It Sucks to be Poor

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PITTSBURGH—Although state lotteries, on average, return just 53 cents for every dollar spent on a ticket, people continue to pour money into them — especially low-income people, who spend a larger percentage of their incomes on lottery tickets than do the wealthier segments of society. A new Carnegie Mellon University study sheds light on the reasons why low-income lottery players eagerly invest in a product that provides poor returns.

In the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, participants who were made to feel subjectively poor bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets as a comparison group that was made to feel subjectively more affluent. The Carnegie Mellon findings point to poverty’s central role in people’s decisions to buy lottery tickets.

“Some poor people see playing the lottery as their best opportunity for improving their financial situations, albeit wrongly so,” said the study’s lead author Emily Haisley, a doctoral student in the Department of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. “The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape.”

July 24: Carnegie Mellon Study Uncovers Why Low-Income People Buy Lottery Tickets – Carnegie Mellon University.

I don’t mean to be facetious, because this is very important research into what has become an almost violently regressive form of taxation, but in the end what it says is simple: it sucks to be poor. The lottery is particularly sinister, too, because it has often been sold as a way to help the poor through better funding of the public schools. This is another legacy of conservative politics.

The money has only rarely (if ever) used to help schools, of course. I am hoping that in the near future we will look back on this and think: trying to raise tax money through a lottery was both stupid and cruel. My inner cynic is especially skeptical, though, because lotteries have been so well marketed that their image of harmless fun will be difficult if not impossible to change.

Posted in: Economics, Writing

High-Skill Educations

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Several recent reports underscore the 21st century challenges we face as a nation. First, disparities in educational attainment persist across racial and ethnic groups: Forty-two percent of whites ages 25 to 64 have an associate’s degree or higher compared with 26 percent of African Americans and 18 percent of Hispanics. Second, assuming no significant changes in degree attainment patterns, the United States will fall 16 million degrees short of the number needed to match leading nations in the percentage of adults with a college degree and to meet the workforce needs of 2025.

Third, high-skill jobs that require advanced learning (a postsecondary education credential) will make up almost half of all job growth in the United States in the next decade. Without increasing the labor supply in these economic sectors, businesses and corporations will look elsewhere to hire college-educated workers. Fourth, stagnation in educational attainment is not only a problem of access to colleges and universities; in fact, barely half of students (54 percent) who begin college complete a degree or certificate, which ranks the United States last among the development economy member nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

Federal Access Policies and Higher Education for Working Adults.

This report gets filed under “saving capitalism from itself” along with the green jobs programs of the Apollo Group I wrote about earlier in the week. Education is a harder sell, I think, despite the long-standing political necessity of emphasizing it’s importance. It’s also important to define education carefully.

I lived in Austin, Texas, in the 1980s, just as the digital juggernaut was just beginning to build up steam. All of the technology firms claimed that they were coming to Austin becuase of the well educated workforce. They said, in effect, that they wanted to take advantage of all of those slackers with doctorates.

What was interesting was that at the same time these same companies were setting up programs at the community colleges to provide the sorts of technical training needed in high tech factories. In fact, they were not at all interested in those slackers; too many of them had liberal arts degrees.

They knew that they could get the workers they needed on the cheap. Unless we are careful, the green revolution may well turn out to be a similarly hollow promise. The ideals of the liberal arts education was that education was an end in itself as well as a means to a better job. It’s as important as ever.

Posted in: Writing

Apollo Alliance

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 1, 2008 – The Apollo Alliance today introduced a comprehensive national economic strategy, founded on the principles of clean energy and good jobs, to chart a promising path to new prosperity through an American landscape buffeted by high energy prices, stagnant wages, widespread foreclosures, institutional collapses, and dangerously warming temperatures.

The carefully constructed plan, The New Apollo Program: An Economic Strategy for American Prosperity, was prepared over the last year by a coalition of experts from business, labor, the environmental, and social justice communities. The title was inspired by the Apollo space program, in which the United States embraced a similarly ambitious national purpose to surmount a formidable technological challenge within a decade. The plan calls for investing $500 billion over the next ten years on specific steps for generating clean power, improving energy conservation and efficiency, cutting energy bills, restoring America’s technological and industrial preeminence, and creating 5 million high-quality jobs.

The New Apollo Program : Apollo Alliance.

We’ve been in the wilderness of Conservative nonsense for so long it’s feels surprising to find that there are so many well developed alternatives. The Apollo Group is a great example. The energy and climate problems are closely intertwined; so is the solution.

I wouldn’t want to draw the parallels between FDR and Obama too closely– there’s no great depression yet– but it does seem that his job in the next several years is to try to save Capitalism from itself. Our job, I think, is to be as informed as possible about the sources of these ideas.

Posted in: Writing