Interstate variation in welfare benefits and the migration of the poor: Substantive concerns and symbolic responses

Nearly all states are thinking about reforming their welfare systems, and several states--particularly those that offer high welfare benefits--are taking action. A major concern is that poor people are moving to high- benefit states in order to receive the benefits offered by those states. It is unclear, however, if this "welfare migration" is extensive enough to break the budgets of high-benefit states. Nevertheless, legislators in those states are seeking to stop it, usually through two-tier benefit schedules whereby new arrivals to a state are temporarily paid the welfare benefits they would have received had they remained in their original state. The authors discuss the extent to which two-tier benefit schedules represent substantive reform or symbolic action. In their estimation, current strategies for welfare reform fail to address the causes of poverty and welfare dependency and may only intensify the antagonism many Americans feel toward the poor.

Critical exponents of the pair contact process with diffusion

We study the pair contact process with diffusion (PCPD) using Monte Carlo simulations, and concentrate on the decay of the particle density $\rho$ with time, near its critical point, which is assumed to follow $\rho(t) \approx ct^{-\delta} +c_2t^{-\delta_2}+...$. This model is known for its slow convergence to the asymptotic critical behavior; we therefore pay particular attention to finite-time corrections. We find that at the critical point, the ratio of $\rho$ and the pair density $\rho_p$ converges to a constant, indicating that both densities decay with the same powerlaw. We show that under the assumption $\delta_2 \approx 2 \delta$, two of the critical exponents of the PCPD model are $\delta = 0.165(10)$ and $\beta = 0.31(4)$, consistent with those of the directed percolation (DP) model

Monopoles and instantons in SU(2) lattice gauge theory

We investigate the monopole-instanton correlation in SU(2) lattice gauge theory using a renormalisation group inspired smoothing technique. We look at the properties of monopole clusters and their correlation with instantons. Since the action of the smoothed configurations is dominated by instantons we compare the smoothed Monte Carlo lattices to artificially reconstructed configurations with the same instanton content but no other fluctuations. Both parallel and randomly rotated (in group space) instanton ensembles are considered.Comment: LATTICE98(confine

Some remarks on Abelian dominance

We use a renormalisation group based smoothing to address two questions related to Abelian dominance. Smoothing enables us to extract the Abelian heavy-quark potential from time-like Wilson loops on Polyakov gauge projected configurations. We obtained a very small string tension which is inconsistent with the string tension extracted from Polyakov loop correlators. This shows that the Polyakov gauge projected Abelian configurations do not have a consistent physical meaning. We also apply the smoothing on SU(2) configurations to test how sensitive Abelian dominance in the maximal Abelian gauge is to the short distance fluctuations. We find that on smoothed SU(2) configurations the Abelian string tension was about 30% smaller than the SU(2) string tension which was unaffected by smoothing. This suggests that the approximate Abelian dominance found with the Wilson action is probably an accident and it has no fundamental physical relevance.Comment: 3 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure, uses espcrc2.sty, Talk given at LATTICE9