News About Inequality - December 2008

'Community Revitalization in the United States and the United Kingdom'

• The Urban Institute, December 30, 2008
  The Urban Institute and the UK's Institute for Community Cohesion developed an innovative program of work to compare approaches to community revitalization, community cohesion and sustainable neighborhoods in cities across both countries. This report describes the project, discusses contextual differences between the two countries that affect subsidized housing, and highlights lessons drawn from the exchanges that took place during the spring and summer of 2008.

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'Supporting Young Children and Families: An Investment Strategy that Pays'

• The Brookings Institution, Winter, 2008
  Growing evidence on the critical importance of children's early years is changing public attitudes toward early childhood programs. If we want all children to enter school ready to learn, public investment in children cannot wait until kindergarten. Tight government budgets require that any new spending stand up to sharp scrutiny. Fortunately, there is ample evidence of successful programs.

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'Retraining America's Workers - The People Puzzle'

• The Economist, December 30, 2008
  Thousands of workers are losing their jobs. America now faces the hard task of getting them back to work.

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'Redoing Globalization'

• The Nation, December 23, 2008
  The great financial bubble of the Clinton Bush years has ended in tears, in home foreclosures, bank failures and what promises to be the most severe global economic recession since the Great Depression. As President elect Obama puts together his economic recovery program, he needs to understand that the economic crisis is the result not just of unscrupulous mortgage lenders and unregulated investment bankers on Wall Street but of the globalization of finance and trade that key members of his economic team set in motion when they were in the Clinton administration. The uncomfortable truth is that the current system of global commerce and transnational finance is inherently prone to crisis. Any sustainable recovery on the domestic front, therefore, will depend on his success in getting other countries to agree to fundamental changes in that global system.

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'Low-Skilled Workers Struggle Amid More Competition and Fewer Openings'

• The Washington Post, December 20, 2008
  Washington area residents who count on low-wage work to make ends meet are having difficulty finding employment as a tight labor market and a more experienced pool of job applicants squeeze opportunities, according to job counselors and labor experts.

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'A Payoff Out of Poverty?'

• The New York Times, December 19, 2008
  FORTY-NINE YEARS AGO, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis published a book called "Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty," detailing a single day in these families' lives.

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'The Current Detainee Population of Guantanamo: An Empirical Study'

• The Brookings Institution, December 16, 2008
  The following report represents an effort both to document and to describe in as much detail as the public record will permit the current detainee population in American military custody at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba. Since the military brought the first detainees to Guantanamo in January 2002, the Pentagon has consistently refused to comprehensively identify those it holds. While it has, at various times, released information about individuals who have been detained at Guantanamo, it has always maintained ambiguity about the population of the facility at any given moment, declining even to specify precisely the number of detainees held at the base.

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'Battle in a Poor Land for Riches Beneath the Soil'

• New York Times, December 14, 2008
  A battle is unfolding on the stark mountains and scalloped dunes of northern Niger between a band of Tuareg nomads, who claim the riches beneath their homeland are being taken by a government that gives them little in return, and an army that calls the fighters drug traffickers and bandits.

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'A Stimulating Question'

• The Economist, December 11, 2008
  Can emerging economies now afford counter-cyclical policies?

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'Life on 70 Cents a Day'

• The Economist, December 11, 2008
  From a cradle of liberty to one of the poorest places on earth.

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'Suing to Raise a Payment of Last Resort'

• New York Times, December 8, 2008
  New York State has not raised its basic payment for people on welfare since 1989, forcing many recipients to skip meals, wear hand-me-downs and spend many days confined to their homes because they lack the $4 needed for a subway trip, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday.

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'When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care'

• New York Times, December 7, 2008
  As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.

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'Family and Office Roles Mix'

• New York Times, December 3, 2008
  THE office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude. Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognize at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.

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'College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.'

• New York Times, December 3, 2008
  The rising cost of college - even before the recession - threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

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'Minorities, Displacement, and Iraq's Future'

• The Brookings Institution, December, 2008
  It is no coincidence that many internally displaced persons and refugees are members of minority groups. In every region of the world, minorities have been repressed, killed and displaced by governments and other armed actors seeking to take over their territory, command their loyalty, and control their actions.