The Washington Post:
Really Out of Line The Government's Poverty Measure Is 40 Years Old --
and Showing Its Age. [via
Planetizen]
The reason for this dissonance between the reality in America's streets and official poverty data is the federal government's reliance on the concept of the poverty line... Over the last 40 years, the federal poverty level has been updated to reflect inflation, but not social and economic changes. For most families today, food constitutes less than a fifth of their budgets while higher costs of transportation, housing, health care and child care have created new burdens....Despite all evidence to the contrary, the federal poverty level measurement also assumes that costs are the same across all of the lower 48 states... A family living in Manhattan in New York is expected to spend the same amount of money on food, clothing and shelter as a family in the town of Manhattan in Kansas.
Note the bit about transportation costs. Suburban Nation shows what a
burden having to pay for a car (or multiple cars) can be on working
families. Public transportation is essential to help poor people be
self-suffient.
This article makes a convincing case that America's poverty measure needs
to be revised. I can't believe it doesn't take cost of living into
account!
Does Free Software Kill Markets?
I followed a link to
Don Park's
weblog from everyone's favorite site, Scripting News. I disagreed with
what Park said about free software killing markets -- more on that in a
bit -- but I found his ideas very interesting. Park has been in the
industry a long time (sadly, no bio is available that I can see) and
has a valuable perspective. His site is worth a visit.
The article I want to respond to is
Free Open Source
Kills Markets. He writes:
With continued flood of free open source (often Java) tools, XML tools market is mostly dead. Why should anyone pay for XML parsers, editors, databases, and servers?
Free open source software devalue commercial software and poisons the marketplace.
Why is this the case? Perhaps you could make the argument that freely
available XML parsing tools harm writers of XML parsing tools. But
everyone else who uses XML benefits by having high-quality professional
grade tools available for free. Students can use XML in their projects
easily, other free software projects can build better applications on top
of standard XML APIs, Sun can incorporate the tools into Java itself, and
software companies like the one I work for can use the code in our own
product. In short, we can use resources we would've otherwise used to
pay for closed, proprietary XML tools for making our products better. Who
loses here?
Do XML tool authors lose? They seem not to, because they keep writing high
quality open source tools (the SAX
code is even public domain!) Making something a comodity does kill the
market for that comodity, but as long as the code is being developed, no
one is being hurt.