Sesame Street Revisited

Cass R. Sunstein, the Robert Walmsley University Professor and Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will join the Russell Sage Foundation as a Visiting Scholar for Summer 2014, starting on Monday, June 9.

Sunstein is a member of the Foundation’s Behavioral Economics Roundtable, an initiative that gathers prominent scholars in the field to support and promote new research in behavioral economics. With RSF trustee Richard H. Thaler, he co-authored the 2009 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, a New York Times bestseller that examines the way that people make decisions and shows how sensible “choice architecture” can successfully nudge people toward the best ones.

Sunstein served as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012. His other books include, most recently, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas and Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (2014).

During his time in residence at the Foundation, Sunstein will work on his next book manuscript, titled Choosing Not to Choose.

A June 19 summit on America’s poverty crisis, organized by the Hamilton Project at Brookings, will bring together leading scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and business and labor leaders for a series of discussions on strategies for combating poverty. Former president Bill Clinton will deliver remarks on the opening day of the summit. Included among the featured speakers are several contributors to the Russell Sage Foundation’s Legacies of the War on Poverty, a 2013 release that analyzed the remarkable and enduring policy successes of the War on Poverty.

At the conference, Harry Holzer (Georgetown University) will participate in a roundtable discussion on new approaches to building skills within the U.S. labor force. Holzer’s chapter in Legacies of the War on Poverty examines changing trends in employment and training policy for low-income individuals since the War on Poverty was launched. Bridget Terry Long (Harvard Graduate School of Education), whose contribution to Legacies traces the evolution of higher education policies, will discuss strategies for addressing the academic barriers to higher education.

In a new working paper for the Great Recession Initiative, Robert A. Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University explores the extent to which families that participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—or food stamps—also receive benefits from other federal aid programs, such as Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). As he finds, in 2008, 76 percent of families receiving SNAP also participated in at least one other major benefit, excluding Medicaid. However, over half of these only received one other benefit and only a very small fraction received more than two others.

As Moffitt explains, analyzing SNAP families’ participation in additional social safety net programs is crucial for understanding the other needs of SNAP households—such as whether these households tend to include family members with disabilities—or if overall, they simply have such low income that they require additional support for other expenses such as housing and medical care. Noting that policy analysts and scholars have long expressed concerns that the receipt of multiple programs may have negative effects on work incentives, Moffitt also investigates whether multiple-program participation by SNAP families deters household members from seeking employment.