New America Foundation

Today’s prolonged economic slump is fundamentally different from an ordinary recession. In the aftermath of a severe financial collapse, an economy is at risk of succumbing to a prolonged deflationary undertow. With asset prices reduced, the financial system damaged, unemployment high, consumer demand depressed, and businesses reluctant to invest, the economy gets stuck well below its full employment potential.

For much of the last three decades, policy debates in the United States have been dominated by a quixotic concern about deficits, debt, and demographics. This concern has distracted policy from fundamental economic issues that have much more direct bearing on economic well-being, most notably the growth (and bursting) of the housing bubble in the last decade. While large deficits can have a negative impact on economic growth, this impact has been hugely misrepresented in public debates.

The way governments give aid to citizens in need has changed dramatically in recent years: the estimated number of government-to-person cash payments transferred electronically in 2012 has doubled from 2012 to 2009 — from 25 to 61 percent according to the data of countries examined by the Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative (GSSP).

With Americans still trapped in the fifth year of our Great Recession, and median personal income having been essentially stagnant for forty years, perhaps we should finally admit that decades of economic policies have largely failed.

Twenty-four hours after Mitt Romney’s concession speech—as most of America nursed election hangovers, pundits opined on what went wrong for Romney and what’s next for Obama, and Florida continued counting votes—I gained perspective from an unexpected source: Mexico. I was at a hotel in Puebla watching the late-night TV hosts of Tercer Grado (the Third Degree) news commentary show bash the amateurish democratic process of their neighbors to the north.

The apparent political dead-end in the Middle East Peace Process combined with a deepening apartheid-like reality on the ground, has reached a degree where many Palestinians and Israelis are asking not can the two-state solution be salvaged but should it? And, perhaps more urgently, what may be the alternatives? Khaled Elgindy, Fellow at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy and Leila Hilal, Director of New America’s Middle East Task Force, moderated a discussion on this critical question with Omar Dajani at the New America Foundation.

On October 31, The Atlantic launched a new blog called "The Sexes" which takes on a question that many New America staffers have posed in the past: How are the roles of men and women changing at work, at home and in society?  One of the site's inaugural pieces "Work-Life Balance As a Men's Issue, Too" was written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a New America board member who also wrote the much-discussed piece, Programs:

• Workforce and Family Program

When it comes to savings for the poor and financial inclusion efforts, India is a dynamic market ripe for innovation and experimentation. Its extensive web of financial service providers as well as the incidence of large-scale exclusion are contradictory features that also make it a market worth examining.

Over the last decade, anti-poverty initiatives across the developing world have increasingly focused on gender-based strategies, and in particular, on achieving equality and empowerment through gender-focused program innovation. While important progress has been made in the last several years, men still outnumber women in paid employment in almost every region of the developing world, with more women working informally, and in more vulnerable employment positions, than men.

On June 21, 2012, Maggie Severns gave a presentation on Illinois's strategy for young English language learners at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) annual conference in Orlando, Florida.