The United Kingdom is implementing a major welfare reform, replacing a constellation of social support programs with a single monthly payment, the universal credit. The amount a recipient receives will be based on income level of the prior month, with additional amounts for disability, caring responsibilities, housing costs, and children. Touted as the most significant reform since the 1940s, the universal credit went into pilot phase in April 2013, with broader rollout to run from October 2013 to October 2017. Read more »

On Monday, Memorial Day, Wal-Mart will begin fulfilling its promise to hire any recent, honorably discharged veteran that wants a job (at least part-time). The world’s largest retailer says its pledge, part of the Obama administration’s “Joining Forces” initiative, will result in the company hiring more than 100,000 vets over the next five years. “Wal-Mart is already the largest private employer of veterans — and we want to hire more,” says the company’s website. Read more »

The U.S. budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional, a large factor in Standard and Poor’s downgrading the U.S. sovereign credit rating in 2011. Budgets were always passed for each fiscal year from 1977 to 1998, but in the thirteen fiscal years since, Congress has failed to adopt a budget five times, including for FY 2013. A continuing resolution—a stopgap spending measure—was passed in late March to fund discretionary programs of the federal government through the end of September, the last month of the 2013 fiscal year. Read more »

This summer, a billion-dollar project will begin to raise the road deck of the Bayonne Bridge that links Staten Island to Jersey City, and provides access to Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel. The project is not being undertaken because of safety concerns about the current bridge, but rather to allow larger container ships to pass underneath it and reach the Port of New York and New Jersey. It’s just one of several port projects in anticipation of the widening of the Panama Canal. Read more »

Midnight. A fishing trawler lurches violently in a squall off the coast of Marseille. A seemingly lifeless body is spotted adrift off the bow, and fished out of the roiling sea. No identification. No memory. Only three enigmatic clues bizarrely implanted in the man’s hip: 000-7-17-12-0-14-26. Gemeinschaft Bank. Zurich. Read more »

Last month Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Rockefeller Foundation announced a program to provide free technical assistance to four states and local governments pursuing social impact bonds (SIBs), one of the first efforts in the United States to scale up an innovative tool for increasing the quantity and effectiveness of social spending. In announcing the program, Jeffrey Liebman, who oversees the effort, said that “social impact bonds bring together the public, private, and nonprofit sectors in a program designed to boost social innovation and direct public dollars to programs that work.” Read more »

Perhaps the most prized real estate at the annual State of the Union address is the first lady’s box, where, for over thirty years, persons of great distinction have been invited to sit and be recognized in the national spotlight. Foreign dignitaries, war heroes, renowned academics, innovators, and others of such esteem frequently receive the honor. Read more »

For communities looking to attract the coveted highly-skilled, highly-paid workforce, there is often little substitute for a locale’s livability. Job opportunities, no matter how plum, may fail to lure workers if a city is determined to be undesirable by potential emigrants. In describing what motivates the so-called Creative Class to relocate, urban theorist Richard Florida notes that “quality-of-place”—a city’s built and natural environment, its population diversity and vibrancy—is the deciding factor. Read more »

Congressional polarization has steadily increased over the last twenty-five years, according to research by political scientists Howard Rosenthal and Keith Poole. Their analysis indicates that the U.S. House and Senate are more polarized today than at any other time since the end of Reconstruction. The 2012 election continued this trend. Read more »

The innovations that will drive a knowledge-based economy and employ the next generation of high-skilled workers require a national commitment to research and development, and no nation has made this a higher priority than Israel. The country of 8 million invests more money in R&D per GDP than any other. And while the United States still leads the world in total R&D spending, it ranks ninth when economies are weighted. Read more »