Moving into and out of poor urban areas

Newly available geographical information from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is used to estimate a variety of relationships involving high-poverty metropolitan census tracts. The longitudinal data from the PSID show a great deal of geographical mobility even for persistently poor adults, with as many as one fourth of certain groups of these entering and leaving poor urban census tracts in a year. At the same time, solution of the transition matrices for various groups—whites and blacks of various income classes, in families with and without children, living in different types of census tracts—in the early 1980s shows the gradual emptying out of poor urban tracts, particularly of whites and blacks in families without children. As a consequence, despite the great degree of geographical “churning,” poor urban areas gradually become poorer, blacker, and the home of a larger share of black families with children. Some of these aggregate trends had been noticed by researchers comparing these areas in the 1970 and 1980 censuses; our more up-to-date results demonstrate the relationships between the micro and macro data.     

Voice of America and Iran, 1949–1953: US liberal developmentalism,propaganda and the Cold War

The administration of President Harry S. Truman used Voice of America radio to promote Iranian ‘liberal developmentalism’. Radio propaganda joined economic assistance, military aid, and other information programs to promote Western‐style capitalism and to repel Communist appeals in Iran. But President Dwight D. Eisenhower abandoned Truman's gradualist Iran policy in favor of covert action, a seemingly more expedient solution to perceived Iranian political instability. The US‐British engineered coup in 1953 to overthrow the nationalistic Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq revealed the shallowness of US commitments to liberal reform in Iran and highlighted Americans' willingness to undermine Iranian sovereignty in order to preserve US security interests in the Middle East.