Moving day

So we're moving to a another blog. It's a bit more unique, so visitors can perhaps find it more easily (As it turns out, there are already several academics in exile blogging away).

Other than that, business as usual.

We're at  The Makeshift Academic now, so all of my readers (both of you) can update your links.

My blog is dead. Long live my blog!

Ignorance is bliss: How Americans' low political knowledge may help "Obamacare" work better

For those of you nervous about the success the health-care exchanges, take a look at this letter:

It's a boring HR letter. That's actually the point. 

(Photo by Patrick O'Mahen)

It comes from the benefits office of my most recent employer, the University of Michigan, with which I am still nominally affiliated. The letter describes coming options under the Affordable Care Act. It indicates that UM offers many employees health care benefits that meet standards for the ACA, and indicates that other employees can go get health insurance on the exchanges.

Polls suggest that Americans don’t particularly love the ACA. Most polls also suggest that they don’t understand it. With uncertain roll-out and the loud and well-funded campaign encouraging people not to sign up on the exchanges, many of the law’s backers (including me) are a bit nervous. But it’s reassuring that a letter like this that will be many Americans’ first contact with the health care law. 

Follow me below the fold for my reasoning.

"The Sound of Freedom"

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry officially marked the opening of the Katy Freeway expansion in 2008, he declared that the roar of traffic in the background was "the sound of freedom."

Freedom:

 
10 mph, thousands of unnecessary of tons of carbon emissions and particulate pollution, thousands of wasted hours sitting in traffic. Freedom, indeed. Didn't George Orwell write a few things about this?

Sure, technically that's is the Southwest Freeway I snapped walking home a few days ago, but I guarantee that I-10 looked the same or worse. And yes, that bumper-to-bumper center lane is the HOV toll lane. At least the toll-authority was collecting $4.75 for every non-HOV vehicle to recoup some of the costs for ramming this monstrosity through a residential neighborhood. (The rich white neighborhoods got expensive trenching and soundproofing -- African American communities didn't make out so well in highway construction.)

Thank God I can walk home -- it's faster.

And thank God that (some parts of)] this region has finally started to get serious about transportation planning over the last decade -- because if 13- and 18-lane freeways can't handle the volume, I doubt that it's cost effective or desirable to build any road that can.

The University Light Rail Line can't get here fast enough.

Compromising on Medicaid Expansion: Real Alternatives, or GOP trap?

Tomorrow, the big news for the Affordable Care Act will be the opening of the state-level insurance exchanges. But the other major part of the law, Medicaid expansion, proceeds apace. Republican governors in many states have simply rejected Medicaid increases, presumably on the grounds that providing poor people with health insurance is a nefarious communist plot. However, some GOP-dominated states like Michigan or divided-control states like Arkansas are working with the Department of Health and Human Services to develop alternative routes for expanding Medicaid coverage to the working poor. The challenge for the Obama administration (and progressive activists) is to determine which plans stay true to the spirit of the ACA and which ones may dangerously undermine it.

Obviously, the biggest goal is to increase coverage, but we also need to be mindful of the various strings that conservative governors and legislators might attach to the modified plans seeking waivers from the Department of HHS. 

Medicaid expansion was originally supposed to automatically apply to all states, but the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling on the Affordable Care Act made it optional. Not surprisingly, 14 states with unified Democratic control immediately signed up for the expansion; the opportunity to provide universal health insurance to residents under 138 percent of the poverty line fulfilled a longstanding progressive dream – all made possible by the federal government picking up 90 percent of the long-term costs.

Of 24 states under complete GOP control, only two took the traditional expansion (North Dakota and Arizona) while 17 rejected it entirely. Six of the 12 states with divided control governments agreed to the standard expansion, while three have passed for now. (Here's a handy map with the state decisions)

That leaves six states under GOP control (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee and Florida) and three states under with split control (Arkansas, Iowa and New Hampshire)  that are either still actively considering the expansion or have proposed a non-traditional style of expanding Medicaid more agreeable to Republican majorities.

And that’s where things have gotten interesting. Follow me below the break for details.

Adjusting to Texas Part I

So I traded this:

For this:

Ouch.
That's an Omar-Vizquel-for-Felix-Fermin-level trade. Rust Belt wins this one.

A good ACA info source

Balloon Juice has a new front pager named Richard Mayhew. He's a bureaucrat at some private insurance company someplace and a political liberal. He's also been using his inside knowledge of health insurance to write a serious of very informative posts  about the nuts and bolts of why health insurance works the way it does and how the Affordable Care Act changes incentives. The comment threads that follow are also unusually thoughtful and informative with real questions from real people about real situations.

I highly recommend checking him out. Here's a link to a collection of all of his posts.

On specific topics, see a list below:

How and why deductibles and co-payments work the way they do.

What networks are and how they affect costs.

The problem of adverse selection and how it hampered reforms in New York and other states
(THIS IS WHY WE NEED AN INDIVIDUAL MANDATE PEOPLE)

An explanation of the rationale behind Medicare Part D doughnut hole and why it doesn't work out well in practice. 

This is how the Internet ought to work.

The Affordable Care Act: Obama's greatest achievement on gender equality?

As we count down the days to the opening of the health-care exchanges, it's worth mentioning that the Affordable Care Act is easily the biggest law promoting gender equality since the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 for the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993.

Barrack Obama has taken his share of flack on women's issues. Most recently, people have challenged his record of high-level executive-branch appointments for women, which has been considerably better than George W. Bush's but weaker than Bill Clinton's. On the other hand,Obama has appointed a record percentage of female judges -- by a country mile. (He's still not appointing women at their prevalence level in the population, but he's getting close)  And the pay gap between men and women is stubbornly constant, with women (still) making roughly 77 cents on average for every man.

But starting January 1, 2014, the ACA will remove several billion dollars in annual gender discrimination.

Will the ACA's medical device tax be repealed?

Today I explore a different aspect of yesterday's topic of the Affordable Care Act's Medical Device Tax. It's more political science (the factors that influence public policy making) than public policy (how effective actual policy ideas are).

The original perspectives piece on the tax in the New England Journal of Medicine by Daniel Kramer and Aaron Kesselheim report that the U.S. Senate voted 79-20 to repeal the tax as part of its non-binding budget resolution that passed last March. The authors then note that the repeal vote was bipartisan, overwhelming, and came after an intense lobbying campaign by the medical device industry. Based on this vote, they suggest that the tax is in imminent danger of repeal.

I think this fear of repeal likely overblown for now because talk is cheap and there were too many possible factors that into each Senator's vote to repeal to figure out if a majority of Senators would have actually voted to repeal the tax if push came to shove (the fancy social science term is to say the result was overdetermined)

Chait on the GOP's desperate push to kill Obamacare

Here's a fascinating must-read on the implementation of Obamacare regarding the differences of rhetoric between the pro- and anti- Affordable Care Act factions. It's a wonderfully researched summary full of very interesting political science hypotheses waiting to be tested.

Jonathan Chait was one of the earliest, best and most thorough reporters on the ACA as it wheezed toward passage. It's only fitting that he's here writing excellent stuff at the end of the journey.

Update: Krugman nails it:

Yep, when it comes to reaching hipsters, or young people in general — I know, Katy Perry — Dems have big advantages; all that coastal cultural elite hatred suddenly turns into a big disadvantage for the right.

But that’s not all: there are also channels of influence the party of Fox News simply cannot reach: Spanish-language radio and TV, black churches (which played a big role in 2012), and more.

I don’t know whether anyone thought this out in advance, but the battle of the exchanges is indeed being fought on remarkably favorable ground for the reformers. And I, for one, find the thought of conservatives humiliated by an army of tweeting hipsters remarkably cheering.

Does the medical device tax cut innovation? Maybe sometimes -- and that's the point

In the Sept. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine's correspondence section, several physicians jousted over the impact of the Affordable Care Act's 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices. I was disappointed in the focus of the argument on the tax's effect on innovation in the medical device industry.  The entire exchange missed the broader point: how much does "innovation" in medical devices actually improve health care and how much of it is rent-seeking that siphons off patient and taxpayer dollars without helping patients?

Right now, most of my readers are probably asking, "Wait, what's this medical device tax?"

Good question. Part of the negotiations behind the ACA entailed major stakeholders in the health care industry -- hospitals and provider organizations,  health insurance companies, drug companies and medical device manufacturers to contribute to cost savings as the law was implemented. Hospital associations agreed to cuts in reimbursement rates in Medicare and Medicaid payments valued at about $155 billion from 2010-2020, health insurance companies had an annual fee levied on them that works out to about $60 billion over the same decade, while drug maker agreed to levies on branded drugs of about $27 billion. The medical device industry reluctantly acceded to a 2.3 percent tax on all sales of medical devices not available on the retail market (i.e. we're taxing M.D Anderson's newest CT Scanner and not grandma's wheelchair). The tax is projected to bring in about $20 billion over the first decade of the ACA's existence and went into effect at the beginning of 2013

I'm getting all of these details out of John E. McDonough's superb Inside National Health Reform, which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand Obamacare. You should buy this book.

OK, now back to the debate in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Increasing Productivity

Look, it's whatever it takes to get us going and help us be productive, right?

And if sugary fruit snacks from children's cartoons improve my productivity, no one should judge. Hey -- they do have those box top that contribute to schools. That sort of makes up for all the high-fructose corn syrup, right? Right?

Does GOP hate Obamacare or Unions more?

The post title here is rhetorical. Conservative Republicans hate both with equal fervor. But it is interesting to watch them twist themselves into knots with the Obama administration's move last week to deny a waiver sought by labor unions to cover multi-employer health plans common in some industries.

First, Republicans praised unions for criticizing the Affordable Care Act:

“It’s encouraging to see those who strongly endorsed the health care law finally recognize its fundamental problems,” the GOP-led House Education and Workforce Committee said in a statement Thursday.

Then they immediately made hay bashing unions again:

And even if the administration isn’t signaling that it’s going to respond to union demands — Republicans are moving to preempt any such accommodation.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has introduced the Union Bailout Prevention Act and filed it as an amendment to the energy bill the Senate is debating. By Thursday, he had 10 co-sponsors.

“The Republicans are perfectly happy to crow about how the unions hate the law too, but hell will freeze over before they agree to do” anything legislatively to address their concerns, [Washington & Lee University Professor Tim] Jost said.

Sigh.

My personal favorite commentary was this rather unhinged reaction by Aik Roy, allegedly one of the smarter conservative commentators on health care. He's does an about face from (incorrectly) hyperventilating that ACA exchanges will lead to rate shocks people paying much more for insurance to crowing about how workers will get better insurance and lead to the end of unions in the United States.

Why?

Well, because government-sponsored health insurance remove union's role in managing health care and show workers that unions are unnecessary:

The great irony—one that union leaders are only now starting to recognize—is that by [backing universal health insurance], they’ve accelerated their own demise, at least in the private sector. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers are unionized. That number will continue to decline as workers realize they don’t need unions for their health benefits. The labor movement will increasingly become comprised of public-sector unions, giving it a far different character than it has today.

Most importantly, workers will benefit from this change. Instead of paying a big chunk of their wages to labor unions and insurance companies, they’ll be able to keep those wages for themselves.

But we can test this hypothesis. According to Roy's logic, countries with universal government-sponsored health insurance -- especially single-payer systems -- should cut unions out of the system. Without health insurance to dangle in front of their members, unions should then whither away and these countries should have low union densities.

Do Roy's contentions hold up?  Not so much.  According to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23.5 percent of the U.S. work force was unionized in 1970. In 2003, that had dropped to 12.4 percent, a decline of 47 percent. In contrast, Canada with its universal health insurance went from a union density of  31.8 percent to 28.4 percent, a decline of 10.7 percent. The average European Union country dropped from 37.8 percent to 26 percent - a decline of 32 percent. (See page 8 of the study)

Not only are the absolute levels of union membership higher in countries with universal healthcare, but their decline have been slower than in the United States. Sorry Aivk, thanks for playing.

Roy is likely to get his wish of weaker unions. But it has nothing to do with universal health insurance. The long shadow of the Taft-Hartley law, the destruction of traditionally unionized manufacturing industries, and state governments run by vandals have done a quite effective job of destroying organized labor and eroding workers living standards over the last four decades.

Thoughts on Obama administration denying union attempts for an ACA waiver

UPDATE: There's a political dimension to this, which I'll deal with in another post.

Ezra Klein, Politico and Avik Roy  reported that the Obama administration denied a key waiver sought by labor leaders for a type of multiple-insurer insurance plan that covers more than 20 million American workers.

Unions,  particularly the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers and the garment workers union (UNITE HERE) wanted the Obama administration to make these plans (called "Taft-Hartley" plans after the legislation that created them) eligible for subsidies offered under the new state health exchanges. As Klein notes, however, they don't comply with some of the requirements of the exchange plans (general issue for example) Also, the plans are already tax-exempt -- and will be until 2018 when taxes will be levied on the company-paid plan premiums in excess of $10,000 for an individual and $27,000 for a family.

Labor is a bit miffed because they believe that the administration is delaying regulations for businesses while leaving labor out. I'm sympathetic to this, but I'm not really sure how how the administration could have ruled otherwise. If they make this exemption for the labor plans, it might open up Pandora's box. How will they stop businesses from claiming both subsidies and tax-exemptions for offering insurance?  How will they deny insurers who want to open plans on the exchanges that don't have guaranteed issue (i.e. exclude sick people)? It has the potential to undermine some pretty big parts of the Affordable Care Act in the way the delaying other regulations for 12-24 months won't.

What are the ramifications of the Obama administration's refusal to grant a waiver for these plans? The short answer is that we don't know. There are several shifting incentives here that may shift the state of the Taft-Hartley plans in a variety of directions.

Trader Joe's decision good sign for Obamacare

Recently, Trader Joe's  made waves when it announced that it would stop offering health insurance to currently eligible part-time employees (about 17,000 employees) and give them an extra $500 in pay to let them shop for coverage on the new health care exchanges that will open on Oct. 1.

At first glance, this looks terrible: a private company is taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act and dumping workers' benefits to save money -- others surely will soon.

On reflection though, this is probably a good thing. After all, the private insurance market has been unraveling for over a decade anyway. Trader Joe's is still offering benefits to its full-time employees. Health reform hasn't caused the collapse of employer insurance in Massachusetts. Finally, Trader Joe's part-timers will on the balance have access to health insurance for a fair price -- regardless of their future employment.

Like many economic developments, this move creates winners and losers. But we can't stop there: we need to ask two questions: First, who wins and who loses? Second, how much do they win or lose?

Generation Y and "Entitlement"

Amen Mr. Weinstein.

I have a PhD from one of the finest universities in the country and I've taught more classes than many tenure-track professors have, but after applying for 85 academic jobs in two years, I've come up empty. It's a simply terrifying experience for most of us on the market --we're generally far better qualified than our peers who graduated in the 1960s and 1970s were, but we're being shut out. I'll be writing more on the problems of contingent short-term labor in academia over the coming months, but they're pretty similar to the ones journalists and others of our generation face.

And Weinstein nails my attitude toward people who look at us in the 22-35 crowd with contempt:

This state of affairs does not exist because we're entitled and have simply declined to work as hard as the people that birthed us. American workers have changed from generation to generation: Since 1979, the alleged Dawn of the Millennial, the average U.S. worker has endured a 75 percent increase in productivity...while real wages stayed flat.

Any lecturer with a PhD. patching together a 4-4 course load across three different universities for $19,000 a year gets it.

As I've written, I'm one of the lucky ones -- no student debt, decent health, a soon-to-be spouse with a decent job.  I always wonder if I have the right to complain -- well, here's Weinstein's answer to that question:

So no, we shan't be doing as well as our parents, and no, we shan't be shutting up about it. If anything, those of us who have been cowed into silence because college-educated poor problems aren't real poor problems should shed our fears and start talking about just how hard it really is out there, man.

 So, complain it shall be, though with the awareness that some one is always worse off -- and an emphasis on effective action as well.

As usual, invoking Atrios' sentiment in the titles of his posts sums up the point pithily.

Home-care workers get federal wage protections

The Obama administration just announced that home-care workers qualify for federal  wage protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This is a big deal. Most of these workers already make at least the minimum wage, but they don't qualify for overtime salaries because they were literally classified as babysitters.

According to the Department of Labor, there are about 2 million workers that qualify for the new protections --nearly 50 percent of whom are minorities.

It's not surprising that a job classification dominated by minorities (and women, but that's another story) was exempt from the FLSA. The exemptions were part of the price that Jim-Crow-era Southern politicians extracted as their price for the passage of much of the New Deal. They wanted relief from the Great Depression, but only would agree to social programs that did not interfere with the peculiar institutions of the south that kept African Americans on the bottom of the labor and social structure. (It's also why every Southern Democrat joined pro-business owner Republicans in backing the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act) For those looking for a good history on the subject, Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White details the whole depressing process.

Today's long-overdue step eradicates a small part of the poisonous legacy over despite the opposition of for-profit nursing homes.

Finally: Elections have consequences. This wouldn't have happened in a Mitt Romney administration.

Houston's baby bike-share grows into a precocious toddler

So walking home recently from the library, I found this nice surprise:

Houston B-cycle is apparently in expansion mode again.

The system, which started in the spring of 2012 as a three-station pilot program and 18 bikes, is now 26 stations with roughly 200 bikes. Early signs of the first part of the expansion last spring seemed to be a success, as the increased network led to a large jump in users.  According to Houston's office of sustainability, now an average of 1,300 trips are taken every week on Houston B-cyle around downtown. That's up from 150 checkouts immediately before the system expanded in March and 500 the week after.

Of course, ridership is a drop in the bucket of the several million auto trips taken in the city every day, and only a fraction of a decently used bus route (think about 2,000-3,000 boardings a day), but it's a start that will only grow bigger as the system spreads out within the I-610 Loop -- and remember, bike-share complements mass transit, it doesn't compete with it

Houston's bike-share folks seem to know what they're doing. You start in the densest parts of the city and build outward to develop a strong network. What's frustrating is the pace. Some bike-share systems subscribe to the "go-big or go home" school of building a network on the theory that a few stations give users few options and will be underused. What cities like Boston, New York, Washington DC, and Minneapolis did was to launch a large network of at least 60 stations and several hundred bikes to give instant access -- and all were wildly successful.

Like all public infrastructure, bike-share needs help for capital costs -- and government grants are a bit tougher to get in Texas for these sorts of things, as El Paso has found out to it's frustration. Houston B-cycle's pilot program was sponsored by a small federal grant that came from the stimulus package, while the expansion is being funded by a $750,000 sponsorship package from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas. Membership fees defray a good portion of the operating costs of the system. Similar-sized programs have taken root and are succeeding in places like San Antonio.

But it still seems expansion is maddeningly slow. Imagine if we could get a $7.5 million grant to fund a 1,800 bike expansion instead of a $750,000 grant  for a 180-bike expansion? Imagine getting 13,000 checkouts (or more -- a denser network makes this more attractive) instead of 1,300 I mean, if TxDOT will move heaven and earth for a $5.2 billion sprawl-inducing third beltway for Houston,  $7.5 million ought to be pocket change, right?

There are advantages to going under the radar too. The city can keep quietly improving the bicycle and cycling infrastructure in central neighborhoods and build a constituency for the program. As the safety and environmental benefits become apparent, bikes should become a much more accepted part of Houston, just like Metrorail has become. Every little expansion will gain new community groups and stake holders buying in (Rice University is hopefully next) who will push and defend the program as it continues to expand. precocious

Also, starting small and expanding incrementally might not draw the notice of this guy, which would be very much a positive thing, as any Metro planner can tell you.

So slow it is. Right now, it's tantalizing close to being useful to me -- but not quite. I now have two stations within a 15-minute walk of my home, but the problem is that it's a 10-minute walk in the opposite direction from many of the places I need to go. This isn't something that's convenient for me and thousands of my neighbors yet -- but it will be someday very soon.

From the "Signs that Work" file.

Here's an example of honesty/utility in Parks and Recreation advertising:

There's a large dog park about 10 feet to the right of this photo. It's amusing watching the mutts run around with each other when I jog by every morning. Every time I read this sign, I crack up inside.

OK, so my sense of humor is rather simple, but it's Monday. 

More posts coming later this week: one on Houston's slowly expanding bike-share program and several on some recent happenings in Obamacare implementation.

Saved by the Stimulus

Last night I went out to grab a drink with the fiance and a few of her friends. I met one of her college friends for the first time, and as we fell into conversation. She had an interesting personal story to tell about the impact of the much-maligned American Recovery and Reinvestment Act  of 2009 (AKA "the stimulus").

You see, she's a lawyer who now works for the federal government.  But she wasn't working when she graduated law school in the summer of 2008. She went to a top-50 law school and probably one of the 3 best ones in the south-central region -- so not tip-top, but solid quality. Insofar as law school prepares you to be a lawyer, this lady was prepared to be a lawyer. Over the next year, she applied for dozens of law jobs -- many in areas she didn't specialize in or had little interest in. But with the economy crashing around her, law work had dried up.

But in the spring of 2009, the Social Security Administration suddenly got an influx of federal from the ARRA to hire employees and improve administration -- about $1.1 billion (see page 6, footnote A).

Guess who got hired to work with disability claims?

Notice four things happen here. First, Fiance's College Friend (FCF) gets a job. Second, because FCF gets a job, she's able to go out more often for drinks at fine eating establishments in Houston, which helps those establishments stay in business and helps their employees get bigger paychecks and tips. That money then keeps accelerating through the economy. Note that those two things would happen even if FCF does nothing but look at cat pictures on the Internet and does nothing useful for society or Social  Security. But that's not the case, because third, she actually gains skills at a job that she seems to like and becomes more useful over time. And finally, skillfully evaluating disability claims means more efficient service for people filing claims and better value for taxpayers wanting efficient use of government resources.

Look, we can argue about how well the stimulus was targeted, or whether it was big enough, but it's actually full of millions of little stories similar to FCF's. And, as Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi (among others) have shown (see page 8 in particular, those stories cumulatively added up to keep the  unemployment rate about 1.5 percentage points lower than it otherwise would have been -- saving or creating roughly 2.7 million more jobs across the public and private sectors

Food for thought for policymakers, especially as I keep searching for a job.

In which I climb into the Monkey Cage

So I write things for other places too. I suppose it makes sense to link to this piece in the Monkey Cage, which highlights some of the work in my dissertation about the relevance of public broadcasting for increasing political knowledge. Despite our best efforts as political scientists, political science actually remains a relevant discipline for making public policy from time to time.

Now if some one would tell Tom Coburn. Actually don't -- the problem is that he understands all too well that political science has found  some uncomfortable truths about how modern democracy works -- or might not work -- in the United States.

Running

So I'm a runner.

For the last five months, it's been my freedom and maintained my sanity.

Two years ago, I started racing again. After a few 5ks, I set myself a goal to run a half marathon; it seemed a good goal -- long but not dangerously long, difficult but achievable, a challenging yet reasonable training schedule. 

In training, I finally discovered the true joys of distance running. I can try to explain it, but you really have to experience it. The physiological benefits are clear enough: you burn calories, improve muscle tone, increase lung capacity, strengthens the cardiovascular system. It also calms me and helps me focus on work. There's the sense of working toward a goal: with two half marathons under my belt, I have a quite respectable time (I broke 1:45 last June and am eying a late October race for my first real crack at 1:40 -- not setting the world on fire, but quite solid for a casual runner). Distance running also forces you to execute a strategy on the course in a way that running a 5 or even 10k really doesn't. It's a wonderful feeling when you successfully execute your strategy -- and break out from your pace group on mile 10.

But more than any of these things, running gives me autonomy. It gives me an identity. It gives me a purpose. It gives me achievements. All those things that unemployment takes away, running returns a measure.

The hidden costs of being unemployed

One of the disadvantages of being poor is that everything costs more. Because you can't put up a month's security deposit on an apartment, you're forced to pay out the nose for a a low-end motel that actually costs a lot more per month than a decent one-bedroom apartment (This book documents this unfortunate reality first hand).  Since the poor live paycheck to paycheck, they can't maintain minimum balances in their checking account and can't take advantage of the traditional banking system. Instead they're forced to "bank" with payday lenders who charge exorbitant interest rates for short-term loans, and even face large fees for the simple act of cashing their paycheck.

As discussed previously, I am by no means poor -- thanks in part to a previous career, supportive upper-middle class parents who helped me get through college, and a soon-to-be spouse who's taking care of pesky things like rent. However, I've made the lovely discovery that being unemployed offers some of the same hidden costs as poverty. Take for example my recent attendance at an academic conference.

In political science, as well as many other disciplines, attending national conferences is an integral part of being a successful academic. You can get your work noticed, get feedback on your scholarship, start to build up your CV and network with other academics. And most importantly for some one without a job, you can get job interviews, which can be your opportunity to stand out from the 50 to 150 other highly qualified applicants who want the same jobs you do.

But you have to get to the conference first. And attending the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association costs a considerable amount of money. First, you have to be an APSA member, which costs an annual fee. Then you have to register for the conference, which costs more. I needed to find a flight from Houston to Chicago and stay in the city for four nights to accomodate several interviews and a scholarly presentation. If you shop around, you can find quite reasonable hotel and flight rates, but I still paid roughly $600 for travel and hotel expenses to spend four days at the conference. Then you still need money for food and travel. You can minimize these costs by taking public transit (a $5 train ride from the airport and $2 bus ride to to hotel beats a $50 cab fare any day), but over four days it still adds up.

Here's the thing: most professors get many of these expenses reimbursed by their employers. As a part of their compensation package, they usually get an annual research grant that can be used for memberships in scholarly organizations and attendance at conferences. In political science, this often ranges from several hundred dollars at small liberal arts colleges to several thousand dollars at large research schools. Graduate students can often (though not always) tap funds to attend conferences as well, either through their professors or through their institutions. At my old school, grad students could attend one conference a year and get up to a $700 grant to cover it -- this little benefit got me about $1500 over three years (and three lines on my CV). Of course, privilege plays a role here too -- richer grad schools generally provide more funding for their grad students to attend conferences, as well as providing better pay and benefits.

Because I'm unemployed however, now I do research on my own dime. Somewhat perversely then, it costs me much more out of pocket to attend a conference than it costs my better-off-financially colleagues who could actually afford it.

I'm not complaining about APSA's management here. The organization tries to mitigate inequality through several mechanisms. First, they have a progressive membership fee structure -- members with higher incomes pay more, and unemployed members pay much less. They also have travel grants to help less well-off members come to the conference -- the $150 they awarded me essentially defrayed the costs of registration and my travel within Chicago.

But like affordable housing units and Head Start slots, there isn't enough aid to go around to all the deserving recipients, let alone fully defray their costs.

Again, please don't take this to mean that I'm putting myself on the same level as a person who needs a payday loan at 50 percent interest to make rent for the month (Remember that context is everything). But it is rather depressing to get a first-hand taste of how the structures that reinforce privilege play out in all sectors of the economy.

Privilege and unemployment (Yes, you CAN have one with the other)

So far this blog has been me reflecting (or perhaps in a moment of weakness, whining) about the difficulties I have faced as a newly minted member of the unemployed army of Americans. One of my goals with this site is to give a bit of insight into some of the challenges that unemployed people face. 

Here's the thing though: I'm unemployed, but I'm shielded from some of the worst aspects of it. I've got a lot of angst, diminished future career prospects, some short-term cash-flow problems, a possible gap in my health insurance (and annoying increased costs in any case) and social isolation.

You see, my Fiance's an MD.  She has a job, which pays quite well. In fact, we're above the median household income for Americans. We can afford good food, rent on a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood in Houston. We drive modest used cars, but we can put gas in them and travel around town without undue worry (repair bills have moved from minor to major annoyances, but they aren't savings account killers for us, or even for me-- yet)

Oh, and neither of us are struggling under a dime of student loans -- that's another trifling matter of $200,000 that's off our backs. Part of that is our own careful financial management; part of it was the luck to be born to loving, stably employed, upwardly mobile, generous parents who believed strongly in funding their children's education. Part of it is a strong public school system funded by taxpayers in Ohio and Michigan. It's wrenching watching my carefully hoarded emergency savings diminish, but I'm not staring at a mountain of debt to pay back.

The fact that we're both white and look a lot like an idealized successful American couple portrayed on TV (minus considerable muscle tone, make-up and eating disorders) doesn't hurt either.




The whole thing is kind of like being Dante traveling through the Inferno: I'm getting a taste of how bad everything is. It's depressing. It's terrifying. It's painful. It's isolating And that depression, terror, pain and isolation are REAL. But I'm just visiting Hell and I'm shielded from the worst of the suffering. Perhaps as I peer out from around Virgil's skirts, I can gain some wisdom and insight in to what the true suffering is; the hope is I can put it to use when I get out of this dreadful pit and can behold the stars again.

But here the metaphor breaks down; most of the unemployed end up so through no fault of their own. They get cast into this particular hell because they happened to graduate during a nasty recession, or happened to have a job in a struggling industry, or became a target for the budget ax in the public sector. No, most of the unemployed are innocent of the malice and sloth they routinely get accused of by some elements of our political system. And most of use feel like failures and want to work. We want to provide, we want to serve society -- it just seems that society doesn't have a place for us.

The final judgement is reserved for those with power who could help the unemployed (and the poor, oppressed, ill etc) ease their suffering, but fail to do so. Sadly, my new home state seems to have quite a few policymakers who fit the bill.

So as you read my musings, please keep in mind that I know paradoxically that I am incredibly lucky in my particular unfortunate situation.

On an Island -- unemployment and social contacts

Yesterday I wrote a brief note about how our jobs become a large part of our identity. The focus was on how a profession gives us identifying markers that underline our social status and mark us as interesting people.

But having a job or profession also builds our identities through giving us social contact as well. One of the toughest things I've found about living in Houston is that not only do I have few social contacts, but the fact that I'm unemployed makes developing social contacts an order of magnitude more difficult.

Below the jump, I discuss these dynamics in more detail.

Identity theft

In many unspoken ways, your job is a large part of your identity.

When you meet some one for the first time in a social setting, one of the first questions that often comes up is what you both do for a living. You might answer with the profession you're in ("I'm an engineer") or you might talk about where you work ("Oh, I work over at Dell"). Either answer stakes out in a simple sentence a large part of the story of who you are. After all, your job generally is the single thing you spend the largest amount of your waking hours doing. Your job also gives hints to a number of other aspects of who you are as a person: your schedule, your values, your politics, your social class, your higher vocation in life ("I'm a doctor -- I save people's lives")

 When you're unemployed though,  you lose that part of your identity, or at least the ability to easily convey it. That's tough personally. As I type this, I can say I'm a "scholar," but no one really knows what that means in a way that "I'm a professor at X university" does. The latter is translatable, while the former is opaque. I'm still the same (reasonably) intelligent, (hopefully) engaging, (occasionally) witty and (arguably) responsible person I was before. I still have the same experiences that make up much of who I am, but I've lost the ability to convey a lot of those experiences in an easy way. And the things that being "unemployed" do announce about me tends to set me on a lower level in the conversation.

It's not that your job is your whole identity -- nor should it be. However, your job not only signifies a lot about who you are, but also sets a foundation for who you might aspire to be -even if its diametrically opposed to what you currently do.

But right now, I'm not quite sure how to think about what I might want to do, because I'm not officially doing anything for a living. I'm stuck in a holding pattern while I wait for the phone to ring. 

And while you wait, you begin to question your place in the world, because without the identity and purpose a job often provides, you don't know how you fit in.

Without a job, not only is it more difficult to share who I am with everyone else, it's that much more difficult to understand who I am myself.

The joys of having health insurance

  
The title to this post might seem a bit snarky.  But it's actually serious.  Health insurance (and its close cousins, vision and dental insurance) are great things to have.

And I'm about to lose mine -- yet another of the perks of being unemployed.

Take what happened to me two weeks ago: I was flossing my teeth and minding my own business when I felt something grind at the base of one of my molars. Then, to my dismay, a large filling popped out in my hand.  After a few hours of panic, I found a local dentist who kindly fit me in her schedule and filled the tooth for me without incident (Thanks Dr. Johnson). I am currently covered by a basic dental plan that only covers the cost of preventative care, but also ensures that I only get charged the insurance company's negotiated price for a filling instead of the list price. The upshot for my wallet was that I spent $89 instead of $129 on a filling -- a cool 31 percent discount-- because large insurance companies have bargaining power that individuals do not.

The same goes for the prices for other health care services as well. Obviously, the larger the insurance company, often the better the price, which is why Medicare and the Veterans'  Health Administration (VA) tend to negotiate much better prices for services than private insurance companies.

Having insurance generally  means that you get a better rate, but more importantly it generally means that you get reimbursed for large medical expenses. If you suddenly have a heart attack, contract TB, get cancer, or get turned into a hood ornament by an SUV driver who thinks stop signs are optional, insurance picks up most of the costs by drawing on the premiums paid by healthy people around you. Hey -- you'd do the same for them; in fact you do all the time.

I'm still covered through my university health insurance for the summer  because I taught both terms last year (Thanks again Graduate Employees' Organization). That's about to run out. I'll be eligible to continue coverage through the Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1986 (COBRA). I'll have to pay the full cost of the premium, but that will be much cheaper than going on the individual market, where insurance companies will look at my history of asthma and depression and jack my rates up accordingly -- if they'd cover me at all.

Now, I'll eventually be covered under my spouse's plan, but her insurance won't cover me until we get hitched. So COBRA it is. It's a heck of a lot better than nothing, but the $250 I'll be shelling out every month come at a time when money is, shall we say, tighter than it has been.

The reason I'm in this state, along with many other problems that plagues civilization, is crappy public policy. Follow me below the jump for more details...

The Trauma of Going to a Coffee Shop

When you have routine money coming in, there are a considerable number of things that you take for granted -- like being able to stop in to get a coffee at the local cafe, or eating dinner out at a cheap restaurant.  That calculus quickly changes when the paychecks stop.

I've never had much money in my adult life. For my first three years after college, I worked as a journalist running a tiny print paper. After that, I went to graduate school, where the money wasn't great either (though the fringe benefits were quite good -- thanks to the graduate employees' labor union). But in both cases, I had enough to think nothing of dropping $5 on a drink and a delicious concoction containing appropriate amounts of sugar and saturated fatty goodness a few times a week. Grabbing a sandwich for lunch or even an occasional splurge for dinner was no problem either, as long as I kept an eye on the overall budget. And with all these things, I was able to save a modest amount every month for the things that responsible people ought to save for. (Yes, I am extraordinarily lucky NOT to have any student loans.)

That changed about a six weeks ago. I haven't been to a coffee shop since the beginning of July. I only work at home and in libraries. I've paid for one very modest dinner out. I live within walking distance of several interesting museums, but unless they are free (fortunately, several are) I need to think long and hard before plunking down $15 to go inside.

I never spent much on myself, but now I have lost the ability to spend most of that.

 And it's not just spending money on myself -- you can't do nearly as many nice things for other people, either. You can't put as much money as you'd like down in the collection plate at Church. You can't surprise your fiance with a nice dinner out. You have to cut down on gifts for family members.

Two years ago, I budgeted for and sent $200 in donations to Partners in Health, a first-rate charitable and social justice outlet that has brought first-world health care to millions of people in developing countries. Recently, they called and asked if I'd be willing to make a small automatic monthly donation. I wanted to really badly, but I sadly had to tell them "no." I felt like a complete heel.

I want to think of myself as an open-handed person who doesn't have to think about money when important things are on the line. Now I'm realizing that the only people who have that luxury are the ones who already have money.

These are just a few of  the small ways in which unemployment saps your autonomy and your self worth. I'll be talking about more of those in the coming entries. And I'll be talking about the myriad ways that I'm shielded from most of the worst ones thanks to my relatively privileged position.

To blog or not to blog

So why start a blog?

All my friends did it years ago. It seemed a good way to survive medical school and residency. Sometimes its an attempt to justify the usefulness of being a lawyer, though perhaps that's a bit strongly worded (and might get me sued for libel). Of course, now blogs are decidedly uncool and all the cool kids have joined Twitter, so I figure it's safe for me to start one. I'm no early adopter like Atrios, or Yglesias or even John Cole And don't even get me started about that guy named Ezra Klein, who's done quite a bit to help out the state of journalism-- along with a stable of really talented reporters like Sarah Kliff, Suzy Kimm and Brad Plummer. After all, I didn't get a cell phone until 2004 -- and my phone is still decidedly dumb. An extra $30 a month for a data plan is not in the cards for a grad student's salary or the low income of unemployment.

But I think that the thing that appeals to me the most about a blog is that I can write as long or as short as I want. There's no artificial 600-word limit like on most op-ed pages (and let's face it, it's impossible to get space anyway.) And being concise is great, but it's often difficult to get a coherent point across in 180 characters, let alone any analysis.

This is also a form of dignity. I've likely missed the boat on the ability to change the world through a blog, but there's more than that in it for me right now. This is a way of justifying my existence and maintaining a small corner of autonomy during a time that I have very little control over my life. Whether you choose to read this or not is your business. Whether you like what I write or not is your taste. But I will continue to write nonetheless.

Arrival in exile

This is a beginning of sorts. It is an ending of sorts. It's also sort of like hitting the "pause" button on your DVR.

Last May, I graduated with Ph.D. in political science from a rather high-end program in the Midwest. After two years of searching and sending out roughly 100 applications, I have failed to find a job. Out of options, without a prospect of feeding myself for the short term and no clear career path for the long term, I moved to Houston three weeks ago to live with my fiance. She is a lovely, smart woman who has an MD from a high-end program at the same Midwestern school and a year-long gig at a major hospital in town here. I'm extraordinarily grateful to be with her, but as a child of the Midwest, I am in an unexplored country -- and this place that is most certainly not home in any sense of the word.

The politics, city planning, the weather and the attitude of this state are all foreign to me. This fall will be the first time I have not been teaching undergraduates in eight years, and coincidentally, the first time I haven't had a paycheck for an extended period of time. I'm still working on research, but I'm cut off from easy access to much of the academic community I've grown to rely on over the last decade. In multiple states of being, I am in exile from much of what I know and love.  

This blog is my commentary on my predicament, and reflections of how it fits in with the bigger picture of the world around us.