Politics: Where Up is Down and Good is Bad

Last week, David Brooks began a two-part series on eight books that have had a major influence in his own life (a summer reading list of sorts, should you want to learn about the inner-workings of Brooks’ soul).

One of the books on his list is the American political classic All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. Brooks writes that King’s Men shows “the way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good,” and “asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to have the power to serve the poor.”

12 years ago, my senior year English teacher gave me King’s Men with an inscription that exclaimed, “Forewarned is Forearmed!” Reading the novel at the age of 18, I understood it from the perspective of an outsider to politics—someone who had been interested in the craft of governing from a young age, but whose experience with the daily give and take of compromise and contradiction was cabined to the four walls of our New England style town meetings, which to this day remain not particularly representative of how government works in big cities, state capitals, or the halls of Congress.

Senator Huey Long (D-LA) (aka "Willie Stark")

I picked up King’s Men again recently, now a self-styled “insider” of the political process, albeit one who is ever-wary of the obsession that comes with the incessant machinations people go through to inhabit the inner most circles of power (a means that all too often becomes the end—HT to Professor Roger Porter for this piece of wisdom).

The impetus to my second read was a discussion I overheard outside my office, but inside the NYC political world about the results of a report. The takeaway was that it was “good” that the data revealed gross inequities in city services because that narrative could generate press, which could, in turn, inure to the benefit of both the principal and the New Yorkers who were not being adequately served.

It immediately brought to find a passage from King’s Men in which Willie Stark is seeking to oust Dolph Pillsbury, the political boss of Mason County, Louisiana. Willie had little fortune upending Pillsbury’s regime until an accident on a fire escape at a local schoolhouse shoddily put together by a corrupt associate of Pillsbury’s changed the political environment forever.

[S]ome of the brickwork gave and the bolts and bars holding the contraption to the wall pulled loose and the whole thing fell away, spraying kids in all directions. Three kids were killed outright. They were the ones that hit the concrete walk. About a dozen were crippled up pretty seriously and several of those never were much good afterward.

It was a piece of luck for Willie.

Only in politics could an epic tragedy in which kids perish be accurately and coldly declared a “piece of luck” for a challenger. And yet, as Warren noted, such “luck” need not be actively exploited. “Willie didn’t try to cash in on the luck. He didn’t have to try. People got the point.”

Indeed, in politics, what challengers often need to win is to have misfortune befall a stronger candidate (frequently the incumbent)—misfortune that typically manifests in suffering for real people and their communities.

This is not a “problem” that requires solving, but is instead an intractable, if unnerving truth about democratic politics. There are only so many seats. What matters is not whether a challenger “takes advantage” of misfortune to rise to power, as Stark went on to do, but instead whether that challenger (a) understands the true nature of the tragedy and is not blind to the real suffering that enabled her rise; and (b) views the opportunity presented by fate as an opportunity to do good by the People, rather than by herself.

Politics takes thick skin—which is to say that you need to be able to take a punch, but also have the courage to throw one when the moment is right, sure in the belief that while aiming to win is anything but a selfless act, it is worth fighting for when motivated by the desire to serve and not be served.

Women, Family, and the Expectations of Leadership

“Women do almost as well as men today as long as they don’t have children.”

-- Professor Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University, 2010

In EEOC v. Bloomberg L.P., 778 F. Supp. 2d 458, 485-486 (S.D.N.Y. 2011), a major gender discrimination lawsuit, Chief Judge Loretta A. Preska of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York declared, “[M]aking a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences…perhaps unfortunately, women tend to choose to attend to family obligations over work obligations thereafter more often than men in our society.  Work-related consequences follow.”

We see this pattern not only in the fast-paced, high-pressure world of financial journalism, but across a spectrum of jobs, including the highest leadership posts in our government. While the last three men nominated to the Supreme Court (Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Stephen Breyer) have all been married (with seven children among them), the last three women (Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Harriet Miers) have all been single and without children.

As freelance writer Robin Marty noted, “When men are able to rise to high-powered positions, dominating the roles of CEO, upper level management, and yes, Supreme Court Justice and even President, all while at the same time being able to raise a family, but women can only pursue these options without being encumbered by children, there is still a major hurdle to overcome.”

Others, however, appear nonplussed by the sacrifices demanded by politics or business at its highest levels. As Kathryn S. Wylde, President of the Partnership for New York City, told the New York Times in the wake of Judge Preska’s historic ruling:

I am among the first generation of ‘liberated’ women professionals who took for granted we would have to sacrifice personal time and family life to achieve our professional goals. Younger women tend to assume ‘equality in the workplace,’ along with the notion that they can and should ‘have it all.’ I don’t think that is possible for men or women, and certainly not in the competitive environment of New York City.

Thus, before we can even figure out how to overcome the hurdle Marty described, we must first decide how or whether to characterize it as a hurdle in the first place. This effort requires us to examine the appropriate balance between professional duty to our community and our personal lives.

This week, Gordon Marino, a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, wrote in the Times Opinionator, “Our desires should not be the ultimate arbiters of vocation. Sometimes we should do what we hate, or what most needs doing, and do it as best we can.”

On the one hand, it seems plain that people need and deserve to live enriching lives beyond the toils of our labor. If, as a great ancient philosopher once said, humans are “luminous beings” and not merely “crude matter”, it stands to reason that our professional passions are but a small part of our souls.

On the other, as Christina Rossetti wrote in her poem-turned-Christmas-carol In The Bleak Midwinter, each of us must do our part, particularly the “wise men” who have been granted opportunity to little credit of their own.

And yet, what Marino misses in his piece—and what so many people who view work and life as a “zero sum” game fail to understand—is how love, family, and personal fulfillment can and do enable professional success and should be viewed as assets rather than liabilities, particularly among leaders in business, politics, and law.

It’s no secret that finding internal peace and happiness in life is brutally difficult, even for those blessed with the material trappings of the developed world. Waving that quest off as if it is a distraction from our core functions is neither helpful nor realistic. Indeed, while some of us can dupe ourselves into thinking that somehow we can do the professional without regard to the personal, life eventually hits you upside the head and it becomes crystal clear that the foundation of success in any realm—the font from which all-else flows—is intimate human connection: familial, fraternal, romantic.

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While it may be acceptable to expect professional athletes or master chess players to have an almost monastic devotion to their craft—the skill and dexterity needed to succeed at the highest level being almost directly tied to their hours of practice—political leaders are different animals.

Being a “political junkie” does not dovetail with being an effective representative. Sure, politicians need to have an understanding of the levers of power and should have a strong historical/procedural understanding of the body to which they are elected; but successful leadership in government requires so much more.

It requires an understanding of the diverse perspectives of your constituents, while simultaneously being confident in one’s own conception of First Principles. It requires a keen awareness of the values of the community and the emphasis placed on certain elements of life that may not at first glance appear to demand prioritization. And perhaps more than anything else, it requires empathy with the real problems of real people (as opposed to obsession with the political problems of political people).

In the spring of 2001, a friend who was graduating from Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School gave me a wallet-sized yearbook photo with a lovely message on the back, which I carry to this day. Well aware of my outsized ambitions, my friend took pains to urge me to “never close my mind to a family life.” It was an incredibly poignant piece of advice from someone one year my senior by the clock, but ages ahead in the consideration of what factors make a life worth living.

And yet, even as I recognize the prescience of her words, it is a challenge to beat back the uncertainty that comes from a political world that demands more of us than most are willing to give and, perhaps more importantly, more than it should demand if we want our representatives to have the perspective of a well-rounded existence that is so cherished by the polity at large.

More and Less: Justice and the Plight of the Poor

“With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”

-- Paul Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,” New York Times (9 May 2010)

This week, Annie Lowrey of the New York Times wrote a terrific, front-page story on how the poor in America have much greater access to material goods than in generations past, yet feel as if they are falling farther and farther beyond the middle class. As James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research, stated, “Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty. But they have also drifted further away.”

If people are better off, why does it matter if they’ve “drifted away” from the middle and upper classes on a relative scale? If the rising tide lifts all ships, what difference does it make if some seas rise faster and taller than others?

As it turns out, it makes every difference in the world—and not just in America, but also across most societies in every corner of the globe. Why? Because rising inequality, no matter how improved the objective standard of living is for individuals across the board, offends something deep within us—an innate sense of fairness, justice, and opportunity.

As Paul Bloom wrote in 2010, “You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice.”

As a result, it should come as no surprise that people are frustrated—even enraged—by how an emphasis on conspicuous consumption has replaced a more fulfilling vision of the American Dream with a vacuous conception of liberty and success.

For far too long, American policymakers have focused on “expanding the pie”, as if GDP growth was gospel sent down from on high—the embodiment of our collective pursuit of happiness. As we’ve explored in this space, however, achieving happiness is a much more complicated task than economic growth. It requires a deep understanding of human nature; a critical examination of the true material needs (as opposed to wants) of individuals, and a commitment to investing in the foundational elements of true prosperity—the infrastructure of opportunity.

That infrastructure is physical—inter-city high-speed rail, urban mass transit, affordable housing, reliable water/gas delivery, clean power—and human—education from K-graduate school, social institutions, mobility (where health care attaches to you as a human rather than an employee), and substantive and procedural justice.

Erecting this infrastructure is a mission statement that acknowledges that government’s primary role is to lay the groundwork (including a robust social safety net) for people to life the lives they’ve imagined, but that the State must also take aggressive steps, as necessary, to allay levels of inequality that threaten to create a “gilded class” (if Thomas Piketty is right that, over time, the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth rate of the economy, then individuals who start with capital are very likely to accumulate more) and undermine the citizenry’s belief in the very idea of Republican government.

While the incredible reduction in extreme poverty worldwide has brought billions of people the bare necessities of life, there remain 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day. These individuals remain in desperate need of economic growth and actions to address inequality. As the Economist noted last year, “Growth alone does not guarantee less poverty. Income distribution matters, too.” Indeed, while two thirds of the fall in extreme poverty was the result of economic growth; one-third came from greater equality.

As the cartoon above implies, the world has enough—enough to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, enough to treat the sick and heal the injured. However, that bounty means little unless extreme poverty is eradicated in the developing world (an achievable goal by 2030) and unless the developed world creates an infrastructure of opportunity commensurate with our innate belief that all people deserve an equal chance to succeed.

What it Means to be #1: Happiness and Social Policy

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”

-- His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan

Last week, Nicholas Kristof of the Times noted that between 1975 and 2006, “99 percent of the French population actually enjoyed more gains in that period than 99 percent of the American population.” In other words, if you exclude the top 1 percent, the average French citizen did better than the average American.

Nevertheless, on one of the more common metrics used to determine the prosperity and halth of a nation—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the U.S. actually came out on top during the same period, as the American economy significantly outperformed the French.

So who’s “#1”? Before you start chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” (too late?), let’s take a closer look at just what we’re trying to measure.

In recent years, researchers have prodded cities and states to step away from the traditional measures of prosperity and embrace tools to measure overall “happiness”. In December 2013, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report calling on governments to ask citizens a series of questions related to their happiness and to use the results to shape social policy priorities and prescriptions.

This type of survey—which began in the small nation of Bhutan in the early 1970s—has spread to other nations, like the U.K., France, and Canada, all the way down to the local level, as in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Indeed, several U.S. cities are now experimenting with happiness or wellbeing measures. Santa Monica, California, which defines “wellbeing” as, “[p]ersonal satisfaction with life, influenced by social connections, economic stability, personal safety, physical surroundings, fulfilling employment, civic engagement, and health,” recently won a Bloomberg Philanthropies award for its efforts to measure wellbeing and respond accordingly.

In New York, Megan Golden (NYU) and Liana Downey (Liana Downey & Associates) wrote that the de Blasio Administration should pilot a happiness survey to determine “whether some groups are struggling more than others, where problems are concentrated, and what conditions affect New Yorkers’ happiness the most.” This pilot would borrow from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which already surveys Americans every four years about health and life satisfaction, as well as “Measure of America”, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

Of course, measuring happiness is easier said than done. As with any broad survey, getting a representative sample is a challenge, particularly in a City like New York, where many are often wary to respond to formal government surveys (see: New York’s experience with the 2010 Census). Furthermore, since most people filling out the survey have different definitions of happiness, questions that seek to gauge the subjective mindset of any population may be inherently suspect.

An even more fundamental question exists, however. And that is whether happiness, however defined, should be the goal of social policy in the first place. As David Brooks wrote this week, “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course.”

No, Brooks is not advocating for a political system that promotes difficulty and suffering. But he’s also cautioning against viewing certain types of suffering as in need of eradication. To put it in concrete terms, suffering that flows from hunger, disease, violence, or neglect carries no short or long term benefit (much to the contrary), whereas the pangs that come with failure, the loss of a loved one, or can make us fuller people—changed souls, rather than shattered ones.

Ultimately, since that the unique number of paths to happiness is roughly as numerous as the number of people alive, the Framers probably got this one right—namely, that the government’s role is to ensure the foundational elements necessary for the pursuit of happiness (food, shelter, health care, employment), leaving to the individual citizen to decide how to chart his own course toward that seemingly universal goal.

Workforce Training: A Public AND Private Duty

“Your workforce is your most valuable asset. The knowledge and skills they have represent the fuel that drives the engine of business.”

-- Harvey Mackay, 2010

As previously discussed in this space, the Harbor power plant in Salem, Mass. is transitioning from coal to natural gas. As a result, most of the plant’s 105 workers will be laid off at the end of May.

Last week, the Boston Globe discussed the next steps for many of these workers, including how both public and private actors have roles to play in workforce training and redevelopment.

On the government side, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act is designed to give families “transition time” to find other employment or seek additional training to make them more competitive on the job market. Furthermore, the Workforce Training Act of 1998 established “One-Stop” career centers for displaced workers to seek out new opportunities and resources (one such center is located right in Salem, with others in surrounding communities).

There is a clear need for improvement in government-sponsored workforce development training. All too often workforce development dollars are poorly coordinated and only tangentially linked to long-term economic trends in particular communities.

As former Speaker of the New York City Council Christine Quinn noted last year, NYC’s system is a “disjoined mess” where workforce development is viewed as little more than an afterthought. “First we create the jobs, then we make sure New Yorkers have the skills to do the jobs. That’s looking at it backwards.”

Indeed, as the Center for an Urban Future reported, while 56 percent of all new job openings in 2012 in NYC required a post-secondary degree, only 42 percent of adult residents possessed one. This state of affairs has led many, including the Partnership for New York City, to call for an overhaul of workforce development in NYC.

As a result, taxpayers are right to question whether the billions of dollars in workforce training dollars are truly being spent efficiently. We’ll dive into this issue more and seek out solutions in future posts.

Today, however, I want to look at how private industry has a duty to play a role in workforce development as well—not only by growing opportunity within their own company, but in helping those workers displaced by the creative destruction inherent to market economies.

Salem Power Plant: Site of "Creative Destruction" and Renewal?
Photo by flickr user "massmatt" (Creative Commons license)

In Salem, the company taking control of the plant, Footprint Power, has “made $500,000 available to help workers train for new jobs…Some workers already have started to retrain as truck drivers, fuel burner technicians, or in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning field.”

Footprint is setting a great example for other companies who want to do more than just issue pink slips and wash their hands of the real world effects of corporate change on the lives of everyday Americans. But more can and should be done to integrate public and private efforts at workforce training and redevelopment.

In the Bay State, the Workforce Training Fund is designed to provide training and technical assistance grants to small and medium sized businesses. The Fund is 100 percent funded by Massachusetts employers and overseen by the quasi-public Commonwealth Corporation. Money is distributed through a competitive grant process that prioritizes projects that will create jobs, improve productivity, and increase the competitiveness of the Commonwealth’s workforce.

In FY 2013, the Fund distributed over $12 million in grants to 147 applicants in cities and towns throughout Massachusetts. North Shore companies that benefitted include Danvers-based XTechnology Global (specialized computer training for 16 workers), Lynn-based Traditional Breads (managerial and safety training for 50 workers), and Newburyport’s Crystal Engineering (technical training and certification for 25 workers).

By ensuring that employers can exercise direct control over projects, the Workforce Training Fund encourages a much tighter “fit” between workforce spending and the needs of the business community. However, as with many workforce development tools, the Fund still needs additional procedures/follow-up to determine the efficacy of its spending using measurable metrics.

Building a labor force that can successfully compete in a global economy requires an all-hands-on-deck approach and a commitment, from both public and private sectors, to carefully define the skills gap and make targeted investments to improve workforce readiness.

Industries will rise and fall. Companies will come and go. Jobs will be created and destroyed. But the bills families must pay are ever-present, and providing the opportunity for people to pull themselves up in times of struggle is one of the core promises of America.

The Accident(s) of Birth: Opportunity Knocks

“You’ve got the world by the strings, kid. Just don’t blow it.”

-- Advice from a Caddy, Myopia Hunt Club, c. 2000

Last week, Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung wrote a terrific column on the need to engage white men in ongoing efforts to make a more inclusive, more opportunistic society—in Boston and across the country. Leung quotes Colette Phillips, President and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications, Inc. (a Boston-based public relations and marketing communications firm), who stated, “In Boston, we need to create a new normal — white men at the table. You can’t talk about inclusion and exclude.”

Phillips’ incisive and earnest sentiment is all-too-often absent from discussions about a wide variety of issues—from reproductive justice (viewed as a “woman’s” concern, rather than a central element of public health for all) to corrections/policing policy (where elected officials often seek to curry favor in communities of color, but do little to engage white voters on the same issues).

This absence is particularly notable since political parties often speak about the need to embrace a “big tent” theory of coalition politics that bridges the divide between many segments to achieve a governing consensus. Neither party has done a particularly good job at this in recent years—as both Republican Tea Partiers and Democratic purists have imposed strict litmus tests on candidates, hollowing out the middle of the American political spectrum in the process.

There is plenty more to say on that subject in later posts. However, today I want to focus on a central idea raised by Leung’s column: how people privileged by the accident of birth should approach (and use) that privilege.

A Road to Opportunity
Myopia Hunt Club, Bay Road, South Hamilton, Mass.

I’m one of those privileged souls—a paradigmatic example of a beneficiary of centuries of prejudice. Some of the factors are immediately obvious to anyone who sees me. I’m White. I’m male. I’m rich. I’m healthy.

Other factors secured to no credit of my own aren’t apparent on the surface, but also form a basis for my privileged position. I’m an American Citizen. I’m heterosexual. I grew up in a two-parent/two-income household. I had a network of people who looked out for me as I was growing up (teachers, Little League coaches, fellow congregants at the First Church of Wenham, the parents of close friends, etc.).

The caddy who offered me advice at the age of 16 was not so blessed. He grew up poor, in a single-parent home in Peabody. His mature approach to offering counsel to his naive co-caddy was evident, both from his willingness to cop to mistakes he made along the way and his steadfast effort to make sure that I didn’t let the riches that I had inherited go to my head. More importantly, by characterizing my position as one in which I had “the world by the strings,” he made it abundantly clear that the world would judge me less by the opportunities provided by Grace, and more by what I chose to do with those opportunities.

Taking advantage of opportunities is, to some degree, a straightforward proposition. Work hard. Pay attention and adhere steadfastly to First Principles. Devote your professional life to your most cherished values.

The harder part is resisting the urge to judge others by the opportunities they have/don’t have. It is telling that the Ten Commandments include a directive not to covet what others have, but do not include a similar, more affirmative edict to do your best with what you’ve been given. Whether it’s “real estate envy” in New York or jealously about the personal or professional lives of friends or colleagues that always seem one step ahead of ours, the human inclination to worry about what we lack, rather than revel in what we have, threatens our ability to seize on opportunities as they arise and undermines our capacity to work with people to solve collective problems.

In the end, no matter what your race, class, sex, or creed, we all bear the burden of not “blowing it”—of seizing on the opportunities that come our way to better the lives of our fellow citizens.

On the Move: Opportunity and Mobility in America

“This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”

--Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893

This week, the Census Bureau released a new data tool showing county-by-county migration data in the U.S. between 2007-2011 (see: http://flowsmapper.geo.census.gov/flowsmapper/map.html).

As the Great Recession took hold, domestic migration plunged, reaching the lowest level since the government began tracking it in the 1940s (see chart).

However, as the economy emerged from recession (and household formation of Millennials followed), migration has seen a slight bump. Today, in a given year, roughly six percent of the population aged 1 and older move across county lines or from abroad.

As we are apt to do in this space, let’s take a closer look at some of the more interesting findings from New York City and the Commonwealth and one unique idea from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution to boost opportunity for low-income Americans.

While story of Brooklyn’s boom over the past decade is well known, the data indicate that within New York City, the Bronx is the borough with the greatest positive net migration. Brooklyn was a net loser of population to every borough other than Manhattan, while the Bronx gained immensely from the other boroughs, including over 9200 people from Manhattan.

Notably, a second level analysis of who these individuals are suggests that the net migration of the Bronx is fueled by low-income and low-education households (the Bronx is the poorest urban county in America, with nearly 30 percent of residents living below the poverty line)—perhaps as the result of those families being pushed out of other boroughs by rising rent and/or the growth of low-wage jobs in the Bronx.

Nevertheless, the population resurgence in the Bronx is cause for optimism. As the Times reported, while the total net migration to the Bronx remains minimal, the borough suffered from annual losses neared 20,000 as recently as twenty years ago.

In the Commonwealth, the story to note is the continued resonance of the Route 128 corridor and the strength of the Metro-Boston region’s higher education institutions in driving highly educated workers to the Bay State. Middlesex County in particular—home to Harvard and MIT, among others—is among a handful of areas (Los Angeles, Manhattan, D.C. and Chicago) that “trade” these highly skilled workers back and forth.

In addition, Suffolk County (Boston) has seen a surge in individuals with graduate level education. In fact, for every 100 residents in the county with this level of education, 9.8 of them moved into the county during the previous year ─ among the highest rates of any large county in the nation (many graduate-level degree holders also leave Boston every year, but that is largely the result of having completed their education at BC, BU, Northeastern, etc.).

Some have expressed concerns about the long-term decline in residential mobility—that it perpetuates racial segregation, is indicative of a lack of frontier spirit that drives entrepreneurial economies, or is an unintended byproduct of post-war efforts at increasing homeownership in America.

There are no doubt circumstances in which one or more of these concerns are valid. However, the lack of residential mobility may also be a product of a long-term trend toward more latticed social networks outside the nuclear family (and the desire not to leave them behind). It could be the product of an increasingly urbanized America that is less susceptible to the types of natural shocks—like the Dust Bowl—that drove thousands from the Plains to the West Coast. Or it could be that Frederick Jackson Turner was right—albeit 50 years too soon—that once the West Coast was built up after World War II, there was simply no where else to go.

Enabling Americans to live the lives they imagine—to pursue happiness in the way that they see fit—is one of government’s fundamental promises. However, that doesn’t mean that Americans in the 21^st century will want to mimic the migration patterns of those in the 19^th.

While academics can and should continue to study these trends and their underlying causes, policymakers need not be concerned about absolute rates of residential mobility. Rather, the “First Principle” is always to define the problem—are people who want to move unable to do so, and why? Are these parts of the country that are in a vicious cycle of out-migration and economic decline (the answer to which is almost always yes)?

Ensuring opportunity, rather than stimulating mobility for mobility’s sake, should be our lodestar. That’s why Jens Ludwig and Steven Raphael’s idea for a ”Mobility Bank” is worth further study. The Mobility Bank would be a federally funded program to help low-income U.S. workers move to take advantage of job opportunities and to ensure that while Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier may have closed, the frontier of a new and better life is still at the heart of the American Experience.