­eign right,” Kumar explained.

...

An econ­o­mist that pub­lished a book on using the elim­i­na­tion of free school lunch­es as a mod­el for how to tack­le fis­cal imbal­ances wants you all to know that there has­n’t actu­al­ly been any real aus­ter­i­ty imple­ment­ed yet in Europe so the argu­ments that aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies are harm­ing the Euro­pean economies sim­ply does­n’t apply. Eat that kid­dos.

Here’s some­thing nice to see: it looks like it’s increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to find a self-respect­ing econ­o­mist that advo­cates aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies. It prob­a­bly won’t make a dif­fer­ence in terms of pol­i­cy since the advo­cates of aus­ter­i­ty were nev­er actu­al­ly engaged in an hon­est debate. Still, it’s always nice when the forces of decep­tion and destruc­tion are forced to drop the pre­tense of hav­ing any integri­ty:

The Con­science of a Lib­er­al
Where Are The Aus­ter­ian Econ­o­mists?
Paul Krug­man
Sep­tem­ber 23, 2013, 9:21 am

I’ve been part of a dis­cus­sion over the direc­tion of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy debate — as opposed to the direc­tion of actu­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy — in which an inter­est­ing ques­tion has been raised: which promi­nent econ­o­mists are now mak­ing the best case for fis­cal aus­ter­i­ty? It’s a tough ques­tion to answer, because at this point it’s hard to find any promi­nent econ­o­mists mak­ing that case.

By “promi­nent”, by the way, I’m try­ing not to make a per­son­al judg­ment. I may think that [redact­ed] is actu­al­ly not too bright, and doesn’t deserve his rep­u­ta­tion, while I may think that [redact­ed] is actu­al­ly a far bet­ter econ­o­mist than many oth­ers with big­ger pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tions, but that’s not the ques­tion here; the ques­tion is which econ­o­mists with big rep­u­ta­tions and large cita­tion index­es are mak­ing the aus­ter­ian case.

And the answer is, it’s hard to think of any. Alber­to Alesina, once the guru of expan­sion­ary aus­ter­i­ty, is still defend­ing his ear­li­er research, but not play­ing a major role in cur­rent pol­i­cy debate. Rein­hart and Rogoff, whose 90-per­cent cliff was once gospel, are defend­ing their pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tions while try­ing to move on, but aren’t lend­ing their voic­es to calls for con­tin­u­ing aus­ter­i­ty. Who’s left?

Yes, you can find econ­o­mists at right-wing think tanks and some inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions mak­ing the aus­ter­ian case, but again, I’m talk­ing about econ­o­mists with big inde­pen­dent rep­u­ta­tions, jus­ti­fied or not. And I can’t think of any. That wing of aus­te­ri­an­ism has sim­ply dis­solved.

And as far as we can tell, it makes no dif­fer­ence. Have Paul Ryan, George Osborne, Olli Rehn, Wolf­gang Schäu­ble changed their tune even a bit? No, they’re busy claim­ing one quar­ter of pos­i­tive growth as vin­di­ca­tion.

For those who like to think that seri­ous eco­nom­ic debates mat­ter, it has been a hum­bling expe­ri­ence.

Well, at least the Ger­man elec­tions are over so, who knows, maybe Merkel real­ly will do that long-expect­ed post-elec­tion pol­i­cy piv­ot and advo­cate less destruc­tive poli­cies for her neigh­bors. She would­n’t even have to admit that her poli­cies have destroyed the prospects an entire gen­er­a­tion of Euro­peans using a foun­da­tion fraud­u­lent ide­ol­o­gy. A sim­ple pol­i­cy shift would suf­fice! That’s how these things work. Or, more like­ly, she’ll change noth­ing at all. It’s a dif­fer­ent kind of integri­ty:

The New York Times
Vote for Merkel Seen as Vic­to­ry for Aus­ter­i­ty

By ANDREW HIGGINS
Pub­lished: Sep­tem­ber 23, 2013

BRUSSELS — As Angela Merkel savored the results of Germany’s nation­al elec­tions, news­pa­pers on the left and right in Greece on Mon­day gave the same mourn­ful assess­ment of what the result means beyond Ger­man bor­ders. “Vic­to­ry for the Queen of Aus­ter­i­ty,” declared the front page of Ta Nea, a cen­ter-left dai­ly. “Merkel vic­to­ry atop the ruins of the South,” said the con­ser­v­a­tive Dimokra­tia.

Blog­gers, mean­while, post­ed a car­toon that showed Ms. Merkel, a stetho­scope around her neck, wag­ging her fin­ger at a skele­ton slumped in a blue chair and order­ing, “Exer­cise, exer­cise, exer­cise to strength­en your mus­cles.”

For months now, Europe has been wait­ing for the end of a Ger­man elec­tion cam­paign that, while focused almost entire­ly on domes­tic issues, stirred furtive hope among those out­side Ger­many that, if re-elect­ed to a third term, Ms. Merkel, despite hav­ing giv­en no indi­ca­tion, would try a more ener­getic, and per­haps more eco­nom­i­cal­ly stim­u­la­tive, approach to lead­ing Europe out of its extend­ed slump. The wait­ing has now end­ed — and so, too, has any hint of a new approach.

Instead of a respite from years of grind­ing bud­get cuts and tax increas­es in return for bailout funds, Ms. Merkel’s con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Democ­rats cam­paigned on hold­ing the line against expen­sive com­mit­ments to reviv­ing Germany’s neigh­bors. Her finan­cial aides claimed that signs that Europe’s long reces­sion had recent­ly become less severe had proved that its aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies were work­ing.

Ms. Merkel’s elec­toral suc­cess — the Chris­t­ian Democ­rats and their allies, the Chris­t­ian Social Union in Bavaria, togeth­er won 41.5 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote — will bring “more of the same,” pre­dict­ed Mats Pers­son, direc­tor of Open Europe, a Lon­don-based research group. For coun­tries now on eco­nom­ic life sup­port, this would mean yet more painful “exer­cise,” which in Greece has slimmed job prospects so sig­nif­i­cant­ly that over 60 per­cent of youth are now unem­ployed.

What­ev­er coali­tion gov­ern­ment emerges in Berlin from what could be weeks of hag­gling, Mr. Pers­son said, “there may be a lit­tle change of rhetoric, but the sub­stance will remain the same.”

“There will be a con­tin­ued focus on aus­ter­i­ty,” he said.

Ms. Merkel said as much her­self dur­ing a final day of cam­paign­ing on Sat­ur­day. “We have to con­tin­ue on this course,” she told a ral­ly in Berlin, denounc­ing the Euro­pean poli­cies of her main rival, Peer Stein­brück, who had called for a pre­sum­ably most­ly Ger­man-financed Mar­shall Plan to relieve what he called “a dead­ly dose of aus­ter­i­ty.”

...

Hey, what do you know: New research finds that par­ent­ing in pover­ty is extreme­ly stress­ful so when you help the par­ents with the pover­ty you help the chil­dren too. And every­one else:

The New York Times
Opin­ion­a­tor
The Great Divide Jan­u­ary 18, 2014, 3:47 pm

What Hap­pens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?
By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF

Grow­ing up poor has long been asso­ci­at­ed with reduced edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment and low­er life­time earn­ings. Some evi­dence also sug­gests a high­er risk of depres­sion, sub­stance abuse and oth­er dis­eases in adult­hood. Even for those who man­age to over­come hum­ble begin­nings, ear­ly-life pover­ty may leave a last­ing mark, accel­er­at­ing aging and increas­ing the risk of degen­er­a­tive dis­ease in adult­hood.

Today, more than one in five Amer­i­can chil­dren live in pover­ty. How, if at all, to inter­vene is almost invari­ably a polit­i­cal­ly fraught ques­tion. Sci­en­tists inter­est­ed in the link between pover­ty and men­tal health, how­ev­er, often face a more fun­da­men­tal prob­lem: a rel­a­tive dearth of exper­i­ments that test and com­pare poten­tial inter­ven­tions.

So when, in 1996, the East­ern Band of Chero­kee Indi­ans in North Carolina’s Great Smoky Moun­tains opened a casi­no, Jane Costel­lo, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical School, saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty. The tribe elect­ed to dis­trib­ute a pro­por­tion of the prof­its equal­ly among its 8,000 mem­bers. Pro­fes­sor Costel­lo won­dered whether the extra mon­ey would change psy­chi­atric out­comes among poor Chero­kee fam­i­lies.

When the casi­no opened, Pro­fes­sor Costel­lo had already been fol­low­ing 1,420 rur­al chil­dren in the area, a quar­ter of whom were Chero­kee, for four years. That gave her a sol­id base­line mea­sure. Rough­ly one-fifth of the rur­al non-Indi­ans in her study lived in pover­ty, com­pared with more than half of the Chero­kee. By 2001, when casi­no prof­its amount­ed to $6,000 per per­son year­ly, the num­ber of Chero­kee liv­ing below the pover­ty line had declined by half.

The poor­est chil­dren tend­ed to have the great­est risk of psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders, includ­ing emo­tion­al and behav­ioral prob­lems. But just four years after the sup­ple­ments began, Pro­fes­sor Costel­lo observed marked improve­ments among those who moved out of pover­ty. The fre­quen­cy of behav­ioral prob­lems declined by 40 per­cent, near­ly reach­ing the risk of chil­dren who had nev­er been poor. Already well-off Chero­kee chil­dren, on the oth­er hand, showed no improve­ment. The sup­ple­ments seemed to ben­e­fit the poor­est chil­dren most dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

When Pro­fes­sor Costel­lo pub­lished her first study, in 2003, the field of men­tal health remained on the fence over whether pover­ty caused psy­chi­atric prob­lems, or psy­chi­atric prob­lems led to pover­ty. So she was sur­prised by the results. Even she hadn’t expect­ed the cash to make much dif­fer­ence. “The expec­ta­tion is that social inter­ven­tions have rel­a­tive­ly small effects,” she told me. “This one had quite large effects.”

She and her col­leagues kept fol­low­ing the chil­dren. Minor crimes com­mit­ted by Chero­kee youth declined. On-time high school grad­u­a­tion rates improved. And by 2006, when the sup­ple­ments had grown to about $9,000 year­ly per mem­ber, Pro­fes­sor Costel­lo could make anoth­er obser­va­tion: The ear­li­er the sup­ple­ments arrived in a child’s life, the bet­ter that child’s men­tal health in ear­ly adult­hood.

She’d start­ed her study with three cohorts, ages 9, 11 and 13. When she caught up with them as 19- and 21-year-olds liv­ing on their own, she found that those who were youngest when the sup­ple­ments began had ben­e­fit­ed most. They were rough­ly one-third less like­ly to devel­op sub­stance abuse and psy­chi­atric prob­lems in adult­hood, com­pared with the old­est group of Chero­kee chil­dren and with neigh­bor­ing rur­al whites of the same age.

Chero­kee chil­dren in the old­er cohorts, who were already 14 or 16 when the sup­ple­ments began, on the oth­er hand, didn’t show any improve­ments rel­a­tive to rur­al whites. The extra cash evi­dent­ly came too late to alter these old­er teenagers’ already-estab­lished tra­jec­to­ries.

What pre­cise­ly did the income change? Ongo­ing inter­views with both par­ents and chil­dren sug­gest­ed one vari­able in par­tic­u­lar. The mon­ey, which amount­ed to between one-third and one-quar­ter of poor fam­i­lies’ income at one point, seemed to improve par­ent­ing qual­i­ty.

Vick­ie L. Bradley, a tribe mem­ber and trib­al health offi­cial, recalls the tran­si­tion. Before the casi­no opened and sup­ple­ments began, employ­ment was often spo­radic. Many Chero­kee worked “hard and long” dur­ing the sum­mer, she told me, and then hun­kered down when jobs dis­ap­peared in the win­ter. The sup­ple­ments eased the strain of that feast-or-famine exis­tence, she said. Some used the mon­ey to pay a few months’ worth of bills in advance. Oth­ers bought their chil­dren clothes for school, or even Christ­mas presents. Most­ly, though, the ener­gy once spent fret­ting over such things was freed up. That “helps par­ents be bet­ter par­ents,” she said.

A par­al­lel study at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill also high­lights the insid­i­ous effect of pover­ty on par­ent­ing. The Fam­i­ly Life Project, now in its 11th year, has fol­lowed near­ly 1,300 most­ly poor rur­al chil­dren in North Car­oli­na and Penn­syl­va­nia from birth. Sci­en­tists quan­ti­fy mater­nal edu­ca­tion, income and neigh­bor­hood safe­ty, among oth­er fac­tors. The stres­sors work cumu­la­tive­ly, they’ve found. The more they bear down as a whole, the more parental nur­tur­ing and sup­port, as mea­sured by observers, declines.

By age 3, mea­sures of vocab­u­lary, work­ing mem­o­ry and exec­u­tive func­tion show an inverse rela­tion­ship with the stres­sors expe­ri­enced by par­ents.

These skills are thought impor­tant for suc­cess and well-being in life. Mater­nal warmth can seem­ing­ly pro­tect chil­dren from envi­ron­men­tal stress­es, how­ev­er; at least in these com­mu­ni­ties, par­ent­ing qual­i­ty seems to mat­ter more to a child than mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances. On the oth­er hand, few par­ents man­aged high lev­els of nur­tur­ing while also expe­ri­enc­ing great strain. All of which high­lights an emerg­ing theme in this sci­ence: Ear­ly-life pover­ty may harm, in part, by warp­ing and erod­ing the bonds between chil­dren and care­givers that are impor­tant for healthy devel­op­ment.

Evi­dence is accu­mu­lat­ing that these stress­ful ear­ly-life expe­ri­ences affect brain devel­op­ment. In one recent study, sci­en­tists at the Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine in St. Louis fol­lowed 145 preschool­ers between 3 and 6 years of age for up to 10 years, doc­u­ment­ing stress­ful events — includ­ing deaths in the fam­i­ly, fight­ing and fre­quent moves — as they occurred. When they took mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing scans of sub­jects’ brains in ado­les­cence, they observed dif­fer­ences that cor­re­lat­ed with the sum of stress­ful events.

...

Uh oh, if this idea catch­es on the world might actu­al­ly make seri­ous attempts at elim­i­nat­ing child­hood pover­ty! It could even spread beyond help­ing chil­dren and apply to every­one! *gasp* With­out pover­ty, what will moti­vate peo­ple to work hard and drag them­selves out of pover­ty? Civ­i­liza­tion­al col­lapse in 3...2...1...

It’s always a beau­ti­ful moment when sim­ple, effec­tive solu­tions are found for com­pli­cat­ed prob­lems. This is sort of the oppo­site of one of those moments:

Raw Sto­ry
‘Enough is enough’: Rand Paul sug­gests cut­ting ben­e­fits for unwed moth­ers with too many kids

By Travis Get­tys
Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 26, 2014 9:30 EST

Sen. Rand Paul (R‑KY) sug­gest­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cut­ting gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits for unwed moth­ers who have mul­ti­ple chil­dren.

“Maybe we have to say ‘enough’s enough, you shouldn’t be hav­ing kids after a cer­tain amount,’” said Paul, who oppos­es legal abor­tion and has crit­i­cized the fed­er­al health care law’s con­tra­cep­tion man­date as a vio­la­tion of reli­gious and eco­nom­ic lib­er­ty.

The like­ly 2016 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date made the remarks Thurs­day dur­ing a lun­cheon in Lex­ing­ton, report­ed the Lex­ing­ton Her­ald-Leader, in response to a ques­tion about work­force devel­op­ment.

He admit­ted the sug­ges­tion, which he did not direct­ly endorse, might be unpop­u­lar and dif­fi­cult to imple­ment.

“I don’t know how you do all that because then it’s tough to tell a woman with four kids that she’s got a fifth kid we’re not going to give her any more mon­ey,” Paul said. “But we have to fig­ure out how to get that mes­sage through because that is part of the answer. Some of that’s not com­ing from gov­ern­ment. It needs to come from min­is­ters and peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty and par­ents and grand­par­ents to con­vince our kids to do some­thing dif­fer­ent.”

The con­ser­v­a­tive sen­a­tor said com­mu­ni­ties or fam­i­lies should be respon­si­ble for the pre­ven­tion of unplanned or unwant­ed preg­nan­cy, but he said gov­ern­ment poli­cies could dis­cour­age unwed moth­ers from hav­ing addi­tion­al chil­dren.

“Mar­ried with kids ver­sus unmar­ried with kids is the dif­fer­ence between liv­ing in pover­ty and not,” Paul said.

U.S. Cen­sus Bureau data back his claim, show­ing that 30.9 per­cent of fam­i­lies led by a sin­gle moth­er were liv­ing in pover­ty in 2012, com­pared to 6.3 per­cent of fam­i­lies led by a mar­ried cou­ple and 16.4 per­cent of fam­i­lies led by a sin­gle father.

“We should sell that mes­sage,” Paul said. “Not in a mean way to tell peo­ple who already have made a bad deci­sion, but if you’ve had one child and you’re not mar­ried, you shouldn’t have anoth­er one.”

He said chil­dren should be strong­ly encour­aged not to have chil­dren until they’re mar­ried, argu­ing that this would allow them entry into the mid­dle class.

“There’s all kinds of ways, and we can debate … but there are all kinds of ways to stop hav­ing kids,” said Paul, although he didn’t specif­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy any of those ways.

An aide to Paul declined to com­ment lat­er Thurs­day when asked to clar­i­fy the senator’s remarks, but Paul him­self offered an expla­na­tion Sun­day morn­ing on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I mused about how you’d have a gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy, but I actu­al­ly came down say­ing it would be very dif­fi­cult to have a gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy,” Paul said. “I most­ly con­clud­ed by say­ing it’s a com­mu­ni­ty, it’s a reli­gious, it’s a per­son­al prob­lem, but it is a prob­lem.”

He con­ced­ed dur­ing the tele­vi­sion pro­gram that “gov­ern­ment can’t do any­thing about this, (but) we shouldn’t just give up.”

...

Com­pli­cat­ed prob­lems some­times have sim­ple, effec­tive solu­tions although not always.

More help­ful and humane aus­ter­i­ty out­comes: Hous­ing HIV-pos­i­tive pris­on­ers in close quar­ters with tuber­cu­lo­sis patients is now some­thing they’re doing in Greece’s only prison hos­pi­tal due to mas­sive over­crowd­ing. The result­ing hunger strike pre­sum­ably cuts down on costs too:

Greek Prison Hos­pi­tal Inmates on Hunger Strike
ATHENS, Greece Feb­ru­ary 24, 2014 (AP)
By ELENA BECATOROS Asso­ci­at­ed Press

Inmates of Greece’s only prison hos­pi­tal said Mon­day they were on hunger strike and were refus­ing med­ica­tion to protest severe­ly over­crowd­ed con­di­tions they say are lead­ing to the spread of dis­ease.

Kory­dal­los prison hos­pi­tal, west of Athens, is designed to hold 60 men but cur­rent­ly hous­es more than 200, accord­ing to prison staff and inmates. Most are HIV pos­i­tive. Oth­ers have can­cer, kid­ney fail­ure and heart prob­lems and are held in close quar­ters with those suf­fer­ing from com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases such as tuber­cu­lo­sis, hepati­tis and sca­bies.

Three inmates at the hos­pi­tal told the AP by phone that 178 pris­on­ers began refus­ing prison food and med­ica­tion on Feb. 16, after two cas­es of tuber­cu­lo­sis were iden­ti­fied among inmates who had not been iso­lat­ed from oth­er patients.

They said 150–160 of the pro­test­ers began a full-blown hunger strike Sun­day, while those too severe­ly ill to par­tic­i­pate were eat­ing only bread. The pro­test­ers were also refus­ing med­ica­tion, includ­ing anti­retro­vi­ral and can­cer drugs.

...

The head of the prison guards’ union, Spiros Karak­it­sos, said they accu­rate­ly depict­ed cur­rent con­di­tions.

“It’s a shock­ing sit­u­a­tion,” Karak­it­sos told AP.

The Coun­cil of Europe’s human rights com­mis­sion­er, Nils Muiznieks, tweet­ed he was “wor­ried at reports of degrad­ing con­di­tions of pris­on­ers” at Kory­dal­los hos­pi­tal and that a quick res­o­lu­tion was nec­es­sary.

Chron­i­cal­ly over­crowd­ed, Greek pris­ons have suf­fered an increase in inmate num­bers and decrease in staff and fund­ing over the past few years, exac­er­bat­ed by the coun­try’s severe finan­cial cri­sis. Kory­dal­los hos­pi­tal has seen a dra­mat­ic increase in HIV pos­i­tive inmates, who are held there even if they are not sick.

The Euro­pean Court of Human Rights has ruled sev­er­al times that con­di­tions in Greek pris­ons and police hold­ing cells con­sti­tute inhu­man or degrad­ing pun­ish­ment.

Some­thing to keep in mind in dur­ing the age of end­less aus­ter­i­ty: rais­ing the retire­ment age for all occu­pa­tions is only real­ly fair if lifes­pans are actu­al­ly ris­ing for all occu­pa­tions:

The New York Times
The Con­science of a Lib­er­al
Don’t Pros­per and Die Ear­ly
Paul Krug­man
Mar 16, 10:41 am

I was pleased to see this arti­cle by Annie Lowrey doc­u­ment­ing the grow­ing dis­par­i­ty in life expectan­cy between the haves and the have-nots. It’s kind of frus­trat­ing, how­ev­er, that this is appar­ent­ly com­ing as news not just to many read­ers but to many pol­i­cy­mak­ers and pun­dits. Many of us have been try­ing for years to get this point across — to point out that when peo­ple call for rais­ing the Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare ages, they’re basi­cal­ly say­ing that jan­i­tors must keep work­ing because cor­po­rate lawyers are liv­ing longer. Yet it nev­er seems to sink in.

Maybe this arti­cle will change that. But my guess is that in a week or two we will once again hear a sup­posed wise man say­ing that we need to raise the retire­ment age to 67 because of high­er life expectan­cy, unaware that (a) life expectan­cy hasn’t risen much for half of work­ers (b) we’ve already raised the retire­ment age to 67.

If Krug­man thinks the debate over fair retire­ment-age thresh­olds are painful­ly frus­trat­ing now, just wait.

You can’t make an omelette with­out break­ing a few eggs:

The Guardian
Child pover­ty up in more than half of devel­oped world since 2008
Unicef report finds num­ber of chil­dren enter­ing pover­ty dur­ing glob­al reces­sion is 2.6 mil­lion greater than num­ber lift­ed out of it

Har­ri­et Sher­wood

Tues­day 28 Octo­ber 2014 06.01 EDT

Child pover­ty has increased in 23 coun­tries in the devel­oped world since the start of the glob­al reces­sion in 2008, poten­tial­ly trap­ping a gen­er­a­tion in a life of mate­r­i­al depri­va­tion and reduced prospects.

A report by Unicef says the num­ber of chil­dren enter­ing pover­ty dur­ing the reces­sion is 2.6 mil­lion greater than the num­ber who have been lift­ed out of it. “The longer these chil­dren remain trapped in the cycle of pover­ty, the hard­er it will be for them to escape,” it says in Chil­dren of Reces­sion: the Impact of the Eco­nom­ic Cri­sis on Child Well­be­ing in Rich Coun­tries.

Greece and Ice­land have seen the biggest per­cent­age increas­es in child pover­ty since 2008, fol­lowed by Latvia, Croa­t­ia and Ire­land. The pro­por­tion of chil­dren liv­ing in pover­ty in the UK has increased from 24% to 25.6%.

Eigh­teen of the 41 coun­tries in the study have seen falls in child pover­ty, topped by Chile which has seen a reduc­tion from 31.4% to 22.8%.

Nor­way has the low­est child pover­ty rate, at 5.3% (down from 9.6% in 2008), and Greece has the high­est, at 40.5% (up from 23% in 2008). Latvia and Spain also have child pover­ty rates above 36%. In the US, the rate is 32%.

“In the past five years, ris­ing num­bers of chil­dren and their fam­i­lies have expe­ri­enced dif­fi­cul­ty in sat­is­fy­ing their most basic mate­r­i­al and edu­ca­tion­al needs,” says the report. “Unem­ploy­ment rates not seen since the Great Depres­sion of the 1930s have left many fam­i­lies unable to pro­vide the care, pro­tec­tion and oppor­tu­ni­ties to which chil­dren are enti­tled. Most impor­tant­ly, the Great Reces­sion is about to trap a gen­er­a­tion of edu­cat­ed and capa­ble youth in a lim­bo of unmet expec­ta­tions and last­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty.”

It adds: “The impact of the reces­sion on chil­dren, in par­tic­u­lar, will be felt long after the reces­sion itself is declared to be over.”

The study’s authors asked peo­ple about their expe­ri­ences and per­cep­tions of depri­va­tion, based on four indi­ca­tors: not hav­ing enough mon­ey to buy food for them­selves or their fam­i­ly; stress lev­els; over­all life sat­is­fac­tion; and whether chil­dren have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn and grow.

In 18 of the 41 coun­tries, scores showed a wors­en­ing sit­u­a­tion between 2007 and 2013, reveal­ing “ris­ing feel­ings of inse­cu­ri­ty and stress”.

The per­cent­age of house­holds with chil­dren unable to afford a meal with meat, chick­en, fish or a veg­etable equiv­a­lent every sec­ond day more than dou­bled in four Euro­pean coun­tries – Esto­nia (to 10%), Greece (18%), Ice­land (6%) and Italy (16%).

Mate­r­i­al depri­va­tion and stress affect­ed par­ents’ rela­tion­ships with their chil­dren, the report for the UN’s agency found. “Low­er lev­els of con­sumer con­fi­dence are asso­ci­at­ed with increased lev­els of high-fre­quen­cy spank­ing, a par­ent­ing behav­iour that is asso­ci­at­ed with greater like­li­hood of being con­tact­ed by child pro­tec­tive ser­vices.”

...

“Even when unem­ploy­ment or inac­tiv­i­ty decreas­es, that does not mean that young peo­ple are find­ing sta­ble, rea­son­ably paid jobs. The num­ber of 15- to 24-year-olds in part-time work or who are under­em­ployed has tripled on aver­age in coun­tries more exposed to the reces­sion,” the report says.

Many coun­tries respond­ed to the reces­sion by adopt­ing eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus pack­ages and push­ing up pub­lic spend­ing, it points out. “Gov­ern­ments that bol­stered exist­ing pub­lic insti­tu­tions and pro­grammes helped to buffer count­less chil­dren from the cri­sis – a strat­e­gy oth­ers may con­sid­er adopt­ing.”

The report con­cludes: “The prob­lems have not end­ed for chil­dren and their fam­i­lies, and it may well take years for many of them to return to pre-cri­sis lev­els of well­be­ing. Fail­ing to respond bold­ly could pose long-term risks.”

Here’s anoth­er reminder that the folks that advo­cate aus­ter­i­ty poli­cies that are obvi­ous­ly going to result in high­er lev­els of child pover­ty are basi­cal­ly indi­rect child abusers:

NBC News
Being Poor Affects Kids’ Brains, Study Finds
BY MAGGIE FOX
First pub­lished March 30th 2015, 2:57 pm

Chil­dren raised in poor house­holds have clear dif­fer­ences in the phys­i­cal struc­tures of their brains com­pared to wealth­i­er chil­dren, a new study finds.

Brain scans of 1,099 chil­dren and teenagers in nine major cities shows the poor­er kids have less sur­face area of the brain. This is impor­tant because hav­ing more brain sur­face area is linked with intel­li­gence.

“Specif­i­cal­ly, among chil­dren from the low­est-income fam­i­lies, small dif­fer­ences in income were asso­ci­at­ed with rel­a­tive­ly large dif­fer­ences in sur­face area in a num­ber of regions of the brain asso­ci­at­ed with skills impor­tant for aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess,” said Dr. Kim­ber­ly Noble, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of pedi­atrics and direc­tor of the Neu­rocog­ni­tion, Ear­ly Expe­ri­ence and Devel­op­ment Lab at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter, who helped lead the study pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science.

Researchers know that socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus affects school achieve­ment and intel­li­gence, but it has not been clear why.

“We know that fam­i­lies from dis­ad­van­taged back­grounds tend to expe­ri­ence more stress,” Noble told NBC News. Chil­dren in more well-to-do fam­i­lies tend to get more men­tal stim­u­la­tion at younger ages, and that can affect brain devel­op­ment. And kids liv­ing in poor sit­u­a­tions are often exposed to brain-dam­ag­ing chem­i­cals such as lead, cig­a­rette smoke and per­haps even air pol­lu­tion.

They’ve been run­ning a pro­gram to exam­ine var­i­ous dif­fer­ences among fam­i­lies with low­er and high­er incomes.

Sur­face area of the brain is impor­tant because that’s where the brain cells linked with intel­li­gence are. The human brain is very wrin­kled, with deep nooks and cran­nies. This is because a lot of brain is crammed into a small skull. If flat­tened out on a table, the human brain would be much big­ger than it looks.

...

They divid­ed the fam­i­lies into groups based on income — from less than $5,000 a year to more than $300,000 a year. Edu­ca­tion ranged from less than sev­en years of school­ing to advanced pro­fes­sion­al degrees such as PhD and MD.

“Among chil­dren from low­er income fam­i­lies, small dif­fer­ences in income were asso­ci­at­ed with rel­a­tive­ly large dif­fer­ences in sur­face area,” the researchers wrote in the jour­nal Nature Neu­ro­science.

“These rela­tion­ships were most promi­nent in regions sup­port­ing lan­guage, read­ing, exec­u­tive func­tions and spa­tial skills.”

It’s not at all clear that these dif­fer­ences are per­ma­nent or unchange­able, the researchers said. In fact, they are start­ing a new study giv­ing cash to low-income fam­i­lies to see if it makes a dif­fer­ence.

“We are going to fol­low the chil­dren from birth to age 3 and see what effects are on cog­ni­tive, emo­tion­al and brain devel­op­ment,” Noble said. “What is it about increased income that changes things in devel­op­ment?” she added.

“Fam­i­ly income is linked to fac­tors such as nutri­tion, health care, schools, play areas and, some­times, air qual­i­ty,” said Eliz­a­beth Sow­ell, direc­tor of the Devel­op­men­tal Cog­ni­tive Neu­roimag­ing Lab­o­ra­to­ry and a pro­fes­sor of pedi­atrics at Keck School of Med­i­cine of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, who also worked on the study.

The team also wants to tease out the oth­er dif­fer­ences they found. Do bet­ter edu­cat­ed par­ents earn more, or do they inter­act with their kids in dif­fer­ent ways? Do rich­er par­ents per­haps buy more nutri­tious food for their kids, are they able to stim­u­late them in supe­ri­or ways, or does being able to relax and not wor­ry about safe­ty and day-to-day sur­vival help brain devel­op­ment?

The team did mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing brain scans of 1,099 nor­mal chil­dren and teenagers aged 3 to 20. They also looked at every detail they could — fam­i­ly income, fam­i­ly edu­ca­tion, genet­ic lin­eage, age and so on — among the par­tic­i­pants.

They found that more edu­cat­ed par­ents tend­ed to have chil­dren with more brain sur­face area. It was a direct, lin­ear rela­tion­ship.

But the rela­tion­ship between income and a child’s brain sur­face area was much big­ger. It was log­a­rith­mic — mean­ing the effect was very strong at the low­er income lev­els. Just a lit­tle more income made a big dif­fer­ence in terms of brain sur­face area at the low­er end, and it made less dif­fer­ence as income lev­els grew.

“There was approx­i­mate­ly a 6 per­cent dif­fer­ence in sur­face area between the chil­dren from the low­est income and high­est-income fam­i­lies in the study,” Noble said.

Oth­er stud­ies have shown that pover­ty can affect brain func­tion.

In one, a team at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty found that being poor stress­es peo­ple out, tak­ing up band­width in their think­ing and lead­ing to faulty deci­sion-mak­ing.

Oh wow, so the poor­er you are the more an income boost can make a pos­i­tive dif­fer­ence in your devel­op­ing child’s brain:

But the rela­tion­ship between income and a child’s brain sur­face area was much big­ger. It was log­a­rith­mic — mean­ing the effect was very strong at the low­er income lev­els. Just a lit­tle more income made a big dif­fer­ence in terms of brain sur­face area at the low­er end, and it made less dif­fer­ence as income lev­els grew.

Huh, so does this study sug­gest that our dom­i­nant trick­le-down socioe­co­nom­ic par­a­digms that ele­vate mar­ket dynam­ics above human wel­fare are actu­al­ly result­ing in the sys­tem­at­ic abuse of chil­dren across the world since the wealth does­n’t actu­al­ly trick­le down and you just end up with a lot of child pover­ty? It seems like some­thing worth inves­ti­gat­ing.

As should be obvi­ous by now, one of the worst things a pop­u­lace can do to itself is elect an aus­ter­ian admin­is­tra­tion promis­ing to heal all fis­cal wounds by mak­ing the rich rich­er and poor poor­er. But there are indeed worse forms of self-inflict­ed nation­al wounds, like reward­ing the aus­te­ri­ans with a reelec­tion. That’s always a real­ly bad idea:

The Guardian
Gov­ern­ment to scrap child pover­ty tar­get before tax cred­its cut

Iain Dun­can Smith to remove mea­sure that required erad­i­ca­tion of child pover­ty by 2020 after pub­li­ca­tion of sta­tis­tics reveals no fall in lev­el

Patrick Win­tour Polit­i­cal Edi­tor

Wednes­day 1 July 2015 10.11 EDT

The gov­ern­ment is to scrap its child pover­ty tar­get and replace it with a new duty to report lev­els of edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment, workless­ness and addic­tion, rather than rel­a­tive mate­r­i­al dis­ad­van­tage, work and pen­sions sec­re­tary Iain Dun­can Smith has said.

The old tar­get set by Tony Blair, based on the per­cent­age of house­holds with below aver­age income, will con­tin­ue to be pub­lished as a gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tic – but will no longer be seen as a tar­get.

The new mea­sures were large­ly worked out by Dun­can Smith with the Lib­er­al Demo­c­rat schools min­is­ter, David Laws, in the coali­tion gov­ern­ment. They were shelved when blocked by the chan­cel­lor, George Osborne, who was wor­ried about the pol­i­tics of reform­ing the sys­tem.

The down­grad­ing of the exist­ing tar­get comes before a big cut in tax cred­its, expect­ed in the 8 July bud­get as part of a dri­ve to cut the wel­fare bud­get.

The cuts to tax cred­its would have made it even hard­er to reach the old child pover­ty tar­get by 2020, the tar­get date set by Labour and the end point of this par­lia­ment. Although some MPs wel­comed the attempt to focus on the root caus­es of pover­ty, the removal of the mate­r­i­al income tar­get was denounced by Labour as the obit­u­ary notice for com­pas­sion­ate Con­ser­vatism.

Dun­can Smith told MPs: “Workless­ness mea­sures will iden­ti­fy the pro­por­tion of chil­dren liv­ing in work­less house­holds and the pro­por­tion of chil­dren in long-term work­less house­holds.

“The edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment mea­sures will focus on GCSE attain­ment for all pupils and for par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­ad­van­taged pupils.”

Dun­can Smith argued the mea­sures set by Tony Blair are a poor mea­sure of pover­ty, since fam­i­lies can fall or go above the rel­a­tive pover­ty line for rea­sons that have lit­tle to do with their mate­r­i­al wealth.

“We know in house­holds with unsta­ble rela­tion­ships, where debt and addic­tion desta­bilise fam­i­lies, where par­ents lack employ­ment skills, where chil­dren just aren’t ready to start school, these chil­dren don’t have the same chances in life as oth­ers. It is self evi­dent.

“They can­not break out of that cycle of dis­ad­van­tage. We are cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing these mea­sures right now – fam­i­ly break­down, prob­lem debt and drug and alco­hol depen­den­cy – and we will report each year on these life chances as well.”

Dun­can Smith said the child pover­ty and social mobil­i­ty com­mis­sion, chaired by Alan Mil­burn, the for­mer Labour cab­i­net min­is­ter, will be renamed the social mobil­i­ty com­mis­sion.

Dun­can Smith has been giv­en the polit­i­cal lee­way to make the reforms after the annu­al child pover­ty sta­tis­tics, pub­lished by gov­ern­ment last week, did not show the wide­ly pre­dict­ed rise.

Dun­can Smith said: “Gov­ern­ments will no longer just focus on mov­ing fam­i­lies above a pover­ty line, instead we want to focus on mak­ing a mean­ing­ful change to children’s lives by extend­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for all, so both they and their chil­dren can escape from the cycle of pover­ty and improve their life chances.

“This process marks a shift, I hope, from sole­ly mea­sur­ing inputs of expen­di­ture to mea­sur­ing the out­comes of chil­dren-focused pol­i­cy.”

He con­tin­ued: “The prob­lem with the statu­to­ry frame­work set around the rel­a­tive income mea­sure has become ... all too appar­ent.

“At 60% of medi­an income, if you sit below the line you are said to be poor, if you sit above it you are not. Ask­ing gov­ern­ment to raise every­one above that set per­cent­age, I think, has led often to unin­tend­ed con­se­quences for good rea­sons.”

Dun­can Smith cit­ed “mas­sive spikes” in tax cred­it spend­ing ahead of the 2005 and 2010 elec­tions. He said between 2002 and 2010, spend­ing on tax cred­its “more than dou­bled” to £258 bil­lion, while over­all wel­fare spend­ing was up 60% in real terms.

The for­mer Labour health sec­re­tary, Alan Mil­burn, said: “It has long been obvi­ous that the exist­ing child pover­ty tar­gets are not going to be met. In fact, they will be missed by a coun­try mile. The com­mis­sion has argued in the past that a more round­ed way of mea­sur­ing pover­ty – tak­ing greater account of causal risk fac­tors – is sen­si­ble.”

He added: “It is not cred­i­ble to try to improve the life chances of the poor with­out acknowl­edg­ing the most obvi­ous symp­tom of pover­ty: lack of mon­ey. Unless the gov­ern­ment sets out a clear tar­get for improv­ing the life chances of the poor­est fam­i­lies, its agen­da for heal­ing social divi­sion in our coun­try will lack both ambi­tion and cred­i­bil­i­ty.

“Abol­ish­ing the legal tar­gets doesn’t make the issue of child pover­ty go away,” Mil­burn con­tin­ued. “It remains a deep scar in the fab­ric of our nation. The key issue is less how child pover­ty is mea­sured and more how it is tack­led. Far more needs to be done to make sure that the poor­est fam­i­lies share in the pro­ceeds of eco­nom­ic growth.

“When two in three poor chil­dren are nowa­days in fam­i­lies where some­one is in work, the pri­or­i­ty has to be to tack­le in-work pover­ty. That’s why we look to the gov­ern­ment to cham­pi­on the liv­ing wage and to ensure that wel­fare cuts do not fall exclu­sive­ly on the work­ing poor.

The act­ing shad­ow work and pen­sions min­is­ter, Stephen Timms, quot­ed com­ments from David Cameron in 2006, when he said: “Pover­ty is rel­a­tive and those who pre­tend oth­er­wise are wrong.

“The prime min­is­ter promised that a gov­ern­ment he led would – I quote – ‘act on rel­a­tive pover­ty’. Why is that promise being bro­ken?”

Child Pover­ty Action Group also voiced con­cerns: “The state­ment isn’t about strength­en­ing efforts to end child pover­ty, but about bury­ing the fail­ure of the government’s child pover­ty approach. And with more cuts com­ing down the line, child pover­ty is set to rise.”

Well, that’s one way to elim­i­nate pover­ty: rede­fine it to no longer involve a lack of mon­ey:

“Gov­ern­ments will no longer just focus on mov­ing fam­i­lies above a pover­ty line, instead we want to focus on mak­ing a mean­ing­ful change to children’s lives by extend­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty for all, so both they and their chil­dren can escape from the cycle of pover­ty and improve their life chances.”

You know how, in a lot of vam­pire movies, the sce­nario is that soci­ety is secret­ly run by real life elite vam­pires that feed on the home­less. Well, it turns out we sort of have to hope that’s real­ly the case in the UK and there’s a sud­den short­age of home­less youth for the elite vam­pires like to feed on. It’s real­ly the most char­i­ta­ble expla­na­tion for what the UK gov­ern­ment is about to do to the UK’s most vul­ner­a­ble youths:

The Guardian
What have young peo­ple done to Osborne to deserve such con­tempt?

As if the chan­cel­lor hasn’t mon­stered the young enough, he intro­duces a gra­tu­itous cut to hous­ing ben­e­fit and oth­er exemp­tions that will cause mis­ery

Pol­ly Toyn­bee

Thurs­day 9 July 2015 06.02 EDT

Why are the young caught in the cross-hairs of this gov­ern­ment? That will mys­ti­fy future social his­to­ri­ans. Most soci­eties talk of them as “our future”, to be nur­tured and encour­aged, but in yesterday’s bud­get, yet again they were pur­sued in a spe­cial vendet­ta of dis­like, bor­der­ing on dis­gust.

Per­ry fits most of the cri­te­ria for the image of a dis­rep­utable young per­son to be starved into shape – though his only crime is to be born. He’s 20 and lives in a YMCA hos­tel in Bur­ton-on-Trent. He is one of six chil­dren, and that’s become almost a crime in itself, now ben­e­fits are being with­drawn from any fam­i­ly with more than two – if they’re low-paid. (Cameron has three chil­dren, Iain Dun­can Smith four.) He comes from a “bro­ken home”, crime num­ber two. When he was 10 his moth­er took off with a new man who beat her up and took against Per­ry. Home life was tur­bu­lent and he missed a lot of school. His moth­er took to drink­ing, and after rows, he was even­tu­al­ly thrown out and can’t go back. So now he relies on hous­ing ben­e­fit – crime num­ber three – which has just been axed for under-21s in the bud­get.

He has sofa-surfed with friends and slept rough, until, trau­ma­tised and lone­ly, he reached this safe haven, where he is being helped to recov­er and get him­self into work. “When I moved into the YMCA I had real­ly bad depres­sion and anx­i­ety,” he says. “I was in a bad way. Apart from going to the job­cen­tre, I pret­ty much didn’t leave my room at all for a month or two.”

He was going for an inter­view the day I talked to him, but wants to go back to col­lege to pick up his missed edu­ca­tion and become a com­put­er and mobile phone repair tech­ni­cian. Painful­ly shy and unsure of him­self at first, now he’s ten­ant rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the hos­tel.

He is one of 19,894 under-21s on jobseeker’s allowance who claim hous­ing ben­e­fit, which until yes­ter­day was cost­ing the state £128m a year. The gov­ern­ment will still pay for those who have chil­dren, leav­ing 17,689 to be cut adrift to fend for them­selves with nowhere to live. Hous­ing ben­e­fit pays £220 a week to keep Per­ry there – but the Bur­ton YMCA doesn’t know how it will man­age to keep the 34 under-21s in its care with­out that mon­ey. Medi­a­tors help get young peo­ple back to their fam­i­lies where pos­si­ble, about 40 a year here, sav­ing the state.

In his lone­ly trav­els, Per­ry has met lots more like him. Even if spe­cial­ist hos­tels get a dis­pen­sa­tion – noth­ing in the small print says so yet – most of those cut adrift will be on the streets with­out hous­ing ben­e­fit. They aren’t liv­ing the high-life in flats: pre­vi­ous ben­e­fit cuts made sure under-35s can only rent a room. On the streets they are vul­ner­a­ble and may be forced into crime: if so, that £220 a week hous­ing ben­e­fit looks good val­ue com­pared with the £170 a night cost of a youth offend­er insti­tu­tion. When the young were cut off from hous­ing ben­e­fit by Mar­garet Thatch­er in the 80s, they poured out onto the streets in card­board cities, high­ly vis­i­ble and polit­i­cal­ly embar­rass­ing. Research from Heri­ot-Watt Uni­ver­si­ty sug­gests the social costs – health, crime, men­tal prob­lems – mean this pet­ty mean­ness will bare­ly even save any mon­ey.

...

This cut is such a gra­tu­itous blow, a polit­i­cal ges­ture designed to imply there is a gen­er­a­tion liv­ing off the fat of the state because they pre­fer it to liv­ing with bor­ing par­ents. Jobseeker’s allowance is being removed from the young too, putting them on a new youth oblig­a­tion scheme instead. Worst of all, the new high­er min­i­mum wage won’t apply to the under 25s – the ones most like­ly to be on star­va­tion wages. But only 0.6% of 18 to 21-year-olds are on both hous­ing ben­e­fit and jobseeker’s allowance, and all the research shows these are main­ly aban­doned and dis­lo­cat­ed young peo­ple like Per­ry.

In his time, Osborne has stripped the young of edu­ca­tion main­te­nance allowances, shrunk tax cred­its, child ben­e­fits, upped tuition fees, cut fur­ther edu­ca­tion col­leges and careers advice while strip­ping away youth ser­vices. But above all, he and his par­ty have mon­stered the young. Nice young peo­ple now stay home until their 30s, unable to find hous­ing. Nice fam­i­lies stay togeth­er for­ev­er. The chil­dren of the rest are blamed and pun­ished.

As the arti­cle sug­gest, future his­to­ri­ans are prob­a­bly going to be rather mys­ti­fied as to why, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, a wealthy soci­ety like the UK would lie to itself about the prac­ti­cal­i­ty and its abil­i­ty to care for its most vul­ner­a­ble young adults and embrace a pol­i­cy of col­lec­tive­ly mon­ster­ing the young (they’re going to be mys­ti­fied a lot). But you also have to won­der what the future George Osborne is going to think about this when he’s, say, 90 and on his death bed. Do peo­ple look back fond­ly on a life spent mon­ster­ing the young as a polit­i­cal ges­ture?

Of course, we just have to hope that death bed con­fes­sions aren’t real­ly an issue for this crop of UK elites because they have already joined the ranks of the undead. It’s, in many ways, so much more pleas­ant a thought than the alter­na­tive.

It looks record high unem­ploy­ment was­n’t the only aus­ter­i­ty-induced record for Spain: sui­cides in Spain at record highs and now the lead­ing cause of unnat­ur­al death:

TheLocal.es

Spain’s sui­cide rate jumps to record high in eco­nom­ic cri­sis

The sui­cide rate in Spain has risen 20 per­cent since the start of the eco­nom­ic cri­sis and now caus­es more than twice the num­ber of deaths than from road traf­fic acci­dents.

Pub­lished: 31 Mar 2016 12:46 GMT+02:00

Sui­cide is the lead­ing cause of unnat­ur­al death in Spain far out­pac­ing death on the roads, from acci­den­tal falls or from drown­ing, and has soared by 20 per­cent since Spain’s eco­nom­ic cri­sis hit in 2008.

An aver­age of ten peo­ple kill them­selves each day in Spain, accord­ing to new fig­ures released by the coun­try’s Nation­al Sta­tis­tics Agency amount­ing to a total of 3,910 sui­cides dur­ing 2014 up from 3,263 in 2007.

In com­par­i­son, road deaths claimed the lives of 1,873 dur­ing 2014 a huge drop from the peak in 1989 when 8,218 peo­ple were killed on Span­ish roads.

Spain’s eco­nom­ic cri­sis saw the nation suf­fer strict aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures, high unem­ploy­ment, and a surge in house repos­ses­sions, which are wide­ly con­sid­ered to have con­tributed to a spike in sui­cide rates.

The largest rise in the sui­cide rate since the start of the cri­sis is seen in mid­dle aged men, the num­ber of men aged around 50 to kill them­selves has leapt 38 per­cent dur­ing the eight year peri­od.

“The age groups who feel the cri­sis most ful­ly are most affect­ed. You don’t react the same way to life’s chal­lenges at 50 as you to at 20,” explains Julio Perez Diaz, an ana­lyst at Spain’s nation­al sci­en­tif­ic research cen­tre (CSIC).\

Luis de Rivera, a psy­chi­a­trist at the Madrid’s Insti­tute of Psy­chother­a­py told El Mun­do that it wasn’t just eco­nom­ic hard­ship that is to blame for the rise in sui­cides but the dis­il­lu­sion­ment caused by the cri­sis.

“The break­down of basic beliefs and con­vic­tions are also to blame,” he explained.

“For exam­ple (the cri­sis) brings an end to the cer­tain­ty that if you gain a uni­ver­si­ty degree you will live very well. In Spain we tend­ed to equate psy­cho­log­i­cal secu­ri­ty with eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty and have sac­ri­ficed things like fam­i­ly, rela­tion­ships and per­son­al well being along the way. Now we find such sac­ri­fices have been in vain.”

...

In fact, although Spain’s sui­cide rate has reached a 25 years high, it still has one of the low­est rates with­in the Euro­pean Union accord­ing to Euro­stat fig­ures from 2013.

Spain’s rate of 8.4 sui­cides per 100,000 peo­ple is below the 11.6 EU aver­age where Lithua­nia has the high­est rate at 35, fol­lowed by Hun­gry, 21, Latvia, 19 and Bel­gium, 17.2.

Despite suf­fer­ing the high­est unem­ploy­ment in the Euro­zone, Greece’s sui­cide rate remains the low­est at 4.7, while the UK rate comes in at 7.3 and Italy 6.6.

“The largest rise in the sui­cide rate since the start of the cri­sis is seen in mid­dle aged men, the num­ber of men aged around 50 to kill them­selves has leapt 38 per­cent dur­ing the eight year peri­od.”
So tank­ing the econ­o­my and shred­ding the safe­ty-net fills peo­ple with despair, espe­cial­ly those who will need that safe­ty-net soon­er. How unex­pect­ed.

And note that when you read...

...
Despite suf­fer­ing the high­est unem­ploy­ment in the Euro­zone, Greece’s sui­cide rate remains the low­est at 4.7, while the UK rate comes in at 7.3 and Italy 6.6.

keep in mind that Greek sui­cide rate might be low rel­a­tive to oth­er EU coun­tries, but it’s also at record high lev­els for Greece.