That’s the News & Observer‘s gushing take on John Edwards’ latest name-lending endeavor. (Such fawning news coverage is exactly why videri quam esse1 pols like Edwards do such things.)
The N&O also had this little snippet:
He is also directing the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, campaigning for raising state minimum wages ?
Please note: the above is the economic equivalent of He is also directing the UNC Center on Gravity Victimhood and campaigning for mandatory state laws to make people wear lead suits.
? and traveling the country trying to elect Democrats to the legislature or Congress, not to mention laying the groundwork for a 2008 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, real academics studying poverty in America are making findings that obviously don’t lend themselves to be addressed by Democrats erecting a fa?ade of “fighting poverty”: that in the words of Prof. Frank Stephenson,
… because of how it is calculated, changes in the poverty rate can be not just affected by, but entirely attributable to, personal decisions rather than labor markets. … How important is the effect of personal choices on the poverty rate? A recent NBER Working Paper examines why ?robust growth in real per capita GDP over the last three decades [but] the U.S. poverty rate has changed very little? and concludes that ?changes in female labor supply should have reduced poverty, but [were] counteracted by an increase in the rate of female [household] headship.?
Note
1. Esse quam videri (“To be rather than to seem”) is the state motto of North Carolina.
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