CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

At-home mothers are more likely than employed mothers to report feeling sad or angry and to have been diagnosed with depression, according to a new report by Gallup.

Women who are employed also express about the same emotional well-being whether they have a child at home or not.

The results are based on surveys of more than 60,000 American women between the ages of 18 and 64 interviewed from January through April. The categories for employed mothers and at-home mothers refer to women who have a child under 18 at home.

Respondents were interviewed about feeling any of the given emotions “yesterday,” and their answers showed that employed mothers were slightly more likely to report positive feelings, too. For example, women who worked for pay were slightly more likely to report having smiled or laughed a lot and experienced happiness “yesterday.”

These are of course potentially inflammatory results, given continuing cultural debates about gender roles. It’s not clear, though, what causes this differential.

You might suggest income differences between the two groups could play a role. But the researchers sliced the data by household income, and for the list of negative emotions, at-home mothers at all income levels reported being worse off than their employed counterparts.

The same was not true for the experience of positive emotions like happiness, however; at-home mothers with lower household incomes (under $36,000) were slightly worse off than employed mothers of comparable means, but at middle and higher incomes, mothers at home experienced about as much positive emotion as did their employed counterparts.

So income explains only part of the story, and none at all for negative emotions.

The takeaway from these numbers probably isn’t that all mothers should work even if they prefer to stay at home (although that subject did seem to occupy the political debate for a while last month).

Rather, the authors suggest that “more societal recognition of the difficult job stay-at-home mothers have raising children would perhaps help support them emotionally,” and that more affordable child care options could help ensure that the mothers who are at home are in that role by choice.

Earlier this year, Alan Krueger, the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a former Economix contributor, presented what he called the Great Gatsby Curve: that is, a chart showing a positive relationship between intergenerational mobility and income inequality in rich countries. It suggested that a greater concentration of wealth might make it harder for people at the bottom to move up the income ladder.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Since then,  Pew’s Economic Mobility Project has released American state-level mobility data. I thought it might be interesting to look at whether states in which wealth is distributed more evenly also appear to provide poorer residents with opportunities for more upward mobility.

It’s an exceedingly difficult question to answer (and Pew’s report did not seek to do so), especially given the limited data available. But here’s a rough, back-of-the-envelope first go.

Economic Mobility Project, Pew Center on the States; Census BureauRelative upward mobility data are from Pew Economic Mobility Project. Researchers tracked a group of nationally representative Americans who were 35 to 39 years old at any point from 1978 to 1997. They then examined how each individual’s earnings had changed exactly one decade after the initial income number was collected. The measure shown on the vertical axis here refers to the share of those in the bottom half of the distribution who moved up at least 10 percentiles.

The chart above shows inequality on the horizontal axis and relative income mobility on the vertical axis. Here are the exact metrics I used:

Pew produced several different measures for economic mobility (none of which was directly comparable to that used in the original Gatsby Curve chart, unfortunately). I focused on its metric for relative upward mobility.

This is calculated by focusing on the Americans who, when surveyed at some point between 1978 and 1997, were in the bottom half of the income distribution — that is, they earned less than the median American. The report’s authors looked at what share of those people were able to move at least 10 percentiles up the income ladder when interviewed again exactly a decade later.

A higher number for each state means that a larger share of people at the bottom were able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. For example, in Connecticut, about half of the people who started in the bottom of the income distribution climbed up at least 10 percentiles.

Then I looked at a measure of income distribution called the Gini index, which runs from zero to one. A lower Gini coefficient means income is more equally distributed, and a higher value means income is more concentrated among the richest.

The Census Bureau offers household Gini index values by state for select years. I took an average of the values for 1979 and 1989 (the two years that fell within the survey period Pew looked at) and compared those to mobility values.

Again, this is a very rough take, but there seems to be a weak negative relationship at best. (For the nerds out there, the R-squared is a mere 0.048.)

I also tried plotting inequality against absolute income mobility — that is, the average percent growth of residents’ earnings over a decade. For example, the average New Yorker had a 20 percent rise in earnings.

Economic Mobility Project, Pew Center on the States; Census BureauAbsolute upward mobility data are from Pew Economic Mobility Project. Researchers tracked a group of nationally representative Americans who were 35 to 39 years old at any point from 1978 to 1997. They then examined how each individual’s earnings had changed exactly one decade after the initial income number was collected. The measure shown on the vertical axis here refers to how much those earnings rose.

The relationship here is slightly stronger, but still pretty weak. (The R-squared was 0.09 in this case.)

One challenge you may notice with these data — besides the fact that the years are not precisely matched up, among other things — is that there’s just not that much variation in inequality among the states. The Gini coefficients range from 0.3795 to 0.471, so the points are clustered relatively closely together.

Do you have thoughts on other ways to investigate how inequality affects mobility within the United States?

The latest batch of economic data has been slightly better than expected, causing Moody’s Analytics to raise its forecast for May job growth to 170,000, up from 165,000 last week.

“The best evidence comes from surveys of builders and manufacturers,” Moody’s economists write. The surveys suggest that “April’s slowdown in factory hiring was a temporary phenomenon.”

Jobs and the Election

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One sign of the likely strengthening of the job market since April, when the economy added only 115,000 jobs, came in this morning’s report on new claims for unemployment benefits. Last week, 370,000 people applied for initial benefits, compared with 389,000 a month earlier. Because last week included the 12th day of the month, it is the week on which the May monthly jobs report will be based.

The latest data do not change the larger picture, though. Moody’s forecasts average monthly job growth of 183,000 in the six months between now and election day (virtually unchanged from 182,000 a week ago). As I noted last week in the debut of The Times’s new Jobs Tracker:

History suggests that this year’s election will probably be very close if the economy adds 100,000 to 175,000 jobs a month in the six months before Election Day. (These benchmarks come from work by Nate Silver, of The Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog.) Job growth above 175,000 would tend to make President Obama a favorite. Growth below 100,000 would make Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, the favorite….

Historically, nothing — not social issues, campaign advertisements or gaffes — has influenced voters more heavily than the direction of the economy in an election year. In only three races since World War II has the outcome been different from what the economy’s direction would have suggested: 1952 (when the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower was running), 1968 (when the Vietnam War hobbled the Democrats) and 1976 (when Watergate hobbled the Republicans).

For now, the forecast suggests that the pace of job growth will be a modest help to Mr. Obama in November. Although the direction of the economy, rather than overall condition, has traditionally been the best predictor of elections, the fact that the last few years have been so rough could obviously complicate the situation this year.

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail. As the largest bank holding company in the United States, with assets approaching $2.5 trillion as reported under standard American accounting principles, it is inconceivable that JPMorgan Chase would be allowed to collapse now or in the near future. The damage to the American economy and to the world would be too great.

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The company’s recent trading losses therefore call for greater public scrutiny than would be the case for most private enterprise – and demand an independent investigation into exactly what happened. (Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets has already called for exactly this.)

The investigation begun by the F.B.I. is unlikely to be sufficiently public. Given the strong political connections between JPMorgan Chase and the Obama administration, it would also be better to have an investigation led by a completely independent counsel.

Hopefully, too-big-to-fail is not forever. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is working on a mechanism that could conceivably allow that agency to handle the “failure” of a bank holding company while protecting the creditors of operating subsidiaries – limiting the potential contagion effect.

But this mechanism is not yet in place. It does not now apply to cross-border banking (remember that JPMorgan Chase’s losses are in London), and even the F.D.I.C.’s acting chairman, Martin J. Gruenberg, was careful in describing its likely efficacy in a speech last week.

(Disclosure: I’m on the F.D.I.C.’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee, and I’ve worked with the F.D.I.C. with some outreach activities intended to help the agency receive constructive feedback on resolution. I am not paid by the F.D.I.C.)

In effect, JPMorgan Chase operates with the implicit backing of the United States government – primarily in the form of actual and potential access to borrowing from the Federal Reserve, with the implication that the Treasury could also provide support.

Being effectively backed by the full faith and credit of the government is a great help; it lowers a bank’s financing costs because it reduces the risk to creditors. JPMorgan Chase and the other big banks in the American economy are effectively government-sponsored (and subsidized) enterprises.

There is no kind of market involved in determining the franchise value of mega-banks; this is a government subsidy scheme, pure and simple. People on the right of the political spectrum understand this, as do people on the left; see my blog post last week on the extent of cross-partisan agreement on this issue.

I would add to that list former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Republican. When I appeared on his radio show on Monday afternoon, we were in complete agreement on the need to break up or otherwise constrain the size of big banks.

There are many unanswered questions about the JPMorgan Chase losses and a great deal of informed guesswork about exactly what went wrong. By his own account, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, was unaware of what was happening on the relevant trading desk until Bloomberg News reporters brought it to his attention.

At that time, he dismissed any concerns as a “tempest in a teapot.” In the weeks after, this supposed “hedge” – or risk-reduction strategy – blew up badly.

The question is not why a trader made a mistake; this can happen anywhere. The issue is how this was handled and reported by JPMorgan Chase’s risk-management professionals and their systems – believed by many insiders to be the best in the business.

Here are five questions that an independent investigation should consider:

1. What exactly was the trade? Who approved and reviewed the trade?

2. To what extent were the mistakes encouraged or condoned by particular quantitative models — for example, those popularly known as value-at-risk? (For a critique, see Pablo Triana’s book, “The Number That Killed Us.”)

3. What did Mr. Dimon know and when did he know it? Was there disclosure to the board and to shareholders with appropriate timing? This is among the specific concerns raised by Mr. Kelleher.

4. Does the board have adequate depth of experience along the relevant dimensions of risk management?

5. What interactions did Mr. Dimon or any of his colleagues have with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before and while these losses were incurred? Mr. Dimon is on the board of that institution, where his role is described as advisory. But on what exactly did he advise them in recent months and years, particularly with regard to risk management and capital levels in systemically important banks?

On the one hand, we hear from bankers that supervisors are watching them closely – and even undermining their business. On the other hand, clearly someone was not paying attention. Why not?

This is not about conducting a witch hunt. It is about establishing the facts and understanding if anything about standard operating procedures and emergency protocols should be examined.

The right analogy is National Transportation Safety Board investigations – a suggestion that has been made by Andrew Lo, my colleague at M.I.T., and his co-authors. We learn a great deal when companies actually go bankrupt; e.g., about Enron (see the excellent book “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind) and about Lehman (see the bankruptcy examiner’s report).

But we need to investigate near-misses as well.

This is awkward for the White House – look at any of Ben White’s recent articles on the links between Wall Street and the Obama administration. But the power of big banks on Wall Street makes this kind of investigation even more necessary – see the reporting of Matt Taibbi for some graphic details.

Congress may also want to get involved, at least to understand if Dodd-Frank has been at all helpful. The Volcker Rule is not yet in effect but, if it were, would this have made a difference?

Mr. Dimon contends not, and he has been a consistent and vociferous opponent of the rule from the very beginning. It would seem foolhardy to accept Mr. Dimon’s view on this matter at face value. I testified in favor of the Volcker Rule before the Senate Banking Committee in early 2010; Barry Zubrow, then chief risk officer of JPMorgan Chase, testified and strongly opposed it.

Some people in the private sector and within the banking community will push back, asserting that this would further expand the scope of government vis-à-vis legitimate private business. This misses the point — that it is the people who run our largest banks who have undermined the viability of the private sector and who threaten its future.

Cam Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, has shown strong leadership on this point over the last week (you can follow him at @Cam_Fine on Twitter).

In the end, we may well come to the same conclusion as Elizabeth Warren – who has brilliantly seized the political moment and put her opponent for the Senate seat from Massachusetts, the Republican incumbent Scott Brown, on the defensive.

Ms. Warren is calling for the re-imposition of Glass-Steagall – separating commercial from investment banking. Mr. Fine is already pushing in the same direction. This position should be appealing across the political spectrum.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

If the American dream is doing better than your parents, only about half of recent college graduates think they will achieve it. They are even more pessimistic about the prospects for their peers, according to a new survey of recent graduates from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

Here’s a chart showing how graduates of the college classes of 2006-11 feel their generation will fare compared to the generation before them, and how the respondents personally will fare compared to their own parents:

Source: “Chasing the American Dream: Recent College Graduates and the Great Recession,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Chart shows responses from a  nationally representative sample of 444 recent college graduates from the class of 2006 through 2011, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The bar on the right shows that just shy of half (48 percent) of college grads from the classes of 2006-11 believe they will have more financial success than their parents. A fifth (20 percent) say they will probably have less financial success than their parents, and about 29 percent say they’ll do about as well.

If that sounds discouraging, take a look at the bar on the left, which shows responses to a question about whether today’s generation of young people over all will be more successful than their parents. A mere 16 percent said yes.

A majority — 58 percent — predicted that their generation will have less success than the generation before.

It’s not clear why respondents are more pessimistic about their peers than they are about themselves.

Perhaps it’s the Lake Wobegone Effect: Everyone believes himself or herself to be above average.

Or perhaps they realize the dwindling opportunities for members of their age group who didn’t go to college.

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

Sometimes Republicans and Democrats are like Coke and Pepsi: a lot more different in marketing than they are in substance.

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Aging, changes in the health sector and the recession all serve to increase what the government spends on social welfare programs. Republicans and Democrats both acknowledge that some kind of adjustment is needed to bring the amount the government spends in line with the amount that it taxes.

Republicans are more apt to say that spending needs to be cut in order to match government revenues that are currently less than spending. Indeed, many of them have taken a “no new taxes” pledge. Democrats are more apt to consider raising revenue to help pay for the cost of social spending.

To the degree that Republicans propose to cut spending by means-testing programs that were formerly provided to all income groups, there may be little or no economic difference between Democratic and Republican proposals.

Take, as an example, Medicare, the health-insurance program administered by the federal government primarily for people 65 and older. It is a universal program, rather than an antipoverty program: all citizens can receive benefits from the program when they become old, regardless of how rich or poor they are.

To simplify the arithmetic, suppose the medical goods and services provided cost an average of $11,000 a year per beneficiary. The government could provide Medicare free of charge, in which case each beneficiary effectively receives $11,000 in premium assistance from the public treasury in order to pay for the cost of the program.

The premium assistance by itself tends to increase the government deficit in proportion to the size of the older population, because the government has to pay for the medical goods and services. One idea, close to some Republican thinking, is to reduce the deficit by cutting government spending by “means-testing”: limiting the assistance to people who cannot afford to pay the premium themselves.

For example, the premium assistance might be reduced 10 cents for every dollar of a beneficiary’s income. (Medicare Part A is currently is a universal program. Medicare Parts B and D currently subsidize premiums for all beneficiaries, but to a greater degree for those with low incomes; in this regard Medicare is a means-tested premium assistance program.)

The universal and means-tested approaches are shown in blue and red, respectively. The horizontal axis shows annual income ranging from zero to $120,000 a year. The universal premium assistance approach is shown as a horizontal line, because all beneficiaries receive the same assistance regardless of income. The green means-tested schedule slopes down, because high income people receive less assistance than low-income people.

An alternative approach would be to keep the universal assistance but help pay for it with an additional 10 percent income tax on people 65 and older. A 10 percent income tax on incomes below $110,000 a year is shown in red in the chart. Democrats have proposed raising taxes on wealthier Americans to avoid deeper spending cuts, though none have called for a tax on the elderly, as in this hypothetical example.

Under the income tax version, the net benefit to beneficiaries is the difference between the blue and the red lines in the chart, which coincides with the green means-tested proposal.

Although the new tax and cut-by-means-test proposals sound different – the former proposal raises revenue without cutting spending while the latter proposal cuts spending without raising taxes – they are economically equivalent in these examples.

Both proposals cut net benefits (or raise net taxes) more for higher-income beneficiaries than for low-income beneficiaries. Putting more of the burden on higher-income beneficiaries is sometimes described as fair or equitable, but it also adds to the penalty for having a high income and, equivalently, subtracts from the burden of having a low income. That results in more people with low incomes, because incomes are determined in part by effort, which is affected by costs and benefits.

My point here is to advocate equity rather than incentives and to point out that both proposals — tax increase and spending cut — can increase equity and reduce incentives, in much the same ways.

Despite the economic similarities between the two approaches, I expect Republicans and Democrats to continue to differentiate their policies excessively, with Republicans arousing taxpayers over Democratic plans to raise taxes and Democrats alarming beneficiaries about imminent cuts in important social programs.

While the recession and its aftermath have been particularly rough on the youngest workers, the oldest workers may end up suffering the longest.

A new Government Accountability Office report on unemployed older workers looks at the difficulties they face finding new jobs if they are laid off, and how their financial security in retirement may be compromised as a result.

As has been documented, older workers have not been laid off at the same rate as younger workers, but once they lose their jobs, they tend to spend much longer finding new jobs, if they find them at all.

In 2011, 55 percent of workers older than 55 had been out of work for 27 weeks or more, compared to 47 percent of those 25 to 55. Of workers who lost their jobs between 2007 and 2009, just under a third of those 55 to 64 had found full-time jobs by January 2010, compared with 41 percent of those 25 to 54.

The report’s authors convened focus groups of unemployed older workers and prospective employers to discuss the barriers to re-employment, finding that older workers believed they suffered from age discrimination but also had trouble adjusting to new technology and online job searches. Employers were hesitant to hire older workers because of perceived higher health-care costs, as well as concerns that older workers would not stay long enough for the employer to reap a good return on investment.

Those older workers who do find jobs are much more likely to take a pay cut than younger workers. According to the report, 70 percent of workers 55 or older who were laid off between 2007 and 2009 and found a new job are now earning less than in their previous job, compared to 53 percent of those 25 to 54.

At the same time, older Americans are trying to work longer. The labor force participation rate – the proportion of people of an age cohort who are either working or looking for work – has steadily risen since 1990 for workers 55 or older. People are living longer and healthier lives, but are also trying to save more for retirement.

But those who are laid off and never find another job can see their retirement savings shrivel as they spend fewer years paying into employer-based plans and Social Security once they are out of work. Some older workers who lose their jobs also draw down from their employer-based pensions or 401(k)s to cover living expenses before they are officially eligible for retirement, and those who have no other options are very likely to claim Social Security early.

By doing so at 62 rather than 65 or 66, these workers will receive lower monthly payments for life. In a simulation, the report’s authors estimated that a person who stopped working at 62 and began collecting benefits would receive a median monthly benefit of $909, about 25 percent less than the $1,212 per month available to those who hold off claiming Social Security until age 66. A person who lost a job at 55 and began collecting at 62 would have a median benefit of just $855 a month.

For those trying to get by primarily on Social Security benefits, such low levels “could become problematic as retirees age and if health care costs and premiums continue to increase,” the authors wrote.

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

On May 8, Representative Ron Paul of Texas took a break from campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination to preside over a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology.

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Its primary focus was on the Federal Reserve System’s so-called dual mandate – to maintain both price stability and low unemployment, a policy that many conservatives view as inherently in conflict. They prefer that the Fed concentrate on one thing and one thing only – price stability, regardless of how high unemployment is.

To his credit, Representative Paul (for whom I worked in the 1970s) noted that the Fed actually has three mandates. These are spelled out in Section 2a of the Federal Reserve Act, which says,

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long-run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long-run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates.

Interestingly, while most conservatives aim their fire at the idea of “maximum employment,” Mr. Paul took issue with the idea of “stable prices.” As he explained in his opening statement:

Some reformers have called for the full employment mandate to be repealed, in order to allow the Fed to focus solely on stable prices. But these critics ignore the fact that stable prices are not a desirable goal. After all, with increasing productivity and technological innovation, the natural trend for most goods is for prices to decrease.

By calling for the prices of goods to remain stable, the Fed would have to inflate the money supply in order to counteract this trend toward price declines, pumping new money into the system and creating economic distortions. This is exactly what happened during the 1920s, as the Fed’s monetary pumping was masked by rising productivity.

The result was stable prices, but the mal-investment caused by the Fed’s loose monetary policy became evident by 1929. There is no reason to expect that focusing on stable prices today would have a dissimilar outcome.

Representative Paul is here reciting the “Austrian” theory of the Great Depression. It says that even though there was no inflation during the 1920s, somehow or other inflation nevertheless caused the Great Depression. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices were either flat or falling throughout the 1920s – i.e., deflation.

But the Austrian school believes there was actually some sort of double-secret inflation because the money supply increased. They believe the same thing is happening right now.

When the Austrian theory was first put forward, conservative economists were keen to refute the widespread view that capitalism itself had caused the Great Depression and that the cure was full-bore socialism. The Austrians, including the economists Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Benjamin M. Anderson, Henry Hazlitt (who was an editorial writer for The New York Times in the 1930s) and others, were desperate to show that government was responsible for the Great Depression.

Although the Austrian theory was initially viewed sympathetically by conservative economists such as Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics, it was abandoned when it became clear that there is no Austrian cure for depressions; the only course, in this view, is to suck it up, let unemployment rise, and purge the mal-investment no matter how painful.

Anything – anything whatsoever – the government does to mitigate high unemployment, counteract the economic downturn or soften the blow is inherently counterproductive, the Austrian school believes, because it slows the necessary economic readjustment and often introduces economic distortions that may sow the seeds of another business cycle.

In the 1960s, conservative economists adopted a different view. The government error was not in causing the Great Depression through invisible inflation, but by responding inappropriately to a garden-variety recession that began in August 1929. Since there was no deposit insurance in those days, when banks failed their deposits evaporated. Consequently, the money supply shrank by about a third over the next several years.

This “monetarist” theory of the Great Depression is most associated with the work of the economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. They argued that if the Fed had acted as a lender of last resort, as it was created to do, it could have stopped the Great Depression in its tracks by expanding the money supply so as to offset the contraction that bank failures caused.

The monetarist theory was a far more attractive explanation for the Great Depression that also blamed government. It was largely adopted by conservatives except for a few Austrian holdouts such as the economist Murray Rothbard. One attraction of the monetarist theory is that it allows for government action to respond to economic downturns, as opposed to the Austrian do-nothing policy.

When economic downturns arise, monetarists say the Fed should respond by expanding the money supply, not through an expansionary fiscal policy, as Keynesian economics recommends.

Thus, in early 2009, Ms. Schwartz urged aggressive monetary stimulus by the Fed. As she told a Council on Foreign Relations conference, “Instead of fiscal stimulus, we should have monetary stimulus.”

In the years since, however, the monetarist theory has lost favor among conservatives. They now assert, along with the Austrians, that the only “cure” for recessions is not to sow their seeds in the first place. Those seeds, all conservatives now agree, are sown primarily by the Fed, especially by holding interest rates “too low.”

Thus almost all conservatives, including many regional Federal Reserve bank presidents, believe the Fed should raise interest rates soon to prevent a reemergence of inflation, another boom and, inevitably, another bust that may be even worse than the one we have yet to emerge from.

Representative Paul is retiring at the end of this Congress, but conservatives will undoubtedly continue to argue that the Fed must be legislatively constrained from pursuing a discretionary monetary policy and bound by strict rules from which it may not deviate, no matter what.

The Austrian analysis of the Great Depression and the recent recession are wrong, I think. Unfortunately, that will not deter the conservatives.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

I still get a lot of e-mail from readers asking whether college is really worth it, given the huge debt burden it produces (as my colleagues have been documenting) and the large number of unemployed recent graduates.

But while those recent graduates regret many things, having gone to college generally isn’t one, according to new survey data from the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers.

Iin online interviews conducted by Knowledge Networks in April and May of this year, two of three graduates of the college classes of 2006-11 said they would do something differently if they could do it all over again. As you can see, only a measly 3 percent said they regretted having gone to college in the first place:

Source: “Chasing the American Dream: Recent College Graduates and the Great Recession,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Chart shows responses from a  nationally representative sample of 444 recent college graduates from the class of 2006 through 2011, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The biggest regret was choice of major, with more than a third (37 percent) saying they wish they had chosen differently.

In general, only about two in five grads (39 percent) said they had thought about job opportunities when they decided what to major in. Perhaps that explains why the replacement majors most frequently cited by graduates who would have chosen differently were professional majors, like communications, education, nursing or social work.

Additionally, more than half of all students (56 percent) said they wished they had taken more computer and technology classes.

The next biggest regret, with 29 percent mentioning it, was not having done more internships or worked part time in college.

This regret also seems justified, as the poll found starting salaries for people who interned in college were about 15 percent higher than for people who didn’t ($30,000 compared to $26,000). Of course, there may be other differences between these two groups of students besides their internship histories.

Source: “Chasing the American Dream: Recent College Graduates and the Great Recession,” Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. Chart shows responses from a nationally representative sample of 444 recent college graduates from the class of 2006 through 2011, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Even those who denounce our “unsustainable welfare state” don’t agree on what it is or how its spending should be measured.

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Brandishing the phrase in his recent call for a structural revolution, David Brooks of The New York Times didn’t get specific.

The Heritage Foundation sometimes offers a narrow definition of the “unsustainable welfare state,” based on means-tested programs – benefits directed to those with income below a poverty threshold, like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, food stamps and Medicaid.

Like many conservative Republicans, however, the Heritage Foundation often includes bigger entitlement programs that are not means-tested, like Social Security and Medicare, within its unsustainable category.

The ball seems to get bigger as it rolls downhill. Some critics consider the entire government payroll part of the unsustainable welfare state. Others use government spending as a share of gross domestic product as a warning sign. By these measures, military expenditures also count.

Academic researchers also disagree about specifics. The economists Irwin Garfinkel and Timothy Smeeding, for instance, assert that spending on education should be considered part of the welfare state, emphasizing its productive contributions to the development of human capital.

Like many other researchers, including Christopher Howard, author of “The Hidden Welfare State,” they insist that analysis of government spending alone provides an incomplete picture, because tax expenditures, such as the costs of tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, or for children, should also be counted.

It seems odd to give the same “welfare state” label to all these different categories of spending. Their distributional impact varies enormously. Means-tested government spending on low-income families is small relative to other transfers. Social Security and government employment tend to benefit the middle class. Tax expenditures, in particular, tend to benefit the rich.

Spending trends also vary enormously. Spending on means-tested programs other than Medicaid has not increased much over the long run. According to the Budget of the United States Government for fiscal 2011, it represented about the same percentage of G.D.P. in 2007 as in 1976 – about 1.3 percent. It increased to 1.7 percent in 2009 as a result of the great recession.

When unemployment goes up and stays up, spending on programs like food stamps and the earned income tax credit goes up, helping people who can’t find a job and buffering the economy from the effects of income loss.

Spending on Social Security, often treated as the greatest bugaboo of our aging society, has remained at 4.5 to 5 percent of G.D.P. since 1985. The already carried out transition to a higher retirement age is contributing to cost containment.

The scary increases in government spending have come in Medicaid and Medicare. These two programs, which consumed 1.2 percent of G.D.P. in 1975, reached 4.1 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.

These increases have less to do with government spending than with the increased costs of health care, regardless of who is paying the bill.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research offers an online calculator showing how much lower our projected deficits would be if we could reduce health care spending per person to levels comparable to those of other affluent countries. The center also graphs the improvement that would result from successful fulfillment of the Affordable Care Act.

If you distrust these calculations, consider that government spending on retirement and health security is largely a substitute for private spending. Try projecting your personal expenditures on retirement and health care if Social Security and Medicare are downsized. Your taxes might go down, but you might need to spend more out of your own pocket to buy the services you need.

All government programs deserve critical scrutiny, and there is plenty of room for meaningful debate over the relative efficiency of public versus private provision. But there is no evidence that social spending in the United States is approaching some upper limit of feasibility.

What is unsustainable (or should be) is the current level of confusion, misinformation and paranoia about the future of the so-called welfare state.