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Can we take the politics out of the federal minimum wage?
At 77 years of age, the federal minimum wage deserves a respite from the day-to-day combat of political life. Today, protestors around the country are demanding a $15 minimum. But few observers think...
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Getting attached: Parental attachment and child development
Attachment theory is founded on the idea that an infant’s early relationship with their caregiver is crucial for social and emotional development. It is an old theory, born during the 1950s. But it...
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Measuring relative mobility, part 1
Most of our blogs focus on how to promote social mobility, with a strong bias towards the relative intergenerational kind. But this is an area where the choice of metrics really, really matter....
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Measuring relative mobility, part 2
Measures matter when it comes to mobility. Yesterday we weighed the pro and cons of two persistence-based approaches: intergenerational elasticity of income (IGE) and rank-rank slope. Today we turn...
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In a land of dollars: Deep poverty and its consequences
America is a rich country. But it contains lots of people surviving on incomes more common in developing countries. In this memo, we explore the consequences of being on the very bottom rung of the...
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Cameron pulls off a surprise win: What now for Europe and Scotland?
David Cameron’s startling victory in the UK’s general election was the result of competing nationalist sentiments. It puts a question mark over the state of two unions: the European Union, and the...
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Question: Is poverty an economic or cultural problem? Answer: Yes.
Whose fault is poverty? Is it the fault of the poor themselves, who should be working harder, making better decisions, and committing to their own futures? Or of society at large, for failing to...
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Does Character Matter? : Essays on Opportunity and the American Dream
Brookings Institution Press 2015 68pp. Richard Reeves introduces this collection of short essays with a challenge: “I defy you to find a richer set of writings on the philosophical, empirical, and...
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Place, opportunity, and social mobility: What now for policy?
Event Information June 1, 2015 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDTFalk Auditorium Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20036 Register for the Event A conversation with Harvard's Raj...
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Space, place, race: Six policies to improve social mobility
Place matters: that’s the main message of Professor Raj Chetty’s latest research. This supports the findings of a rich body of evidence from social scientists, but Chetty is able to use a large...
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Cutting poverty by increasing program participation
You might not think of George W. Bush as the “food stamp president.” But his administration worked hard to help families who qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to get...
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Brookings Scholars' Take on "Our Kids"
Robert Putnam’s new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis has become a must-read in policy circles for discussions about social mobility. Much ink has been spilled on the ideas within this...
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Boys to men: Fathers, family, and opportunity
It isn't easy being a man today. That is, at least, the strong message coming from professors and movie producers. Men are now, according to a provocative cover article in The Economist, “The weaker...
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Promises, promises: What can we learn about education from Kalamazoo?
Five years ago, President Obama spoke at the graduation ceremony at Kalamazoo High School in Michigan—an unusual move for a sitting president. Why Kalamazoo? Because thanks to a generous group of...
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Time to make America's founding dream real—for all
America and I share a birthday: July 4th. This is an agreeable coincidence, especially for a Brit. The whole nation seems pleased that I’ve chalked up another year. One of the attractions of America...
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Unpaid internships: Support beams for the glass floor
It is intern season again, and as the weather heats up, the argument about unpaid internships is heating up as well. Unpaid internships are increasingly controversial, seen by opponents as...
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Stretchy ends: The shape of income inequality
Income inequality was once a scholarly backwater. Henry Aaron, our Brookings colleague, once compared monitoring the unchanging statistics to “watching paint dry.” But inequality is now one of the...
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The British glass floor, part 1
Here’s a stubborn mathematical fact: each quintile can only contain 20 percent of the income distribution. If you want more people rising into the top quintile, you need more people falling down. Just...
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Free college? It doesn't fix everything
Here is one solution to the rising cost of college: Make it free. That's what a group of anonymous donors in Kalamazoo, Mich., accomplished a decade ago for local students. Almost every high school...
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The British glass floor, part 2
Kids performing poorly on cognitive tests at age five are likely to do fine as adults, so long as they are from an affluent or better-educated family. At least that’s true in the UK, according to a...
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