Andrew Sullivan

Yes They Can?

Dave Brockington suspects “the current polling is overstating the estimate of the yes support.” Tomorrow he expects “at least a four point (i.e. 52% No, 48% Yes) victory for the unionists”:

We do have empirical evidence to make some reasoned, if imprecise, estimates regarding the don’t knows. As the ICM poll released yesterday still reports 14% Don’t Knows, this remains a significant chunk of the potential electorate. The literature on direct democracy, specifically referenda and initiatives in the United States (the literature about which I’m most familiar), suggests that in a yes / no dichotomous decision, the No option has some of the advantages of incumbency. I strongly suspect that of the DKs that do turn out to vote, they will break significantly to No. This makes sense. Given this is the most important and far reaching election in Scotland in a lifetime, if a voter has yet to make up their mind 48 to 96 hours before the election, the odds of them sticking with the safety of the status quo rather than the riskier unknown of independence is compelling.

But, if tweets are any indication of votes, Yes still has momentum. Mark Gilbert explains:

Karo Moilanen, a visiting academic at the university, has dissected more than 1 million tweets in the past month. The “yes” campaign has generated more than 782,000 missives, compared with 341,000 for those backing the “no” movement. Both camps saw a dive in activity yesterday, though those backing the Scottish nationalists were still twice as active as the unionists

Dan Hodges thinks the referendum has already exposed the fact that the union is essentially a mirage:

In Scotland we see that just under half the people are toying with turning their back on the United Kingdom for good, and the other half are demanding almost total autonomy as the price for remaining within it. In England there are growing calls for similar autonomy via an English parliament, regional parliaments or even individual city parliaments. In Wales support for independence is now nudging twenty per cent, and there are similar calls for the devolution of more powers and a reassessment of the funding settlement. In Northern Ireland people are currently refraining from murdering each other, which apparently represents a great success. If this is union, what exactly would fragmentation look like?

Jack Shenker frames the independence campaign as part of a tectonic shift in British politics:

What the Scottish independence referendum has exposed, unexpectedly but enthrallingly, is not so much a vein of support for nationalism, or even for independence in its own right, but rather a vein of political imagination that upends everything we’re usually told about politics today. It’s exposed a rejection of gradualism in favor of more ambitious, and even radical visions of change. As young musician Becci Wallace puts it, “it’s opened up so many people’s minds and given them a voice they didn’t even know they had.”

The hope for many is that regardless of the referendum outcome, this mental gear shift could seep across the border; as indicated by the rise in England of the self-styled “anti-establishment” U.K. Independence Party, which tacks firmly to the right, a hunger for alternatives to the political status quo can be discerned right across the British Isles.

Ishaan Tharoor highlights Thatcher’s role in all this:

Critics point to the dark corners of her foreign policy and say Thatcher’s epochal transformation of Britain — her systematic privatization of the country’s industries and wars with labor unions — hollowed out Britain’s industrial base and deepened inequities.

It’s a legacy that many in Scotland have invoked as grounds for wanting to leave, including Alex Salmond, leader of the “Yes” campaign. “That overwhelming desire among the people of Scotland to escape the economic and social bedlam of the 1980s was actually the result of the approach of Margaret,” Salmond told the BBC in 2013. “She set the ball rolling to make Scottish self-government a huge priority, and that ball is still rolling fast now. So in that respect, people should reflect that in some ways, she was the handmaiden for a return to Scottish democracy. Not what she intended, but nonetheless what happened.”

Alex Massie wants No voters like himself shown some respect:

Chafe against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland by all means, imagine a different, more glorious future all you want but at the very least – and it should not be a large thing to ask – recall, just for a second, that your opponents are not motivated by a willingness to sacrifice Scotland or do her down or oppress her or lead her to some kind of dystopian future.

Deep down most Yes voters know this. Deep down they know that if Scotland is a half-decent place to live today it will remain a half-decent country on Friday even if Scots vote No. If it is large and smart and rich enough to be independent it is also – must, in fact – be large and smart and rich enough to remain a part of Britain.

Confidence, in other words, is a two-way street and while there are a hundred, even a thousand, reasons to vote Yes or No it remains the case that many Scots are confident enough in our collective future to vote No.

James Wimberley hopes that No will prevail. But he won’t be surprised if it doesn’t:

Part of the deal for the Scots in 1707, after the failure of their own colonial venture in Darien, was to join in England’s imperial and commercial expansion, for glory and profit. They were not cheated on this. Scots played a quite disproportionate part in the British Empire, from its trading-houses to its battlefields. Glasgow became the shipbuilder to Empire. Hong Kong was created by Scots. But that’s gone now. Cameron can still offer occasional battles to the shrunken Scottish regiments; his oath of vengeance on ISIS was not just theatre. But generally, Britain is now just another peaceful European welfare state, cultivating its gardens like Candide. There is no wider vision or ambition to stir Unionist blood, not even building Europe, an unpopular project. So why can’t Scotland be its own cosy welfare state like Denmark or Slovenia? Catalans and Basques are asking the same question, with potentially graver consequences for Spain.

Previous Dish on Scotland here.

(Image: A sample ballot from the U.K. Electoral Commission via The Atlantic.)

Cool Ad Watch

She even looks a little like Maureen Dowd:

The billboard version is even more obviously Modo:

This is from a new ad campaign from the people who won the ballot initiative in Colorado. Among the advice given:

Don’t be a pothole.

Do not pressure others to join you in consuming marijuana, and never give anyone a marijuana-infused product without their knowledge. It is not funny, and it could result in serious problems for that person and others. For example, they might end up driving or engaging in another activity that should not be done while under the influence. It could also cost someone their job if they get drug-tested by their employer. If someone would like to join you in consuming a marijuana-infused product, be sure to inform them of the amount of THC in the product, and let them know the appropriate serving size if they are unsure.

Be respectful of the people around you and do not smoke marijuana in public or in the presence of someone who would prefer not to be exposed to it. This applies especially to situations in which kids are present.

For legalization to be a success, it has to be accompanied with an embrace of real responsibility, a commitment to do all we can to prevent kids getting high, and an ethic that is better than our current campaigns to drink responsibly. Colorado is once again leading the way.

Obama vs The Obama Administration On War

Could the messaging get any worse? Eli Lake and Josh Rogin wonder how the president will maintain his light-touch approach to fighting ISIS when his people, specifically his top military brass, keep hinting that they favor a more direct intervention:

The internal dissent is likely to intensify with Obama’s choice of John Allen to lead the international campaign to persuade U.S. allies to pony up troops, money, and arms for his new war. Allen, a retired general beloved by Washington’s neoconservatives, has called for a robust U.S. war against ISIS since June. Obama and Allen sat down together Tuesday at the White House. Soon after he retired in 2013, Allen took a veiled shot at his old and now new boss, observing that in the wake of Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, “the body count is going up, the bloodletting is going up.”

As the details of the president’s new war plan leak out this week, many of Allen’s former colleagues and lawmakers wonder whether the president’s new special envoy will be able to convince Arab and European states to get behind a strategy they see as amounting to a half-measure.

Friedersdorf points out that if Obama didn’t want his administration going off-message and calling for more war, he shouldn’t have staffed it with hawks:

That momentum would build behind war is no fluke. What else did Obama expect when he staffed his entire administration with hawkish Iraq War proponents? Any attempt to measure the momentum for war must include Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel calling ISIS “beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” heated rhetoric from Secretary of State John Kerry, and Vice President Joe Biden vowing that the United States will follow ISIS “to the gates of hell.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also been a prominent hawk. This is not a surprise. Obama elevated a faction of hawkish Democrats, despite purporting to believe that they all favored a “stupid” war. Little wonder that elites seem so overwhelmingly in favor of intervention.

Mark Thompson thinks Dempsey’s statement yesterday was telling:

[W]hile he caveated what he told the panel about the escalating fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, his message was clear: if the U.S.-led effort to defeat ISIS and oust it from its self-proclaimed Islamic State straddling the Syrian-Iraq border falls short, Dempsey will go back to the Oval Office and ask Obama for a green light to send at least a limited number of American ground-combat forces to help get the job done.

What was striking was how he delivered the message. Pentagon officials are forever saying they won’t speak in “hypotheticals”—things that might happen in the future—yet Dempsey dropped an atomic what-if into his opening statement. “If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraq troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets,” he said, “I’ll recommend that to the President.”

And to Zack Beauchamp, it indicates that our commitment in Iraq and Syria could easily snowball:

Obama has final say on America’s Iraq policy and is free to reject Dempsey’s “recommendation” to send troops into combat. Given the president’s wariness about ground wars after George W. Bush’s Iraq War and Afghanistan, and his own consistent promise to the American public, he might reject any plan to send US troops into a direct combat mission. But here’s the third thing: this war is escalating quickly. We went from a targeted mission to protect American citizens in Kurdistan and save Iraqi Yazidis from genocide to a full-scale mission to destroy ISIS in both Iraq and Syria in the span of, roughly, a month. Despite his promises, Obama did indeed consider sending ground troops into combat to rescue Yazidis trapped on a mountain.

Internal pressure from leading advisers like Dempsey could very well push the president towards even larger escalations. So, too, could the internal logic of war.

And Obama appears as if he is a spectator to this dangerous escalation – not someone strongly tamping it down. I fear he has lost control of events – by attempting to appease them.

Cameron Close To Tears – And Resignation?

An impassioned plea from the prime minister:

Has he been on the hustings in Scotland, taking his case to the people? Not exactly:

Sadly, only a small number of Scots got to hear his appeal [last week] directly. That’s because the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom wasn’t actually able to walk the streets of the United Kingdom to deliver his message. He had to stay safely within the confines of a small building for his own security. Yesterday, Ed Miliband, the man who would be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom, also tried to take his case for the Union out onto the streets. And he was chased from those same streets by an angry mob.

You can see the chaos when Miliband tried to walk the streets of Edinburgh here. And, yes, they yelled at him, calling him a “fucking liar” and “serial murderer” (!) to his face. Some of that is from the usual thuggish suspects – but the atmosphere in the campaign has gotten ugly in the past week or so. The one thing that my friends in Britain tell me about politics right now is that there’s enormous discontent with all the major party figures. They seem like a distant metropolitan clique, cushioned in super-safe districts – not real representatives of actual people. That’s why UKIP has had such success. Here’s a UKIP candidate explaining why he quit the Tories:

Lawmakers become lawmakers mostly by working in the offices of other lawmakers. It’s a club. Recent research found that over half of Labour candidates in seats where the party stood a good chance of winning in the next election had already worked in Westminster. Instead of using primaries to select candidates for parliamentary seats, party hierarchies parachute in those whom they favor. Politics has become an exclusive game played by insiders, little more than a competition between two cliques, at the top of the Labour and Conservative Parties, to decide who sits on the Downing Street sofa.

Sound familiar – as we contemplate a chance of another Bush-Clinton match-up? And as a deeply unpopular party nonetheless has a structural lock on the House? This is not just about independence for Scotland. It’s about democratic accountability. And Westminster has clearly failed to represent that for large swathes of Scots.

Daniel Berman dismisses the idea that, should Yes prevail, Cameron will lose his job because “he would be the Prime Minister who oversaw the end of the Union.” Cameron’s problems go much deeper than that:

Cameron’s greatest error was in his decision to pass the enabling legislation for the referendum. Much as he showed little to no interest in Scottish affairs in any other aspect of government, he outsourced the management of the referendum process to an interested party in the form of the Scottish government in exchange for cosmetic concessions regarding language. Predictably then, Salmond government proceeded to do everything in its power to rig the system in their favor, moving to disenfranchise nearly 800,000 Scots currently resident outside of Scotland, nearly 20% of the electorate in a nation of five million, nearly all of them likely NO voters. If YES were to win narrowly, or in in all honesty by anything less than 55-45 or so, it will be able to be ascribed to this decision. It is one thing to hold rallies in Trafalgar Square, as happened this Sunday, and at which the government was also MIA; it is entirely another to actually do something about this disenfranchisement which never could have taken place if the administration was conducted jointly with Westminster.

As a consequence there is a real case for treating the referendum as a test of Cameron’s leadership. Of course this would not matter if he were popular within his party, which he is not, or if the same complaints could not be applied across a range of issues, which they easily can. The main reason Cameron will be in trouble then is not solely to do with Scotland, but because in a context in which his entire modernization line has been fully discredited as a path forward for the Tories, the political circumstances will have changed.

A spell has been broken. No one knows what comes next.

Quote For The Day

“There is, like, a weird historical gay job. It’s not just jobs in the arts or whatever. It’s loner jobs. Lone wolf jobs. There’s something in that, for sure,” – Choire Sicha, ruminating on why so many of the new media start-ups are by gays.

Think about it: Nate Silver; Kara Swisher; Nick Denton; Glenn Greenwald; Dan Savage; yours truly. Loners. And all the men have amazing spouses. Joe Pompeo’s piece about the phenomenon is here – and I apologize for all the f-bombs I seem to have uttered down the telephone.

Drowned In Search Of Freedom

Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the ugly story of how as many as 500 Middle Eastern migrants seeking refuge in Europe were deliberately shipwrecked off the coast of Malta by their traffickers last week:

Unlike most of the traffickers who eventually either abandon the ships or meld in with the migrants, these traffickers had devised a bucket brigade plan to pass their human cargo between a series of increasingly smaller vessels mid-journey, always taking the bigger boats back for more refugees, according to survivors. … The only problem with the plan to pass the passengers was that eventually the migrants refused. According to two Palestinian survivors who spent a day and a half in the water before being rescued, the boat they had been on for just a day was met by yet another smaller vessel “for the umpteenth time” about 300 miles off the coast of Malta and the migrants, who were by then extremely tired, hungry and sea wary, were ordered to once again jump onto the smaller ship to continue the journey.

According to reports from refugee aid groups in Sicily who spoke to the survivors, when the migrants refused to transfer yet again, the trafficker from the mother ship allegedly hopped onto the waiting ship, which then rammed the vessel full of migrants until it sank. The smugglers then sped off, leaving as many as a hundred people floating in the water. Only a dozen survived, including two children who were saved when a merchant ship called the Pegasus spotted them floating in the sea. They said that the rest eventually sank beneath the surface—some after bobbing in the water clinging to debris for several hours.

Zooming out, Dara Lind explains how dangerous that voyage is:

Crossing the Mediterranean is much deadlier than crossing from Mexico into the US. The National Foundation for American Policy found that the deadliest year on record for the US/Mexico crossing was 2012, when 477 migrants were killed. That’s about 1 of every 1000 migrants apprehended crossing the border illegally. In 2011, which was the deadliest year for the Mediterranean crossing before this year, 1,500 migrants were killed: 1 in every 50 migrants who crossed. And the IOM’s initial estimates for this year indicate that 2014 will be twice as lethal as 2011: they estimate that 3000 migrants have been killed so far making the voyage.

(Map from Pew.)

A Universally Derided Idea Whose Time Has Come

Dylan Matthews argues that “the economic case that open borders would dramatically improve the well-being of the world is rock solid.” He interviews George Mason prof Bryan Caplan:

“Imagine that you’ve got a million people farming in Antarctica. They’re eking out this bare subsistence in agriculture in the snow,” [Caplan] says. “Obviously, if you let those farmers leave Antarctica and go someplace else to farm, the farmers are better off. But isn’t it also better for the world if you let people stop eking out this existence, contributing nothing to the world, and go someplace where they could actually use their skills and not just feed themselves, but produce something for the world economy?”

Alternately, think about what happened in the 1960s and ’70s as more and more women joined the workforce in the United States. Was the result mass unemployment for men, as women took all their jobs? Of course not — the economy adjusted, and we’re all better off for it. … That’s the basic argument for open borders: that you’re “moving productive resources” — people — “from places where they’re next to useless to places where they can contribute a lot.” The size of the numbers involved makes the case even more compelling. “You might think that moving from Haiti to the United States would cause a 20 percent increase in wages, but no. It’s more like a 2,000 percent increase in wages,” Caplan notes. “The difference between the productivity of labor in poor countries and rich countries is so vast, it’s hard to wrap your mind around it.” With numbers that big, the potential gains are enormous. A doubling of world GDP is a reasonable estimate.

Ezra Klein nods:

It’s intuitive to Americans that the economy benefits when there are more people around to invent, produce, and purchase stuff. As such, public opinion in America overwhelmingly favors the idea that we should make more people. But that consensus quickly breaks down when the conversation turns to letting in more people.

There are good reasons for that. A higher birth rate has very different implications for social solidarity than a spike in immigration, for instance. Plans to strengthen America’s social safety net — or, much more to the point, adopt a universal basic income — would buckle beneath a massive influx of immigrants. There are difficult questions around border security. There are very hard questions about how to integrate a lot of new people into American society (or any other society). But the reason most often given is a bad one: the idea that more immigrants will take jobs from, and depress wages for, native-born workers. There’s overwhelming economic evidence that higher levels of immigration make most native-born workers better off. There’s mixed evidence on the effect on low-skill workers, but even if there are small losses, those are better managed through transfer programs than by closing the border.

Alex Tabarrok looks at the data:

David Roodman has a characteristically careful and comprehensive review written for Givewell of the evidence on the effect of immigration on native wages. He writes, “the available evidence paints a fairly consistent and plausible picture”: There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries.

• Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2% (@Longhi, Nijkamp, and Poot 2005@, Fig 1; @Peri 2014@, Pg 1). Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact (emphasis added, AT) …

• One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.

Matt Steinglass, meanwhile, thinks immigration advocates have learned a thing or two from the gay rights movement:

The most effective model America has seen in recent years of how an already-committed minority constituency can drive its party’s policies is that of the Tea Party, which staged rallies, won media attention, and (most importantly) ran right-wing candidates in primary elections to force concessions from incumbents. But some immigration activists are looking to a different model: the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual (LGBT) movement. Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, an immigration rights group, noted last year that one of the lessons he learned from the LGBT movement was that “we had to give our cause a human face.”

That may seem like a quixotic ambition, given the vociferousness of right-wing antipathy to undocumented immigrants. On the other hand, maybe not. On Monday, theWashington Post ran a story by Eli Saslow about a ten-year-old boy he calls Alex Ramirez, who earlier this year traveled 2,500 miles from El Salvador to Los Angeles to rejoin a mother and father he hadn’t seen in six years. If you want to assess whether immigration advocates have a shot at winning the heart of America, you need to read Alex’s story. It is by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming. When his father and, later, his mother left the coffee fields for America to earn money to send home, they left Alex with his grandmother in the bamboo house where the family had lived for generations. When Alex’s mother, Yessica, finally phoned to tell him she had paid for a “coyote” to take him north, he refused. Yessica insisted.

Shining A Light On The Darkroom

Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein captions a project by John Cyr:

As analog photography becomes less popular, John Cyr’s Developer Trays read like a love poem to the vanishing medium. For the haunting series, he catalogues the empty developer trays of prolific and renowned photographers, each bearing the marks and stains of chemicals, which emerge like secret data points recording every serendipitous accident of the darkroom.

Through the course of the project, Cyr shot eighty-two trays, contacting photographers, institutions, and estates that held them in their possession. After cultivating a wide network of artists and studios, he turned to more obscure sources, like the relatives or former assistants of deceased photographers. Some photographers sent their developer trays in the mail to be photographed. For this labor of love, Cyr made himself available to travel at a moment’s notice; to view Sally Mann’s tray for example, he drove twelve hours to her Virginia home two days after she responded to his request. To Cyr’s dismay, many established and working photographers no longer had darkrooms and therefore no developer trays.

In a 2012 interview about the project, Cyr spoke about how digital technology has changed photography:

At this point, I can’t think of any analog photographers who haven’t done anything with digital media of some sort. With that said, those who still prefer traditional darkroom prints do so because of the materiality of a silver gelatin print. In one’s digital workflow, an extensive amount of work is performed on a digital file, which can then be printed countless times exactly the same as the first. When making a traditional print, all adjustments are made in the darkroom during the image’s exposure. This results in a unique print that will never be exactly duplicated, no matter how good your printing notes are. It is the objecthood of each silver gelatin print that keeps certain photographers interested in continuing to produce traditional darkroom prints.

Sally Mann’s tray is pictured above. See more of Cyr’s work here, and check out his book here.

Rape In The Boonies

Sara Bernard recently visited Tanana, Alaska, to better understand why the state has “higher rates of sexual assault than anywhere else in the United States”:

Growing up in Tanana, a town of 254, the prevalence of this kind of thing was common knowledge, but rarely discussed. Everyone knew the local elder who’d molested and raped his daughters and granddaughters for decades until he was arrested for touching another family’s girls; after four years in jail and another half dozen or so at a cabin downriver, he was back on the village tribal council. One of Geneva’s great aunts was molested and raped by an uncle for years; dozens of years later, the aunt’s grown daughter told her that the same uncle had molested her, too. Sometimes people pressed charges; most of the time, though, nothing happened. …

It’s only in recent years that some Alaskans have begun to speak publicly about this problem. In many places, silence still endures. But Cynthia Erickson hopes that the “old way” will eventually fade, and that speech, above all else, will empower victims, shame perpetrators, and interrupt the cycle of trauma where it starts: in childhood.

A 2003 study underscored some key reasons why rape can be a much bigger problem in rural areas than urban:

In general, victims of sexual assaults in rural areas have difficulty disclosing the crime, especially in cases where the victim knows the perpetrator. Informal social codes dictating privacy and family reputation reinforce the propensity not to report these crimes. The low population density and high levels of familiarity virtually assure that rural victims of sexual assault will have little anonymity, compounding the problem of severe under-reporting. Other barriers to reporting include the experience of greater physical isolation in rural areas and a general distrust of outside assistance.

The analysis focused on data obtained from Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Mississippi. The research conducted in Pennsylvania revealed significantly higher rates of sexual assault in rural areas of the State, while the data from Oklahoma indicated that reported rapes did not reflect the true prevalence of rape in rural areas. Rates of sexual assault in Alaska and Mississippi were higher in rural areas than in urban areas.

Poverty’s On The Decline … But Tell It To All Those Poor People

Emily Badger summarizes the news:

The official poverty rate declined from 15 percent in 2012 to 14.5 percent in 2013, although the number of Americans living in poverty remained statistically unchanged for the third year in a row. That’s largely because of population growth. Poverty is now starting to tick down as unemployment declines, and as more workers, who held at best part-time jobs in 2012, find full-time employment. Between 2012 and 2013, Census counted 2.8 million net new full-time workers in the United States, with many of those jobs marginally improving the prospects of families that had been living below the poverty line.

Jared Bernstein pours more cold water on the figures:

Yes, various indicators improved in 2013. Real G.D.P. was up, but no faster than the year before (a bit above 2 percent); same with payrolls. And while the unemployment rate fell seven-tenths of a percentage point in 2013, from 8.1 percent to 7.4 percent, more than half of that was from people dropping out of the labor force. That’s not exactly a sign of strength. In fact, the share of the working-age population with a job barely budged last year.

The real wages of low-wage workers were generally as torpid in 2013. For example, if we look at the hourly wage of those in the bottom third of the pay scale, it averaged a bit above $10 per hour over both 2012 and 2013. However, a stagnant low wage is actually an improvement, because real low wages fell sharply earlier in the recovery. And the real median hourly wage went up 1 percent last year, providing a slight bump to the middle class.

How Neil Irwin presents the figures:

This simple fact may be the most important thing to understand about today’s economy: Around 1999, growth in the United States economy stopped translating to growth in middle-class incomes. In the last 15 years, median income has been more or less flat while there was far sharper growth in, for example, per capita gross domestic product. …

But there really is no mystery as to why public opinion has been persistently down on the quality of the economy for years. You can’t eat G.D.P. You can’t live in a rising stock market. You can’t give your kids a better life because your company’s C.E.O. was able to give himself a big raise.

Jordan Weissmann considers the usefulness of the Census’ measure:

The official poverty rate is sometimes criticized as unreliable because of its odd origins and narrow definition of income. The statistic was basically MacGyvered into existence in the 1960s by a lone Social Security Administration economist who based it on cost of food for a family of three, since that was just about the only data on living standards she had to work with. Since then, the stat has only really been updated for inflation. While it counts cash payments such as Social Security towards a family’s finances, it doesn’t account for benefits such as food stamps. As a result, it vastly understates the decline of material need in America over the decades.

That said, it does provide a decent snapshot of poverty as it exists today. For several years, Census researchers have been honing an alternative statistic known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account more government benefits along with geographical variations in the cost of living for a much more sophisticated approach to quantifying need. But in 2011, the SPM was only 1 percentage point higher than the cruder, official measure we’ve been using since the Johnson days.

Ben Casselman points to a few pieces of good news:

The weak recovery has hit young people especially hard; the unemployment rate for Americans younger than 25 is still 13 percent, more than double the 6.1 percent for the population as a whole. But the “lost generation” may at last be seeing some gains. Americans ages 15 to 24 saw their household income rise 10.5 percent in 2013, the biggest increase for any group, though they are still earning 4 percent less than before the recession. Those 65 and older, meanwhile, saw their incomes rise 3.7 percent. No other age group saw statistically significant income gains.

Cassidy’s bottom line:

To oversimplify a bit, income stagnation paired with rising inequality is a recipe for political polarization and, under the American system of divided powers, political gridlock, which is what we have. Based on the latest Census Bureau figures, there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon.