Economics 10/06/2009

• Poverty Simulation

  tags: Economics

  • Come and live a month in poverty…

    One of our most powerful educational tools is the Poverty Simulation Workshop. The Poverty Simulation Workshop is a role-playing experience that offers the opportunity to learn more about the realties of living in conditions of poverty. Participants enter the workshop with a new identify and family profile. Participants experience one month of poverty compressed into the real time of the simulation (generally three hours total). Afterwards in the debriefing, they share insights of extraordinary vividness and intensity.

    
    
    As a result, ordinary people from all walks of life can share a very special kind of awakening. The Poverty Simulation Workshop can open people’s eyes to the human cost of poverty. The power of this unique learning resource is that it creates, like no other method, an insight into the state of chronic crisis that consumes so many working poor families.

• Ezra Klein – The Persistence of Obesity

  tags: Economics

  • If you have never participated in a poverty simulation run by qualified people, you should seek one out and do it. I thought I wouldn’t learn anything but I was floored by what I realized I would do to cope and survive – and this was a one-hour sim. I was also shocked by the assumptions that people had about the poor. I ran into a lot of deeply internalized beliefs (often to the point of subconscious acceptance) that the poor are not to be trusted, addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and are neglectful parents. If I could, I’d run poverty simulations in every high school in the country.

• Ezra Klein – Your Recession in Charts

  tags: Economics

  • Since the early 1970’s real wages have been flat to falling. Workers’ share of GDP has been falling. Management used to reinvest profits in the business, and/or pay dividends. But since the marginal tax rates came down beginning in the 1980’s, management instead pays itself ever more exorbitant compensation packages.

    To make up the difference, ordinary people stopped saving then started borrowing. The financial sector aided and abetted this by devising ever more clever means to hook people on debt.

    Now the golden goose is dying because people can’t afford to buy stuff any more. People are cutting back on credit and saving as much as they can. Business can’t get credit because the banks are hoarding the money and so no one is hiring. The gov’t is stymied by “deficit hawks” who would rather see unemployment keep rising than spend public money to make up for the decline in private demand. And the rich? The people whose share of income has more than doubled over the past few years? Don’t even think of raising their taxes back to where they were in the Clinton years. That’s Communism!

  • Mimikatz – as good a 3 paragraph summary as I have seen.

    I would add that what I find really remarkable is that many of the rich seem to be willing to allow the golden goose to die.

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