I noted in a previous post that wavering House members represent districts that have the most to gain from health reform. Thanks to my colleague Louis Woynarowski, we can see this in mapped form. He mapped uninsurance rates for every district represented by a wavering House member, as listed in FiredogLake's invaluable whip count. Each district is shaded to represent the percentage of nonelderly people who lack health coverage.
Last week, President Obama signed the 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act, an amalgam of six separate appropriations bills providing $447 billion to an array of federal departments. A small fraction of this funding is devoted to supporting federal statistical agencies that generate the demographic, economic, and social data that will help metros better understand themselves.
Federal statistics are essential to public policy and private enterprise. At the same time, they are incredibly cheap and, unlike grants, can be used over and over again. Federal statistics are the best bargain that taxpayer money can buy.
Let’s look inside this high-impact, (relatively) low-cost grabbag of Fiscal Year 2010 federal statistical efforts and see what’s new and different for metro area data.
When it comes to the value of the dollar, there are clear trade offs between American export competitiveness and import prices. How these opposing forces balance out nationally and across regions is the subject of a great deal of debate but surprisingly little empirical work. Paul Krugman, in a recent post, predicts advantageous outcomes if the dollar depreciates but cites no convincing evidence. Dani Rodrik’s recent paper, which is the most solid and relevant econometric work I’ve seen on the subject, finds that an under-valued currency increases economic growth. His results are compelling; yet, since they focus on developing countries, I decided to take a look at how a weaker dollar would affect the United States.
Though the method, described below, is debatable, the results show that export growth, driven by a forecasted change in the exchange rate, increases GDP growth enough to offset the negative effect of price increases. In other words, having a weaker dollar would strengthen the U.S. economy.
The first step in performing this exercise was to forecast the exchange rate over the next 10 years. What we need is at least one variable that strongly affects the exchange rate, but is not significantly affected by it. I choose global GDP to play this role. As other economies grow, international investors recognize the benefits of purchasing assets in non-U.S. markets regardless of the dollar’s value. Why, for instance, should Chinese investors accept a pittance from U.S. treasuries or a modest return from U.S. stocks when they can earn triple the return for real estate development in Brazil, India, or Indonesia?
With the key variable selected, the econometric part of this involves regressing the quarterly exchange rate (the Federal Reserve’s trade-weighted index) on world GDP, the U.S. share of world GDP, the log of U.S. population, the number of countries in the WTO, and dummy variables for decades and the post Cold War era. The WTO variable signifies more international openness to trade which could affect U.S. exchange rates. I did this using data from 1973 to present. I was helped in this by using forecasted data from Moody’s Economy.com for the U.S. and World GDP figures, and I used the Census Bureau’s annual population forecasts. The results predict a 10 percent devaluation in the U.S. dollar index between 2009 and 2019.
There has been much talk lately about how politics complicates the 2010 Census. (See this, this, and this.) Politics aside, it’s a daunting task to count each of the nearly 308 million residents of the United States once and only once. Some people are inevitably missed, while others are counted twice.
The 2000 census actually double-counted (about 11.6 million) more than it undercounted (10.2 million). Duplicates included “snowbirds” who spent part of the year in a second home, as well as college students and those in the military or prison. For the 2010 census new efforts are in place to limit double counting, including a printed warning on the form and a scanning procedure to find duplicate names and birth dates on completed questionnaires. While over-counting is a problem, it’s easier to deal with than undercounting.
The Census Bureau would rather weed out duplicates after the fact than risk missing people altogether, and so it conducts national advertising blitzes to convince everyone that “It’s in our Hands,” while investing extra resources in communities with people who are less likely to fill out their forms. State and local governments are making similar efforts, too, including the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Chicagoland.
Who is risk of being missed and where do they live? The Census Bureau has developed a “hard-to-count” score for every neighborhood in the country, based on 12 factors that are typically correlated with low response rates: rental and multi-family housing, overcrowding, unmarried individuals, low education and income levels, public assistance, high unemployment, recent movers, lack of phone service, linguistic isolation, and vacant housing units.
You may not have noticed the subtle, but critical change on TNR.com’s homepage. The Avenue is now properly deemed a blog about “metro policy,” as opposed to “urban policy.” The difference matters at lot.
And what is the difference? Simply that metro is a term that, like metropolitan areas themselves, encompasses urban, suburban and rural areas. In a metropolitan nation like the U.S., the urban/rural dichotomy, like the urban/suburban dichotomy, is rapid losing its relevance.
Urban and rural are often closely linked socially and economically. Cities are tremendously affected by what goes on where the density starts to dwindle. Policies on transportation, agriculture, manufacturing and trade all matter tremendously to cities. And how well cities educate (mostly minority) children, acculturate immigrants, generate jobs, and create the spaces for fortuitous interactions that spur creativity and innovation matters a lot everywhere else
The concept of metropolitan areas explicitly recognizes the connections between cities and their surroundings – it’s built into the definition. A metro consists of one or more principal cities, the surrounding county, and other counties linked by substantial commuting flows. (The Census Bureau doesn’t even use the term “central cities” any more, because cities aren’t as central as they used to be.)
Remember when the Census Bureau released the new 2008 national poverty numbers earlier this month? Not surprisingly, the news wasn’t good, and the best guess was that the outlook would be bleakest in the Sun Belt metro areas hit hardest by the downturn in the housing market and in regions reliant on the auto manufacturing industry.
Well, now the local numbers are in. Only about one-fifth of the 100 largest metro areas experienced a significant change in poverty from 2007 to 2008, and as might be expected, most of those saw their poverty rates increase. By far, California and Florida are home to the greatest number of these metro areas; clearly, the ripple effects of the housing market collapse in these Sun Belt metros were already making themselves felt down the economic ladder in 2008.
The depth of this recession is prompting some scrutiny in the media, and soul-searching among policy wonks, on the plight of the long-term unemployed. Last week, the Wall Street Journal profiled several workers among the 5 million nationwide who have been out of work for at least half a year. Brookings’ own Ron Haskins wondered aloud whether the post-welfare reform social contract--government support in exchange for work--can hold up in an era of long-run unemployment.
While national data don’t reveal exactly where those 5 million workers live, recently released data from the Census Bureau offer a window on the labor markets that were already highly troubled in 2008, which almost certainly contain outsized shares of the long-run unemployed today. This map examines two measures for the 100 largest metro areas in the United States in 2008: unemployment (the share of adults not employed and actively looking for work), and labor force participation (the share of adults employed OR actively looking for work). It restricts these measures to working-age adults (age 25 to 64) who have a high school diploma or less, the educational group most severely impacted by the downturn. Where unemployment rates were already high in 2008, or labor force participation rates were low (signaling dropouts from the labor market), problems are likely to be even greater in 2009.
With a little over six months until the 2010 Census, outreach has already begun to ensure as complete a count as possible. A lot’s at stake.
Every ten years, the Census Bureau has the daunting task of counting everyone--no matter their legal status--living in the United States and its territories, as mandated by the Constitution. 2010 is one of those years.
Although the Census Bureau protects respondents’ privacy and does not inquire about residency status, many unauthorized immigrants are fearful that information they provide may be used by law enforcement or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against them. It’s well known that the census undercounts minorities and low-income people disproportionately, and great pains are taken to reach out to these communities to gain trust and minimize the undercount. Nevertheless, immigrants with legal status are more likely to fill out Census questionnaires than those who are living here illegally and fear of government recriminations. (Never mind that refusing to answer basic census questions is itself illegal.)
Certainly, that fear could be minimized by immigration reform, if it were to include a means for unauthorized immigrants who meet certain requirements (work history, background check, basic English skills, fines and fees) to obtain legal status. Those who sign up would thus already be registered with the government as someone who was living in this country without authorization. They would have less to lose by filling out their Census questionnaire. And with one of the shortest forms in its history -- just ten questions per person -- the Census Bureau is hoping to boost response rates.
So it looks like the housing sector will soon start contributing--a little, in some places--to the economic recovery after contributing mightily to national breakdown.
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
The Census Bureau just released its latest income, poverty, and health insurance numbers for 2008. As it reports, the number of uninsured rose by 680,000 between 2007 and 2008, from 45.66 million to about 46.34 million. I’m only relieved things weren’t worse.
Things would have been worse but for one thing: continued expansion of government-provided health insurance coverage. Between 2007 and 2008, the proportion of Americans reporting any private coverage fell by 0.8 percentage points, from 67.5 percent to 66.7 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage reporting some form of government coverage rose by 1.2 points, from 27.8 percent to 29.0 percent.
Unfortunately, the Census Bureau focuses on year-to-year changes. Trends are clarified when one looks over a longer period. The figure below compares government statistics from 1999 and 2008, which show some real trends.
First, the absolute number of uninsured has increased. Second, employer-based coverage is eroding. Third, adverse trends in private coverage are partly masked in the overall numbers by the rise in public coverage.
The Census Bureau released new numbers today on poverty in the U.S. The new estimates--from 2008--give us our first official glimpse of the recession’s impact on the country’s poor population. Not surprisingly, the news isn’t good. A few points from the report:
In theory, the Census is a straightforward, if onerous, task: Every ten years, count everybody. In reality, it's rife with logistical snags and subject to partisan wrangling--and, with just eight months to go before the Big Count, you can already sense how nasty this is going to get. The first major volley was launched in April, when a pair of Republican senators stalled the confirmation of Obama's nominee for Census director, keeping him from conducting crucial preparatory work.
Wasilla, Alaska, is currently the most famous small town in America, thanks to its former mayor Sarah Palin. A healthy part of her appeal is that she seems to embody small-town values, nurtured in Wasilla and America's other hamlets and burgs. As she said in her firecracker acceptance speech, small-town people live lives of "honesty, sincerity, and dignity" and "do some of the hardest work in America."
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece detailing the anti-poverty efforts of Tony Blair's government. Using a combination of tax credits and government-run child care, Britain has seen it's child poverty rate fall precipitously:
