Interesting Q&A at Wonkblog between Ezra Klein and Chana Joffe-Walt, “I thought I knew what being disabled meant, and I don’t.” Klein’s intro:
Over the weekend, “This American Life” and “Planet Money” ran a story by Chana Joffe-Walt looking at the extraordinary growth of America’s disability insurance system. Joffe-Walt visited Hale County, Ala., where one-in-four residents is on disability, looked at the lawyers who specialized in winning disability cases against the government (and getting paid by taxpayers for it), and spent time with a young child whose disability check has become the key to his family’s survival.
The result is a detailed, nuanced, and discomfiting look at a social insurance program that has become a catch-all for the failures of both our economy and our safety net. It’s worth reading, or listening to, in full. I spoke with Joffe-Walt on Wednesday. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Full disclosure: Based on listening to her reports on NPR in the past I don’t have a high opinion of Joffe-Walt as a reporter but, that said, the Q&A she does with Klein is instructive. It’s worth reading. (I haven’t listed to the This American Life/Planet Money story yet but I intend to.)
At the end of their Q&A Klein links to Brad Plumer’s interview with Harold Pollack. Pollack offers some important complementary information and a critique of the This American Life/Planet Money story.
Finally, here’s Jared Bernstein from two months ago with some hard numbers on Disability rolls, Disability Rolls and the Makers/Takers/Fakers Nonsense. Spoiler alert: Disability applications have shot way up over the past decade – more people do apply when jobs are harder to find – but the approval rate has gone way down at the same time. When you take age into account the award rates have grown very modestly, i.e., much of the growth in the absolute number of awards can be attributed to an aging population. (That’s not to downplay the growth but recognize it for what it is.)
UPDATE 3/30/13:
James Kwak at Baseline Scenario doesn’t care for the Joffe-Walt piece either. He provides an intelligent critique and some numbers to back it up. For example:
… is the existence of disabled people some sort of huge new insight into the evolution of the American economy? … Joffe-Walt claims that the 14 million people receiving benefits outnumber the people who are unemployed and are completely invisible to economists. It’s true the newspapers don’t publish monthly disability figures like they do unemployment statistics. But look at this:
That’s the employment-to-population ratio, from the incredibly useful Calculated Risk. Since the denominator is all working-age people, this chart reflects any growth of disability recipients. And do you see some huge invisible force that is pushing down the employment ratio? I don’t think so. This chart tells the usual story we all know. The economy was very strong in the late 1990s, probably unsustainably so (with unemployment below the long-term sustainable rate, according to the macro guys). We had a recession, and then employment recovered to roughly the sustainable rate. Then we had the financial crisis and a huge fall in employment. Sure, a rise in disability rates could mean the employment-to-population ratio is lower than it otherwise would have been. But it’s not a new way of thinking about the economy.
UPDATE 3/31/13:
NY Times article where the lead describes someone (presumably) on disability: As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester.