The New Face of Poverty in Oregon

It won't surprise anyone that the demand for state services associated with poverty has increased dramatically in the current economic downturn.  But the dramatic increase in households needing assistance is unprecedented, for example there was a 58 percent increase in participating households from 2005 to 2009.

This comes from a new study of SNAP, the state food stamp program, reveals how dramatically the population needing assistance has changed.  Suzanne Porter a student in the OSU Master of Public Policy program, and Mark Edwards, a sociology professor at OSU, in a new report show that many of the new recipients of SNAP have no recent history of SNAP receipt, that many of the new SNAP recipients come from manufacturing and construction and are therefore disproportionately male, and that many households have a full-time worker.

Here is the report:

Newly Poor in the Great Recession

ECON 539-Public Policy Analysis: Incentives Matter

Finally time to get down to brass tacks and start some real teaching after a delayed start to the quarter caused by a chilly visit to Atlanta. I am teaching a class in the Masters in Public Policy program (and cross-listed as ECON 439 for our advanced undergrads) and will add a discussion here as an experiment in new media teaching.

Today's class will be about the basics of economic theory: how individuals respond to incentives. Economists believe that they do so in predictable ways. A more nuanced statement might allow for many personal idiosyncrasies but that on average people tend to behave like economic theory predicts.

I will start the class with a discussion of a paper by a friend of mine, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, who found a (surprisingly?) large response from the financial incentives to have a baby before midnight on December 31 from the US tax code and EITC.

With this as background we will go over the basics of preference theory, optimal choice and utility maximization.

Then, we will examine things that affect choice: changes in income (new Oregon income taxes), prices (tax on gasoline) and new technologies that alter costs like hybrid cars. We will also look at policies like food stamps which change the shape of the budget constraint.

Finally we will review the most fundamental concept in economics in my opinion: the concept of Marginal Benefit = Marginal Cost (MB=MC).

My class is overstuffed - literally - apparently there were jokes about calling the fire marshal in the first class (covered by a colleague), so no more can join this term. But the class will be offered again next year if anyone is interested.