The Ladder

That's the buzz circulating around the President's selection of Richard Cordray to head the CFPB. Ezra Klein says that her possible Senate candidacy is a good reason to nominate someone else.

With the “golden age of behavioral research,” as New York Times columnist David Brooks recently described, comes a golden opportunity for the asset building and financial inclusion fields.  Indeed, the latest breakthroughs in social science and behavioral research beg – or perhaps even force – us to think differently about poverty reduction and the policies and mechanisms that can enable it.

Two days ago, the NY Times published an op-ed describing how the economic recession has called attention to the U.S.’s general neglect of infrastructure development. The op-ed contends that in recent years, the U.S. has made relatively few investments in infrastructure ranging from transportation to energy and that this has implications for the country’s long-term sustainability and growth. Support is made for S.652 Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development which would create the American Infrastructure Financing Authority (AIFA), recently proposed into Congress with bipartisan support and intended to spur infrastructure development vital to the country’s future. AIFA would invest private capital into grants and loans for long-term and financially sustainable projects related to infrastructure development. I think the interesting parts of the op-ed, though, are the ideas that infrastructure is a worthy investment for long-term sustainability and growth and that widespread investment in infrastructure could be reminiscent of Roosevelt’s New Deal. And especially how these ideas might relate to children's savings.

Last Friday, New York Times columnist David Brooks had a great piece summarizing some recent research on the psychology of poverty by Harvard’s Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir.