City Still on Track to Hire Conflict Counsel

The city of Philadelphia still plans to enter into a contract with a legal services vendor to represent Philadelphians in criminal and family cases with which the Defender Association of Philadelphia has a conflict, according to Michael R. Resnick, director of public safety.

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

Mondadori Portfolio, via Getty ImagesAt the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1927, the only woman in attendance was Marie Curie (bottom row, third from left).

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

Meg Urry, professor of physics and astronomy at Yale.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind.

In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs. I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine. And while some of the men I wanted to date weren’t put off by my major, many of them were.

Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

Not until 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, wondered aloud at a lunchtime talk why more women don’t end up holding tenured positions in the hard sciences, did I feel compelled to reopen that footlocker. I have known Summers since my teens, when he judged my high-school debate team, and he has always struck me as an admirer of smart women. When he suggested — among several other pertinent reasons — that innate disparities in scientific and mathematical aptitude at the very highest end of the spectrum might account for the paucity of tenured female faculty, I got the sense that he had asked the question because he genuinely cared about the answer. I was taken aback by his suggestion that the problem might have something to do with biological inequalities between the sexes, but as I read the heated responses to his comments, I realized that even I wasn’t sure why so many women were still giving up on physics and math before completing advanced degrees. I decided to look up my former classmates and professors, review the research on women’s performance in STEM fields and return to Yale to see what, if anything, had changed since I studied there. I wanted to understand why I had walked away from my dream, and why so many other women still walk away from theirs.

Eileen Pollack is a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan and author of “Breaking and Entering” and “In the Mouth.” She is at work on a book about women in the sciences.

Editor: Joel Lovell

Off the Charts: Five Years After Chaos, Shares of Many Big Banks Are Still Struggling

Two weeks later, Lehman Brothers failed and a panic began. The crisis demonstrated how interconnected the world financial system had become and how vulnerable even apparently healthy banks were when their competitors began to crumble. In the weeks that followed, most large banks around the world had to be bailed out. Their share prices plummeted.

Since then, however, some big banks have performed much better than others — a difference based to a significant extent on just how well, or badly, each bank had been run in the months and years leading up to the crisis.

The accompanying charts show the performance of 25 large banks around the world. As the crisis began, each of them ranked in the top 20 in the world in at least one of three measurements — market capitalization, book value or total assets.

In the weeks and months that followed, all but one of them lost at least half of their market value, as measured in the local currency of the bank’s primary market. The exception was a Chinese bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, whose shares lost less than a third of their value.

The charts also show the performance of the Bloomberg World Bank Index, which comprises more than 140 banks and has done better than most of the large bank stocks. This was a crisis where bigger was not necessarily better, and where some of the largest banks proved to be far from adequately capitalized, notwithstanding what their books had indicated before Lehman collapsed.

This spring, the world bank index got back to within 3 percent of its level at the end of August 2008, although it has since slipped back and is now 11 percent lower. Few of the large banks shown have done as well.

But a handful of banks turned out to be profitable long-term investments that August. Shares of both JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo in the United States are now more than 40 percent higher than they were. Shares of two of the three Chinese banks shown — Bank of China and China Construction Bank — are higher now than they were five years ago, while the third is approximately unchanged. In Britain, HSBC is up about 13 percent, a much better performance than was shown by other large European banks. It did not hurt that HSBC had a significant presence in many developing countries, most of which rode out the recession reasonably well even though some have stumbled this year.

Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.

Economic View: Why Innovation Is Still Capitalism’s Star

The decisive role of the “spirit of capitalism” is an old concept, going back at least to Max Weber, but it needs refreshing today with new evidence and new thinking. Edmund S. Phelps, a professor of economics at Columbia University and a Nobel laureate, has written an interesting new book on the subject. It’s called “Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change” (Princeton University Press), and it contains a complex new analysis of the importance of an entrepreneurial culture.

Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend in many countries, however, even the United States. He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.

Is the United States really becoming corporatist? I don’t entirely agree with such a notion. Even so, President Obama has been talking a lot about innovation as a job creator this year, and while some of his intentions may be good, I’m afraid that some of his proposals look a little corporatist, and might suppress individual initiative.

In his State of the Union address in January, for example, the president proposed that the government should create 15 new “innovation institutes,” modeled on a public-private partnership that he helped start in Youngstown, Ohio, that is devoted to developing 3-D printers. There was more in this vein in his administration’s 2014 budget, offered in April. And in a speech on July 30 in Chattanooga, Tenn., Mr. Obama suggested extending the number of innovation institutes to 45, or almost one for every state. The institutes, he said, would be “getting businesses, universities, communities all to work together to develop centers of high-tech industries all throughout the United States.”

Will such measures work? Should the government really be trying to start a 3-D printer center? And why in Youngstown? It is easy to be skeptical of such a plan, especially when it was started in a swing state just before the presidential election. Web sites of the two senators and two representatives introducing bills this month supporting the president’s latest proposals are suggesting, in not-too-subtle terms, that the legislation would bring jobs to their own states.

Successful companies aren’t usually started this way. Professor Phelps, citing a McKinsey study, suggests that in free-market capitalism, “from 10,000 business ideas, 1,000 firms are founded, 100 receive venture capital, 20 go on to raise capital in an initial public offering, and two become market leaders.” It is easy to doubt, as Professor Phelps does, that the odds are favorable for a Youngstown 3-D printer center.

How you view the innovation institutes, and the topic of capitalism and culture, may depend on your own experience. Many people have never seen the hatching of a successful business idea. That makes it hard to judge the subtle changes that may be occurring in the nation’s culture and in its potential for innovation.

My own business experience has certainly helped shape my thinking. Yale, like many other universities, sensibly allows its professors to spend limited time in business, providing the opportunity for faculty members to gain valuable experience outside of the ivory tower and to offer their technical skill to the business world.

In 1991, I started a business with Karl Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College, and Allan Weiss, a former student of mine at Yale. We called it Case Shiller Weiss, Inc., and it was devoted to an innovation we dreamed up. The idea was a new “repeat sale” home price index — which would track the changes in the value of the same houses over time.

At the time, this was an entirely new line of business. And, at first, that posed a problem: we were spectacularly unsuccessful in raising money. We talked to venture capitalists and their committees, to no avail. They just didn’t seem to get our business plan. We must have appeared odd to them — overly academic, perhaps. One remarked that we’d do better proposing a new shopping center.

But we went ahead with our idea anyway. At first, Allan worked without pay. A friend of Professor Case, Chuck Longfield, contributed some money. And in 1995, I took out a home equity line of credit on my house in New Haven so I could personally lend more money to help keep our business afloat. The experience was stressful, especially when adding it to the burdens of my main job, as a professor. I have much to thank my wife, Virginia, for her tolerance of my overwork and my worrying, and for allowing me to put our family savings at risk.

In the end, our business was successful, and I think a big part of it was that we relied on our own ideas and energy and, to a large extent, our own money. In 2002, we sold the business to Fiserv Inc., then licensed Standard & Poor’s to create what are now known as the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. In 2006, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began trading futures on 11 of our indexes. Fiserv sold the index business to CoreLogic early this year.

In short, our business made its mark without any help from the government.

This little real-life experiment convinces me that committees of experts, even at smart venture capital firms, will often not recognize real innovation. I think that America’s business success through the decades has occurred because we have so many people with specialized knowledge who are willing to put their money, time and resources on the line for ideas that can’t be proved to a committee.

THAT experience may also help explain why I think the new crowdfunding initiative, started by the Jobs Act that the president signed last year, is an exciting step forward. It’s all about finding and mobilizing people who really understand specific, hard-to-prove ideas for important investments.

At the same time, other of my experiences incline me to think that government-appointed committees of experts can help set the stage for an entrepreneurial culture, under certain limited circumstances.

Long before I started any commercial ventures of my own, I received some federal government support — in the form of National Science Foundation research grants, awarded to me decades ago as a young professor. They allowed me to do research, and though it was not directly related to my later business endeavors, the process developed my expertise and reinforced a sense of entrepreneurial opportunity.

These grants were awarded competitively, based on the quality of the proposals, and gave me experience with a system focused on creating opportunities for those who try hard. Later, from 1983 to 1985, I evaluated others’ proposals when I served on the foundation’s panel for economics. Observing the process from the government side convinced me that the foundation really works. Maybe it’s because the panelists are chosen from successful scientists, who serve anonymously out of public spirit.

In any case, as Professor Phelps has argued, direct government involvement in capitalism is a delicate thing. The system’s success depends on subtle cultural factors — and these require careful nurturing.

Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

DealBook: Still Trailing Rivals, BlackBerry Seeks a Way Out

Bits: I’m Still Waiting for My Phone to Become My Wallet

A truly mobile wallet — one that would let you easily pay for restaurant meals, subway rides or beers at a bar with a quick wave of your cellphone — has long been described as imminent. But it remains elusive. Some innovations have begun to bridge the gap, but most have been a disappointment or have not yet worked well enough for mainstream adoption.

In 2012, Square, which makes a credit card reader that can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, worked on a credit-cardless system that let people pay for goods without ever pulling out their wallets or phones. When Square users walk into a store in its network, a Square-enabled register shows pictures of their faces, which are used as authentication for payment. But the app can be awkward to use.

Last summer, Apple introduced Passbook, a digital system for storing boarding passes, movie tickets, loyalty cards and gift cards on the iPhone. But it doesn’t do much beyond that, at least not yet. Google worked with major credit card companies and banks to create its Wallet app, which lets people pay for items at some stores by waving their phones but is available only for Android devices. Visa offers two digital wallets, payWave and V.me, but I’ve never seen anyone use them or signed up myself.  And the major mobile carriers in the United States banded together to form Isis, a mobile payments network, which has yet to roll out nationally.

Starbucks has arguably had the most success with the pay-by-phone idea in the United States. The company has persuaded millions of people to download an application that can be used to pay for their lattes. It works like a digital gift card — but only at Starbucks, obviously, so it’s limiting. (The company also invested $25 million in Square and is incorporating Square’s technology in its stores.)

When I complain to friends and colleagues about the inconvenience of fumbling around for my wallet when I’m shopping — and say I wish I could just use my phone instead — they often give me bewildered looks.

Apparently, that’s because paying with a phone today is rarely easier than paying with a credit card. Paying via phone often involves a series of awkward swipes and taps to start the transaction, and the process can be disrupted by spotty wireless connections, low batteries or other electronic hiccups.

“No one wants to be the guy holding up the grocery line at 6 p.m.,” said Joshua Reich, one of the founders of Simple, a banking start-up company that gives people free checking accounts and offers them data-rich analyses of their spending and saving habits. “You don’t want to look like that dork, the guy riding a Segway.”

Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum who covers the mobile industry, agreed.

“Mobile payments are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist for most people,” he said. “You don’t hear people moaning about how hard it is to pay with their credit cards or debit cards.”

The biggest problem for paying by cellphone is that so many kinds of businesses are competing to offer services. Companies as varied as phone carriers, banks, credit card companies and technology start-ups have had plans to get into the mobile payment business, but many are locking horns over who can profit the most, Mr. Dawson said.

“Everyone wants to be the primary payments provider,” he said.

Wireless carriers, desperate to bolster their revenue, are reluctant to hand over potentially lucrative streams to companies like Apple and Google, which already make billions from devices and the software that runs on them. Banks and credit card companies are also rolling out mobile checking services and applications, both to impress their younger users and to keep a hand in a game where billions of dollars are at stake annually, largely from the endless parade of small fees racked up with each purchase. And industry heavyweights like PayPal and Groupon are also scrambling to get their own offerings into the market.

It’s tough to persuade major retailers to spend money to work with Google Wallet or Apple’s Passbook, for example, when so many other options are still on the table. And what is popular today might be outdated in a few months.

Part of the reason that Starbucks’ own app works so well is that the company invested significantly to build out the infrastructure in its stores — sleek phone-scanning kiosks and mobile apps that work reliably and efficiently.

“There is a lot of reluctance in installing a lot of technology, especially if they aren’t sure it’ll take off,” said Rob von Behren, one of the lead engineers at Braintree, a payment services company that powers and processes transactions for popular services including Uber, the mobile taxi service, and Airbnb, the travel rental site. This reluctance leads to an “infinite waiting period and slows the growth of an industry,” he said.

Mr. von Behren was one of the creators of Google Wallet before he left to work at Square and later at Braintree. He said that while his Google team’s original goal was to simplify online purchases, it quickly realized that nudging mobile e-commerce forward seemed more urgent.

A large portion of shopping begins on cellphones, but getting to the final checkout remains a challenge because entering payment information on a small screen is clumsy. And most traditional big-box retailers that could build infrastructure to support mobile payments came of age “in an era where there wasn’t network connectivity,” making it harder to update their cashier software, payment methods or loyalty programs, Mr. von Behren said.

He ultimately decided that working with legacy retailers to create a system for in-store shopping with cellphones was a “tremendous juggling act.” He added, “It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t.”

BUT a new generation of innovation is coming, he said, so he thinks that wide use of pay-by-cellphone systems will arrive eventually. Braintree recently acquired Venmo, a company that lets people send money to one another via simple text messages. In addition, some promising newcomers say they are working on more complete alternatives.

Clinkle, a start-up, has persuaded a notable roster of venture capitalists to funnel $25 million into its mysterious and forthcoming mobile payment services. And a new company, Lemon, is working on its own digital wallet.

I guess I’ll have to wait and see. For now, I’ve come up with my own workaround for hot weather: securing my credit card and driver’s license to my iPhone with a rubber band. But it’s not what I had in mind when I pictured paying with my phone.

DealBook: William Heinecke, an Early Entrepreneur in Asia, Is Still Finding Success

William Ellwood Heinecke, the billionaire chairman of Minor International.

William Ellwood Heinecke has always followed his instincts.

He started his first businesses, cleaning offices and selling advertising, as an expatriate high school student in Bangkok. He was a millionaire before he reached voting age.

Defying conventional wisdom at the time about overseas appetites, he introduced pizza to Asians in the early 1980s, the start of an empire of retailers, restaurants and resorts built around classic brands like Pizza Hut, Sizzler, Marriott and Esprit. It encompasses more than 10,000 rooms and 1,400 restaurants across 22 countries. He has moved up the value chain, developing his own successful brands.

Now Mr. Heinecke, the billionaire chairman of Minor International, has aggressively steered expansion into the Middle East, Africa, Australia and emerging markets across Asia, flying around the region in corporate jets, swooping in on huge deals.

Maintaining the spirit of American entrepreneurship, Mr. Heinecke has kept his mantra the same: find a gap and fill it.

“The stakes are bigger perhaps,” he said. “Now we’re dealing with a bigger playing field. It’s a more complex world. But the skills of being an entrepreneur haven’t changed, and probably won’t change.”

Mr. Heinecke has long stood out as an entrepreneur here, and not just because of his unusual upbringing and appearance — he is six feet tall and has worn a beard since he started his first businesses as a teenager.

Asia is among the world’s biggest source of new billionaires, but most expand or refocus family wealth. Outside of mushrooming markets like technology and real estate, few are self-made successes like Mr. Heinecke.

Fewer still are Western-born. “You can probably put him among a handful of expats in Asia,” says Kevin Whitcraft, another American businessman raised in Thailand, who has franchised one of Mr. Heinecke’s companies in frontier markets like Laos and Cambodia.

“What really stands out about Bill is that he could have made it anywhere in the world,” Mr. Whitcraft added. “He’s always been a great salesman. He’s just a born businessman and entrepreneur.”

Mr. Heinecke, 64, grew up in Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. His father, Roy, was a United States diplomat in Asia. His mother, Constance, worked for for American magazines. The family moved to Bangkok 50 years ago.

He always seemed in a hurry. Starting with go-carts as a boy, he geared up to the racetrack, then rallies on dirt roads through the jungles. He set many Asian records, and survived several near-fatal crashes. He keeps a collection of vintage cars including a 1963 Shelby Cobra worth $3 million, and a Ferrari that once belonged to Clint Eastwood.

He says he believes he was in the right place at the right time, before the Asian boom. Yet he was not only driven, he had an innate sense of direction. As fellow students traveled West to attend college, Mr. Heinecke stayed in Thailand. “I always knew what I wanted to do, and where to do it. I just saw so much opportunity here,” he explained.

In 1980, he introduced pizza to Asians. Experts predicted that they would never take to Western fare, but he added local ingredients and quickly became Asia’s pizza king. He initially franchised for Pizza Hut, but when the parent company tried to restrict his other restaurant efforts, a battle ensued, and Mr. Heinecke boldly started his own Pizza Company, instantly becoming the regional giant.

He spied a related opportunity and moved into dairy production, churning out cheese to top all those pies. He melts 1,000 tons of mozzarella annually, just in his Thailand pizza parlors.

Mr. Heinecke expanded into hotels, running properties under the Marriot, Sheraton and Four Seasons banners. His hotels typically feature an array of retail shops and dining, mainly from the Minor portfolio. Call it old-fashioned synergy.

Some point to construction of the Four Seasons Tented Camp in the Golden Triangle, where Thailand borders Laos and Myanmar, as a transformational project in Mr. Heinecke’s career. Jason Friedman worked closely with Mr. Heinecke a decade ago on the small collection of luxury tents in an elephant sanctuary financed by Mr. Heinecke. Many thought it a vanity project — contrasting Mr. Heinecke’s reputation for frugality.

“Bill is quite well known for being conservative, almost formulaic, by the numbers,” said Mr. Friedman, former manager at the camp, but now the manager of the Siam, an upscale boutique lodge in Bangkok. “The tented camp was really a passion for him. He was involved in all the details, right down to the number of animals in the park.

“I saw a very different side of Bill than many see, and the project really put him out there not only as an entrepreneur but also an innovator.”

The camp became a global sensation, generating more publicity than any previous Four Seasons opening, he said. Minor later started Anantara, which has become one of the fastest-growing Asia-based resort chains. Much of that growth has been in the Middle East, China and the Maldives.

“Now, we are recognized for our expertise, our own intellectual property,” Mr. Heinecke said. Anantara is like a franchiser. Owners finance the projects and pay Minor management fees. “This allows us to grow the brand much faster.” Revenue for the company’s hotel division was up 80 percent in 2012 over the previous year.

Mr. Heinecke has also expanded Minor by canny acquisition. His takeover of Oaks Hotels and Resorts in Australia doubled hospitality operations in 2011. While he had ample success with his own Pizza Company, he bought Australia’s Coffee Club to take prominence in another market many said would never gain traction in Asia.

Minor is now ideally positioned just as coffee consumption soars across the increasingly affluent region.

Yet there have been missteps, as Mr. Heinecke is the first to recount. “You don’t succeed without stumbling,” he said.

Mr. Heinecke was probably the first to bring fast food to China — too early, as it turned out. He was also a pioneer with hotels in Vietnam, building in the 1980s, before the boom. That first hotel in Vietnam, he conceded, still has not turned a profit. Several other properties in Vietnam are doing well, however. He chalked that up to lessons learned and diligence, something he stresses in every aspect of his operation. Before he signed on the Oaks deal, he said, he visited most of the hotels, staying in many.

Outside forces have also buffeted his operations. Mr. Heinecke was nearly crushed by the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. The 2004 tsunami wiped out an entire hotel. Coups, flooding and SARS have also hit his businesses hard, particularly those heavily dependent on tourism.

Through it all, Mr. Heinecke remains focused on the next deal, and improving efficiency. “He’s constantly on the move, doing business all the time,” said Joe Cummings, a Bangkok author who is writing a book about the Anantara hotels and destinations. “He’s like a shark, very opportunistic. And he really knows every detail about his businesses, right down to the price of a candy bar in the minibar.”

For Many Filipinos, Jobs and the Good Life Are Still Scarce

“The Philippines is the rising tiger economy of Asia,” Mr. Tagarro said. “But only the rich people are going up and up. I’m not feeling it.”

Mr. Tagarro earns the equivalent of about $5 a day working before dawn and after dark, battling petty corruption to maintain his improvised sidewalk stand and dealing with rising wholesale prices for the onions and tomatoes he sells.

The Philippines, with a 7.8 percent expansion of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2013, has the fastest-growing economy in East Asia, surpassing even China’s. The country has a red-hot stock market, a strong currency and a steady stream of accolades and upgrades from international ratings agencies.

But Mr. Tagarro’s experience — of being left behind by the country’s newfound prosperity — mirrors that of many Filipinos, according to the latest government poverty and employment data.

An estimated seven million Filipinos, about 17 percent of the work force, have gone overseas in search of jobs, according to the Asian Development Bank. For those who stay home, options are few.

Despite the rapidly expanding economy, the country’s unemployment rate increased to 7.5 percent in April, from 6.9 percent at the same time a year earlier. About three million Filipinos who want to work are unemployed.

“Higher rates of economic growth over recent years have not made a serious dent in the employment problem in the Philippines,” the Asian Development Bank reported in its recent Asian Development Outlook report.

President Benigno S. Aquino III ran on a platform of clamping down on corruption, improving the business environment in the country and addressing widespread poverty. In his first three years in office, Mr. Aquino removed high-level government officials accused of corruption, cracked down on tax evaders and aggressively courted foreign investment.

Though his efforts to improve the economy have received accolades, he has had less success in addressing the country’s persistent, widespread poverty.

Mr. Aquino’s political opponents argued before recent legislative elections that his actions had further enriched the wealthy and left the poor behind.

The Philippines still has a strong service sector. In 2011, it overtook India as a top provider of offshore call centers. But the country lacks the manufacturing base that has lifted millions of people out of poverty in other Asian countries.

In countries like China, the rural poor increased their income by finding jobs in factories. That is rarely an option in the Philippines, and few poor people from the countryside are qualified to work in a call center.

The country’s latest poverty data, released in April, shows almost no improvement in the last six years. About 10 percent of Filipinos live in extreme poverty, unable to meet their most basic food needs. This is the same figure as in 2006 and 2009, the previous years when poverty data was gathered, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board.

The board also estimated that 22.3 percent of families were living in poverty in the first four months of 2012, compared with 22.9 percent in 2009 and 23.4 percent in 2006.

According to government estimates, more than nine million extremely poor Filipino households are not able to earn the 5,460 pesos, or $135, needed each month to eat. That amount is about the same as the price of a back-row upper-level ticket to the recent Aerosmith concert in Manila, where many of the country’s wealthy could be found holding parties into the night.

Other reports confirm the government’s findings that poverty has persisted.

In a survey by the independent Manila polling group Social Weather Stations, the number of Filipino families reporting that they periodically go hungry has increased in recent months.

The survey found that 19.2 percent of survey respondents, about 3.9 million families, reported going hungry. This is up from 16.3 percent in December 2012, when a similar survey was done.

Monitor Finds Mortgage Lenders Still Falling Short of Settlement’s Terms

The nation’s five biggest mortgage lenders have largely satisfied their financial obligations under last year’s $25 billion settlement over mortgage abuses, helping hundreds of thousands of families keep their homes. But four of the five have yet to meet their commitment to end the maze of frustrations that borrowers must navigate to modify their loans, according to a report on Wednesday by the settlement’s independent monitor.

The most common failure involved a requirement that borrowers be notified in a timely manner of any documents missing from their applications. Banks also failed to meet strict timelines for approving applications. The settlement requires that borrowers be notified of missing documents within five days and given 30 days to supply the missing paperwork and that decisions be rendered at most 30 days after an application is completed.

“I think what you see is there’s still a communication problem,” said Joseph A. Smith Jr., the monitor. “If there’s a unifying feature, it’s that the servicers who failed these things are not yet communicating effectively.”

The mortgage settlement came after the housing crash led to a wave of foreclosures across the country and after widespread improprieties in mortgage lending and in the foreclosure process were uncovered.

The banks report their own performance on 29 loan servicing criteria, and their findings are then tested in a random sampling by outside consultants overseen by the monitor.

Citibank failed three metrics, two of which involve notifying borrowers of missing documents in a timely fashion and one that requires that a letter containing accurate information be sent to a homeowner before foreclosure.

Bank of America failed two metrics, one regarding missing documents and the other regarding the pre-foreclosure letter. Wells Fargo also flunked on the missing documents.

JPMorgan Chase failed to adhere to the prescribed timeline for reviewing loan modification requests and notifying customers of its decision. It also failed to remove home insurance policies, known as forced-place insurance, within two weeks of a homeowner’s submitting proof that he or she had insurance.

The fifth lender, ResCap, formerly the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, whose mortgage servicing is now handled by other companies, was not found to have failed on any of the metrics.

The banks are required to submit a corrective action plan and compensate affected borrowers. Chase, for example, has already refunded insurance premiums charged to 2,000 borrowers. “We quickly fixed the issue,” said Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman for Chase, adding that the timeline problem had been remedied as well.

Wells Fargo said that its internal reviews showed that it had already fixed its problem. Citi said it had fixed one of its issues and was working on the other two.

Dan Frahm, a spokesman for Bank of America, which is responsible for about 60 percent of the total financial obligation under the settlement, said, “While neither area of noncompliance resulted in inaccurate foreclosures or improper loan modification denials, we took immediate action and resolved one area and will soon return to compliance in the other.”

The servicers also submitted to the monitor almost 60,000 complaints received from elected officials on behalf of their constituents. The most common complaints, the monitor’s report said, were related to the bank’s obligation to provide a single point of contact to borrowers seeking modification of their loans. There were also complaints about “dual tracking,” in which the foreclosure process is begun before a borrower’s request for a loan modification is resolved.

Despite the volume of complaints, none of the banks failed the requirement to provide a single point of contact, leading Mr. Smith to conclude that he needed to add more criteria in that area. He said at least three new metrics measuring the efficacy of the single point of contact would be added.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a lender that was not found to have failed on any of the metrics. It is ResCap, the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, not Ally Financial itself.

City Still on Track to Hire Conflict Counsel

The city of Philadelphia still plans to enter into a contract with a legal services vendor to represent Philadelphians in criminal and family cases with which the Defender Association of Philadelphia has a conflict, according to Michael R. Resnick, director of public safety.

Fed Stimulus Still Needed to Help Recovery, Bernanke Says

While acknowledging the risks of historically low interest rates and the Fed’s aggressive policy of buying government bonds to help stimulate the economy, Mr. Bernanke said in testimony that “a premature tightening of monetary policy could lead interest rates to rise temporarily but also would carry a substantial risk of slowing or ending the economic recovery.”

After his opening statement, however, Mr. Bernanke seemingly opened the door a bit wider to tapering down.

Under questioning by Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who chairs the Joint Economic Committee, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could prepare to “take a step down” in the next few meetings if the outlook for the labor market improved.

“It’s dependent on the data,” he said. “If the outlook for the labor market improves, we would respond to that.”

Mr. Brady asked if the tapering could begin before Labor Day, prompting Mr. Bernanke to say, “I don’t know.”

“We are buying a certain amount of assets each month,” he continued. “We are looking for increased confidence and in steps respond to that.”

According to a summary of the Fed’s last Open Market Committee meeting released Wednesday afternoon, Fed policy makers were still tentative about dialing back on their efforts to boost growth at their session on April 30 and May 1.

“A number of participants expressed willingness to adjust the flow of purchases downward as early as the June meeting if the economic information received by that time showed evidence of sufficiently strong and sustained growth,” the minutes of the meeting stated. However, views differed on just what that evidence would be and whether a tapering was indeed likely.

While “a few members expressed concerns that investor expectations of the cumulative size of the asset purchase program appeared to have increased somewhat since it was launched last September,” others members of the panel were less convinced, according to the minutes.

“In contrast, a few other members focused on evidence that market expectations about the total size of the program had changed little,” the record showed.

While there was no clear consensus on policy, most members agreed on the need “to communicate clearly that the pace and ultimate size of its asset purchases,” would depend on outlook for the economy, a stance echoed by Mr. Bernanke in his testimony earlier the day.

In his opening statement, Mr. Bernanke said that since last summer, “financial conditions in the euro area have improved somewhat,” helping lessen the headwinds faced by the American economy as well.

He noted that the federal government’s fiscal policy had become “significantly more restrictive,” even as the Fed had pursued a looser monetary policy. The expiration of the payroll tax reduction in January and tax increases, as well as automatic spending cuts imposed by Congress and lower military spending, will collectively “exert a substantial drag on the economy this year.”

Speculation had been rising in recent weeks that the Fed might be preparing to taper its bond purchases, which total $85 billion a month. The bond-buying program has been credited with increasing growth, but some observers worry it could create a bubble in the prices of assets like stocks.

At its most recent meeting this month, the Fed said it was “prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its asset purchases,” prompting some analysts to speculate that bond purchases might be reduced in the coming months.

“In considering whether a recalibration of the pace of its purchases is warranted,” Mr. Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee, the Fed “will continue to assess the degree of progress made toward its objectives in light of incoming information.”

Stocks on Wall Street surged after Mr. Bernanke’s remarks but pulled back in afternoon trading.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the timing given by Mr. Bernanke of a potential Fed move. He said the Fed could prepare to “take a step down” in the next few meetings, not the next few weeks.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

Bucks Blog: Nuances of Credit Scoring Still Elude Consumers

Consumers still have many misunderstandings about the details of credit scoring, like the impact of having several inquiries on their report around the same time, according to the Consumer Federation of America.

The federation and VantageScore Solutions, creator of a score that competes with the heavily used FICO score, commissioned a survey to gauge the public’s understanding of credit scoring and the factors that affect a credit report.

A credit score is a three-digit number, based on information in your credit report, that lenders use to help gauge the risk of lending you money. Both FICO, the most widely used scoring model, as well as the newest version of the competing Vantage score, use a range from 300 to 850 — the higher the score, the lower the risk. (Earlier versions of the Vantage score use a range of 501 to 990.)

Just 7 percent of those surveyed knew that making several inquiries about a consumer loan, like a car loan or mortgage, in a short period of time won’t lower a borrower’s credit score. In fact, consumers should check multiple lenders to be sure they are getting the best rate, Stephen Brobeck, the federation’s executive director, said in a telephone briefing about the findings. This misunderstanding may hamper comparison shopping for interest rates, and end up costing consumers extra on their loans, he said.

Generally, multiple similar inquiries within a one- to two-week period are recognized as comparison shopping, so they count as one inquiry and don’t greatly affect your score, he said. Even if the inquiries span more than two weeks, it’s generally worth the effort because the potential savings outweigh a minor impact on your score, he said. “Consumers should not worry that comparison shopping for a loan in a week or two will lower their scores,” he said.

It’s a different situation, however, if you apply for multiple store credit cards in a short period of time. Such inquiries are clearly separate applications for credit, and may be detrimental to your score, said Barrett Burns, president and chief executive of VantageScore Solutions.

Consumers were also uninformed about the impact of co-signing for a student loan for a child.  About a third didn’t know that even one late payment could harm the credit score of the loan’s co-signer.

Consumers were also not aware of the relative cost of having a low credit score. About 80 percent underestimated, for example, the increase in interest costs due to a low credit score when taking out a $20,000, 60-month auto loan. (The correct answer, according to a quiz offered by the federation, is that a person with a low score will pay around $5,000 more than a person with a high score.)

To see how much you know about credit scores, and how to improve them, answer the questions at creditscorequiz.org. The updated quiz covers many of the questions asked in the survey.

The telephone survey of 1,022 adults, including both land lines and cellphones, was conducted by ORC International on April 25 through 28. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. (The survey results can’t be compared with prior years’ surveys because of a change in methodology, including the addition of cellphones to the survey sample.)

The federation offers these tips for maintaining a healthy credit score: pay your bills on time each month; don’t put the maximum amount on your credit cards; pay down debt, rather than just moving it around to new cards; check your credit reports for potential errors. You can check them free at annualcreditreport.com.

Were you aware that comparison shopping for rates won’t harm your credit score?

Strategies: Forecast for a 20,000 Dow Still Holds

LAST July, when the Dow Jones industrial average was still stuck below 12,900 and investors were seeking safety in bonds, Seth J. Masters made a startling argument.

Mr. Masters, the chief investment officer of Bernstein Global Wealth Management, said that people were so traumatized by the financial crisis that they were seriously underestimating the stock market. In fact, the chances were quite good that by the end of the decade, the Dow would rise more than 7,000 points and reach 20,000, he said.

In some important ways, he said, stocks at that moment had become safer than bonds. “This argument may seem provocative,” he told me back then. “But that’s only because market conditions are so unusual, and so many people have become so pessimistic.”

Last week, Mr. Masters made essentially the same argument, but it sounded much less provocative. In fact, after months of soaring prices, new stock market records and minuscule bond yields, it may even be the Wall Street consensus.

“It seems we’re somewhat ahead of schedule but I think we’re still on track for Dow 20,000 by the end of the decade,” Mr. Masters said last week. “The odds have just gotten better.” And despite the stock market’s recent meteoric rise, he said, stocks still look relatively cheap, certainly compared with bonds.

“It’s not that the expected return on stock right now is really that high,” he said. “It’s that the return on government bonds is indubitably very low.”

That unfavorable verdict on bonds is no accident. In a sense, it’s the policy of the Federal Reserve. Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, says he is trying to make traditionally riskier assets like stocks relatively attractive, increasing investors’ wealth and in that way stimulating the economy.

As far as the bond market goes, the yield on a benchmark 10-year Treasury note was only 1.5 percent when I spoke to Mr. Masters in July, and it is about 1.9 percent now. To put those yields in perspective, the average for 10-year bonds since 1962 has been more than 6.5 percent, according to quarterly Bloomberg data. In other words, since last July, bond yields have risen by the tiniest bit, and they remain extraordinarily low, on a historical basis.

For bond investors, particularly retirees, these low yields pose a serious dilemma. “This situation creates great problems for people trying to live off the income they can get from bonds,” Mr. Masters said. (I’ll explore this issue further in a future column.)

For now, it’s worth noting that the problem for income-seekers will sort itself out eventually when bond yields rise and prices fall. But that shift is likely to inflict considerable harm on unwary investors.

That day of reckoning keeps receding, however, as global economic growth and inflation remain constrained. That alone tends to keep bond rates low. Furthermore, government spending cuts like the budget sequestration in the United States have reduced economic growth substantially, in the view of the International Monetary Fund and other forecasters.

And as long as unemployment is high and inflation is low, the Fed says it will continue to keep short-term interest rates near zero — and buy $85 billion a month in long-term bonds and other securities. Other central banks have made similar promises. At least for a while, then, historically low interest rates seem likely to persist, for short-term bills as well as for long-term bonds.

The likelihood of low bond yields helps explain the relatively high stock market returns expected by Mr. Masters. And a new study suggests that those yields are the main factor behind the bullish stock market consensus of financial analysts on Wall Street and in academia.

Fernando Duarte and Carlo Rosa, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, described their study last week in “Are Stocks Cheap? A Review of the Evidence,” a posting on the New York Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog. They analyzed 29 separate economic models and found that most predicted extremely high stock returns for the next five years. Why? There are many wonky reasons but in the end, they said, it is “mainly due to exceptionally low Treasury yields at all foreseeable horizons.”

Small-Business Guide: When Couples Divorce but Still Run the Business Together

The two met in the late ’80s, in law school, and the relationship blossomed in the early ’90s at the firm — Ventura, Ribeiro & Smith — where Mr. Ribeiro was essentially the chief executive. They were married in 1998, and soon after, Ms. Calistro took a more active role in running the company’s operations. Together, they built the business into what is now a 50-person operation with an emphasis on civil litigation.

But while the business grew, their home life started falling apart. Mr. Ribeiro and Ms. Calistro divorced in 2006, and suddenly, the former spouses had to make a choice: Do they continue running the business together or should one of them leave? (Ms. Calistro was not an equity partner at the time of the divorce; she is now.)

“People said, including both of our lawyers, that we shouldn’t work together,” Mr. Ribeiro said. “But we talked in an office for two hours and decided we should try to make our business relationship work.”

Given a 2007 Census Bureau estimate that about 3.7 million businesses are owned by a husband and a wife. Given the high rate of divorce, this situation is more common than many realize. This small-business guide, based on the experiences of owners like Mr. Ribeiro and Ms. Calistro, offers suggestions on making the best of a difficult situation.

“We created the business,” Mr. Ribeiro said, “we created the structure, and we had a team that counted on us.” Six years after signing the divorce papers, the business partners say they are working together happily and the firm is in good shape.

RESPECT IS CRUCIAL When Stephanie Blackwell and her husband of 12 years divorced in 1991 — “we just fell out of love,” she said — she wanted out of the business they had started together, growing alfalfa sprouts. He was angry, she said, and she could not deal with it. One day she drove off, but he chased her and told her to come back to work. “There was so much anger between the two of us,” she said, “but I still cared for him. I just didn’t want to be married.”

While it was tough to continue running the company with her husband, she stuck it out. They had four children together, she could not afford to leave her job, and she still respected him.

In 1998, she left to start another business, Aurora Products, which turned into a $45 million company that packages and sells natural and organic snacks. Initially, her former husband took full control of the alfalfa business but it closed 12 years later. He now works for her, overseeing construction of a new plant.

Ivan Lansberg, co-founder and senior partner at Lansberg Gersick & Associates, a consulting firm in New Haven that advises family businesses, also emphasizes the importance of respect. Unfortunately, he said, many relationships become so damaged — especially if one person has cheated — that trust and respect are not possible.

To Mr. Lansberg, it all depends on open communication, predictability (people have to do what they say they are going to do), and consistency (they have to follow through even on bad days). But there also has to be some compassion. “You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the other person and empathize with what they are going through,” he said.

GET HELP Unlike most former spouses, those who own a business together must continue to see each other regularly even after the divorce papers are signed. That can make it harder to heal, which may be a good reason to seek professional help — even if it is too late to save the marriage.

Terri Allen still cared for her husband when the two separated in 2010 — they are not yet divorced — but there was so much anger that they could barely communicate. That made it difficult to continue running their accounting firm, which is based in Toronto.

The couple decided to hire a therapist to help them sort through their problems so they could continue working with each other. They found someone who specializes in Imago Relationship Therapy, a type of therapy that helps people communicate. “It helped us learn how to talk to each other in a calm and rational way,” Ms. Allen said.

Diversity Is Still a Challenge for N.Y. Firms, Study Finds

By Christine Simmons All Articles 

New York Law Journal

November 21, 2012

Despite law firms' efforts to promote diversity, results of a new survey of women and minorities at New York firms "paint a picture of stagnation," according to the New York City Bar's sixth Diversity Benchmarking Report. The study, which reported data for 2011, is based on the responses of 74 law firms that were signatories to a city bar statement of diversity principles.

"While new hires across levels are more diverse than attorneys at signatory firms, elevated turnover for women and minorities continues to erode the gains," the report said, noting there are higher turnover rates at every level for women lawyers compared to men and higher turnover for minority attorneys compared with whites. "Elevated turnover rates contribute to the creation of a 'leaky faucet' of talent for diverse attorneys."

Women continue to improve their representation at the partner level, reaching a new high of 18.3 percent in the 2011 results, while simultaneously declining among associate ranks. The study found that firms with more women on their management committees are generally more diverse firm-wide.

Minority attorney representation at the firms rose slightly in 2011, to 17.2 percent from 16.6 percent in 2010, but failed to reach the 2009 high of 18.1 percent, the report said. In particular, the percent of Hispanic and Asian attorneys increased in 2011 after declining from 2010. Meanwhile, the representation of black attorneys declined last year.

"The numbers presented in this report demonstrate a slow rate of change and indicate that many firms may need to reassess how they go about creating a workforce that better reflects our society," Carey Dunne, the city bar's president and a partner at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, said in a statement.

The Media Equation: Print’s Poetry Still a Draw for the Publisher Felix Dennis

Felix Dennis, the British magazine publisher, took America by storm in the 1990s with Maxim, a bawdy men’s magazine with models whose garments always seemed on the precipice of falling off. The formula was so successful, he also started Stuff, a little brother brand, and Blender, a music magazine.

In 2007, Mr. Dennis sold the magazines to Alpha Media, backed by Quadrangle Capital Partners II, a private equity firm, for $250 million. The bottom dropped out of the category, Stuff was folded into Maxim, Blender ceased publication, Maxim hemorrhaged ads and employees and its owners defaulted on their loans.

Mr. Dennis, who built and sold computer magazines in America when the category was hot, had done it again. After selling Maxim, he repaired to England with a big bag of loot, though he did hang on to The Week, a low-cost print aggregation of news done by others, which has outlasted the print version of Newsweek. In 2011, he also bought Mental Floss, a smarty pants magazine and Web site aimed at a young, connected demographic.

Mr. Dennis, who has invested aggressively in digital operations in Britain and elsewhere, is intent on proving there is still life left in print. With a keen understanding of readers and a deft touch for timing, he’s proud that he’s still able “to be a nuisance to the rest of the business.”

“I have sold at the top of market several times,” he cackled. “Nobody remembers how long I’ve been at this. I love the media game. Love. It.”

He also happens to be a best-selling poet in his native England. In a documentary, “Felix Dennis: Millionaire Poet,” that is out right now, Tom Wolfe is seen reading three of his poems. A ruffler of feathers and professed “bearded dwarf,” Mr. Dennis knows his way around a quip and tends to dole them out at a very high frequency.

He was once invited to give the annual Delacorte Lecture to the students at Columbia Journalism School and advised them to ignore advertisers — they are merely “guests” — and focus on readers. “They are my bread, my butter, my caviar and my Gulfstream jet. Actually, I always rent the private jets. My rule is, if it flies, floats or fornicates, rent it. It’s cheaper in the long run.”

But he is oddly chaste about the death of the print version of Newsweek, a magazine which he had constantly slagged as a bloated, beside-the-point publication.

“I have always been a fan of Tina,” he said, referring to Tina Brown, the editor, “and thought she brought a sense of fun to magazines, but there was no way that was ever going to work out. It had huge costs at a time the economics would not support it.”

He added: “You’ll get no triumphalism from me. I was a subscriber, believe it or not, and it’s never good when a magazine goes away.”

Even though he believes that American magazines are overedited and overstaffed — “No one else in the world takes so many people to make magazines” — Mr. Dennis says that there is nonetheless a lot of life left in printed products here. “No woman or girl is going to want to spend time looking at pretty dresses on the Internet,” he said. “Vogue is going to be around for a long time to come.”

Mr. Dennis, 65, got his start selling magazines on Kings Road in London and worked his way over to the editorial side at Oz magazine, where he quickly ran afoul of British obscenity laws and was charged with “conspiracy to corrupt public morals.” The verdict against him and his co-defendants — they were convicted of two lesser charges — was eventually overturned.

He then got in early on the computer craze with a raft of hobby magazines, although to this day he does not use e-mail and carries no cellphone.

United States Economy Still Weak, but More Feel Secure

Despite months of disappointing-to-dismal economic reports — capped by a Commerce Department release Thursday showing the economy had expanded at an annual pace of just 1.3 percent in the second quarter, barely above stall speed — a closely watched measure of consumer confidence surged to its highest level since February.

Economic experts pointed to several trends to explain how Americans were feeling better about the economy even though growth in jobs and the overall economy had weakened. First, the election is having a strong effect on economic perceptions. Second, though the recovery is weak, it has persisted, with employment and wages rising and some households feeling more secure.

Though the unemployment rate has been stuck between 8.1 and 8.3 percent all year, employers have continued to add workers to their payrolls. Wages and consumer spending have strengthened.

The housing sector’s nascent recovery foretells rising employment in the construction, real estate and mortgage finance sectors, as well as rising household wealth.

“There is a recovery. There are jobs. There is more income. There is some improvement,” said Lawrence Mishel, a labor market expert at and president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “But the improvement is obviously disappointing,” he added, a sentiment that many economists echoed.

Moreover, Labor Department data released on Thursday suggested that job growth in the 12 months through March 2012 might have been significantly stronger than government economists first expected.

In a standard revision of its jobs numbers, the department said that the economy added nearly 400,000 more jobs during that period than originally thought.

“The pattern of revisions suggest that the recession that began at the end of 2007 was deeper than initially reported, and the jobs recovery over the last 2.5 years has been a bit stronger than initially reported, although much work remains to be done to return to full employment,” Alan B. Krueger, the head of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers said in a statement.

In the first quarter of the year, the economy added, on average, 134,000 jobs a month. Over the last three months, the rate of job growth has fallen to 79,000 a month. Similarly, economic growth was 2 percent in the first quarter before dropping to 1.3 percent in the second, largely because of the effects of the nation’s worst drought in 50 years.

According to Macroeconomic Advisers, a widely respected forecasting firm, growth is tracking at 1.7 percent for the third quarter. Moreover, rising gas and food prices have cut into workers’ wallets.

The economic data has grown so dismal that Federal Reserve this month announced a major new bond-buying effort to resuscitate the recovery once more. “The Federal Reserve is basically saying that we don’t have a recovery,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Mitt Romney’s running mate. “Obamanomics didn’t work.”

Earlier this year, the conventional wisdom held that numbers like these should have meant trouble for the Obama campaign. Yet, even as job growth has fallen far below 100,000 a month, the American people appear to be growing more confident in both the economy and the president.

On Tuesday, the Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence surged to a seven-month high, trouncing economists’ expectations. Respondents in particular had a more favorable view of the job market going forward — with more consumers expecting employers to add positions in the coming months.

The recovery seems to have jelled with voters, too. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 40 percent of respondents think the country is on the right track, up from 23 percent a year ago. Moreover, 31 percent of respondents described the economy as very or fairly good, up from 14 percent a year ago.

Just as opinions about the economy have driven opinions about the campaign, it seems that opinions about the campaign are driving opinions about the economy.

Democrats have become much more optimistic, pulling the national numbers up with them. A new Pew poll, for instance, shows that just 15 percent of Democrats say that recent economic news is mostly bad, while 60 percent of Republicans say the same. A year ago, they held similar opinions.

“Right now, politics is playing an inordinately large role in the behavioral economic data,” wrote Lydia Saad and Dennis Jacobe, of Gallup, in an analysis of the surge in consumer confidence. “This suggests that the period between now and the election is a particularly hazardous time to apply traditional behavioral economic and political interpretations to key economic measures.”

Economists and political experts described the recovery as a “Rorschach test,” with both sides’ arguments compelling to voters.

“It’s a challenging messaging environment,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “President Obama is in this strange situation of wanting to go out there and own this growth when people are saying, ‘That’s nothing to be proud of!’ ”

“If it were just the economy, the president would be in a lot of trouble based on how voters have reacted to numbers like the ones we’re seeing now,” said Nigel Gault, the chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm.

Mr. Gault said he believed that Mr. Obama’s significantly higher likability and favorability numbers — and the Romney campaign’s recent decision to talk about other things besides the economy — helped to explain Mr. Obama’s lead in the polls.

Professor Vavreck, though, said that the fact that the economy was growing gave Mr. Obama a powerful leg up, even given voters’ queasiness about the economy.

“Incumbents in growing economies, even slow ones, are hard to beat,” she said.

Others noted that the time for Mr. Romney to make his case and have it sink in had grown short.

“The economy’s not going to change much between now and the election,” said Mr. Gault of IHS Global Insight. “The economy is what it is. And if the economy hasn’t tilted the race in favor of Romney by now, you wonder whether it ever will.”