In October 2015, the National Academy of Social Insurance hosted a roundtable, "Rethinking Unemployment Insurance," with support from the Russell Sage Foundation. The event convened a group of experts from academia, government, and public policy institutions to discuss challenges facing unemployment insurance (UI) in the wake of the Great Recession. Participants considered strategies for how to promote reemployment through the UI system, how to redesign the program’s financing, and how to reshape the overall system. Attendees also discussed agendas for future work on UI, both from within government administration and in the policy-research fields.
A new report highlighting the roundtable’s findings, “The Current State of Unemployment Insurance: Challenges and Prospects,” is now available from the Academy. The summary states:
As the crisis of the Great Recession gives way to economic recovery, the federal-state Unemployment Insurance (UI) system that helped sustain the country during the height of unemployment continues its essential function in the American economy. The program that made headlines during each successive wave of extraordinary unemployment compensation extensions continues its fundamental work of providing income replacement to workers laid off from a job. The present period, when the demands on the system are relatively low, is precisely the time to have reasoned conversations about reforming it – before the next high-stress period of sustained and widespread use.
This need for timely reform inspired the National Academy of Social Insurance to convene a roundtable discussion on “Rethinking Unemployment Insurance.” This brief presents the issues, problems, and proposals for reform that were identified at the roundtable, and represents an up-to-date accounting of some of the most pressing issues facing the UI system as articulated by leading experts on the program.
The Russell Sage Foundation is saddened to report the passing of Orville Gilbert Brim, Jr., known as Bert, who served as president of the foundation from 1964 to 1972. During his tenure at RSF, Brim established the Visiting Scholars program and expanded new areas of research, including lifespan development and aging, mental testing and human resource management, and techniques for evaluating social programs.
Brim earned his B.A. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in Sociology in 1951 from Yale. After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, he joined the Russell Sage Foundation and co-authored Experiences and Attitudes of American Adults Concerning Standardized Intelligence Tests (1965), American Beliefs and Attitudes About Intelligence (1969), and co-edited The Dying Patient (1969), among other publications.
Following his time at the foundation, Brim went on to serve as president of the Foundation for Child Development. He was also board chairman of the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences, a longtime member of the board of the William T. Grant Foundation, and led the Research Network on Successful Midlife Development for the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation.
Mary C. Waters (Harvard University) will deliver the 2016 Henry and Bryna David Lecture on Tuesday, May 3, 2016, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. Waters is a former chair of the Russell Sage Foundation’s board of trustees, co-author of the RSF book Inheriting the City, co-editor of the RSF books The New Race Question and Becoming New Yorkers, and a recipient of multiple research awards from the foundation.
In her address, Waters will discuss the war on crime and the war on immigrants in the U.S., focusing on how the growth of mass incarceration and of undocumented immigrants has been proceeding along parallel tracks since the 1970s. She will look at these two groups together, arguing that the U.S. has developed a new form of legal exclusion and discrimination.
The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Click here to register.
The talk will also be livestreamed from the Henry and Bryna David Lecture website at the time of the event.
RSF trustee Kathryn Edin (Johns Hopkins University) has been awarded the 2016 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism with co-author H. Luke Shaefer (University of Michigan) for their book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. In the book, Edin and Shaefer investigate the rise of households surviving on virtually no cash income and find that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to one and a half million American households, including about three million children. Through in-depth interviews with struggling families, the authors discover a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor.
Edin and Shaefer discussed some of their findings in a recent article for the RSF Journal special issue, “Severe Deprivation in America,” which is available in full here. Edin is also co-author, with Stefanie DeLuca and Susan Clampet-Lundquist, of the new RSF book Coming of Age in the Other America; co-author of Making Ends Meet; and co-editor of Unmarried Couples with Children.