When we talk about the "young, over-educated members of the elite who have dreams of saving the world," we're talking about the people who run the domestic violence shelters, the people who help the urban poor get food stamps, the people who campaign for universal health coverage, the people who sue the government when it breaks its own rules. I should think it would be a goal of liberals to get as many passionate, talented people as possible working to further their causes, and to do what it takes to keep them. No one saves the world without support.

Posted at October 18, 2007 4:19 PM in response to What Social Democracy Can Do For You

I believe George Lakoff outlines the conservative career path in "Moral Politics." I don't have it in front of me because I just moved recently and it's still in a box, but as I recall, he talks about how conservative think tanks pay their interns and new hires decent salaries and provide them with affordable housing and mentors. Why don't liberals do this? Michelle Malkin might have had it rough a few years ago, but she didn't get where she is now by accident -- the machine helped her.

I don't think it's good enough to say things are tough all over. Things are tough because conservatives have been deliberately tearing our society apart. Liberals help them by failing to support the people who work for their causes.

Posted at October 17, 2007 3:34 PM in response to Ideology: Another Kind of "Trap"

As one of those lawyers, I can tell you what got lost since the 1970s -- pay and the public's commitment to higher education.

The baby boomers who started their careers in legal aid in the 1970s were able to raise families on the salaries they were paid. (Yes, they raised families. They didn't have to live like perpetual grad students or saints.) The differential between what legal aid attorneys got paid and what private sector attorneys got paid in the 1970s was small, and higher education was priced accordingly.

Thirty years later, these folks are now in management at these agencies, and the people who work for them turn over at a rapid rate. Hardly anyone lasts more than three years, unless they are independently wealthy or married to someone who makes real money. By the time people are trained enough to be good at their jobs (and it takes a few years to get good at being an attorney), they're gone.

I went to a state school in the Midwest. It was a top-notch law school and also considered to be a great bargain pricewise. When I graduated seven years ago, the state was supplying 40% of the law school's funding. Now it's down to 15% in just seven years, and the law school has set a goal of amassing an endowment large enough to forego state support entirely if necessary. But that doesn't mean they'll start giving out education for free.

I know people don't want to believe this, but you cannot work for long at a legal aid agency making $3,000 per month when your monthly student loan payment alone is $800 per month. Not all the ramen noodles in the world can fix that. I've seen too many people burn out trying.

Posted at October 17, 2007 11:50 AM in response to Responding to earlier criticism

Not when your law firm requires you to make 2,000-2,200 billable hours per year, which is the industry standard.

Posted at October 17, 2007 11:25 AM in response to Responding to earlier criticism

Conservatives nurture their young talent from college through retirement. They provide networks, mentoring, jobs, even housing for their people, and it shows in the massive political machine they have been able to build.

Liberals chew up and spit out their young talent. They pay them crap wages, then tell them if they can't make ends meet it's because they don't care enough about the "cause," whatever it is. They don't nurture talent, which is why nonprofit organizations will be facing a crisis in management in the next 10 years as entrenched management retires and there are few up-and-comers in the pipeline.

Brook isn't arguing that idealists should be able to live where they want. He's arguing that they used to be able to afford decent lifestyles and now they can't. I don't see why liberals want a good life for everyone except the people who work for their causes.

Posted at October 16, 2007 1:00 PM in response to Ideology: Another Kind of "Trap"

I don't think that's the entire reason. Nonprofits are located in big cities because that's where rich funders are, that's where their client populations are, and that's where they can take advantage of volunteers from local colleges to provide unpaid resume-burnishing labor.

I used to work for a nonprofit in a semi-rural area. Finding volunteers and funders was murder, and the cost of living wasn't signficantly lower than the adjacent rich urban areas, so no one wanted to relocate to work there, either.

Posted at October 16, 2007 12:46 PM in response to Don't Let Young Professionals Off the Hook When it Comes to Public Service

How would relocating to the other side of the country help the low-income people in my community with all the needs they have that the government has chosen not to fund anymore?

Posted at October 16, 2007 10:44 AM in response to Don't Let Young Professionals Off the Hook When it Comes to Public Service

Blogging is a different form of writing from letters, however, especially letters written in times before computers, telephone, or even regular mail delivery. In those days, people writing to each other took days or weeks to compose letters, knowing they wouldn't arrive for another few weeks after the events being described, and knowing this was their only way to talk to each other if they didn't live close by.

I've seen too many people who claim they want to be novelists frittering away their energy on their blogs. When the instantaneous pleasure of dashing off something and publishing it instantly is weighed against the hours of plotting and plodding needed to write and finish a novel, the novel often comes out last.

The public nature of blogs just makes the problem worse. People who have personal blogs usually have a readership composed of their family and friends, who aren't in a position to be critical. Writers of other kinds of blogs, like political ones, can get drawn into spending lots of time monitoring their message boards. The thing can become an energy sink.

Posted at July 19, 2007 5:17 PM in response to The Market Value of the Blogosphere

Mortgages have one purpose - to help you buy a house. They fulfill that purpose 100% of the time.

No, they do not. Missing from this discussion is mention of the many subprime mortgages that have been extended to people who already own homes. In a phenomenon called "reverse redlining," minorities and elderly people who own homes are encouraged to refinance into new mortgages with worse terms. These deals are often presented as a way to get money to make home repairs, or to pay off debts. The terms are atrocious and designed to ensure the homeowner fails. Here's an example:

Take the case of Florence McKnight, an 84-year-old Rochester widow who, while heavily sedated in a hospital bed, signed a $50,000 loan secured by her home for only $10,000 in new windows and other home repairs. The terms of the loan called for $72,000 in payments over 15 years, after which she would still owe a $40,000 one-time payment. Her home is now in foreclosure.

The purpose of subprime lending is not to help people own homes who couldn't own homes before. It's to strip as much equity as possible out of as many people as possible.

Posted at July 17, 2007 5:00 PM in response to A financial security agenda?

According to the Food Research and Action Center, in 2005 the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 35.1 million Americans are classified as "food insecure." Of those 35.1 million, 22.7 million are adults (10.4 percent of all adults) and 12.4 million are children (16.9 percent of all children). Here's what that means:

"In some developing nations where famine is widespread, hunger manifests itself as severe and very visible clinical malnutrition. In the United States hunger manifests itself, generally, in a less severe form. This is in part because established programs – like the federal nutrition programs – help to provide a safety net for many low-income families. While starvation seldom occurs in this country, children and adults do go hungry and chronic mild undernutrition does occur when financial resources are low. The mental and physical changes that accompany inadequate food intakes can have harmful effects on learning, development, productivity, physical and psychological health, and family life."

Posted at June 11, 2007 8:48 PM in response to Edwards, Poverty, and the New York Times' Matt Bai