To create successful incentives, says Yale behavioral economist Dean Karlan, a policy needs to specifically target the people whose behavior its trying to change. “So in the case of broccoli you’d want to find out who’s not eating broccoli and then pay them to eat it,” he says. You don’t want to necessarily make broccoli cheaper for those who are already buying plenty of it, you want to target those who don’t buy enough fruits or vegetables. It could be very tricky to structure such an incentive.

To find out how prices influence choices, researchers at the University of Buffalo set up an experiment where they could control food prices and see how shoppers responded. For their study, they recruited a bunch of moms to shop for groceries in the simulated supermarket and gave them each the same amount of money. In the first shopping trip, the food prices were identical to what was being offered at the local grocery chain.

But then the researchers manipulated prices several different ways. First they discounted the prices of healthful foods — making items such fruits and vegetables much cheaper. They tried a 12.5-percent discount, then a 25-percent discount.

“Then we looked at the purchasing patterns of these mothers,” explains Len Epstein, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Buffalo who was involved in the study. He says the mothers’ choices were somewhat predictable. When the costs went down, “they did buy more of the healthy foods.”

A Surprising Effect

But since the healthful items now cost a lot less, the moms had money leftover. Esptein says they used it to buy more junk food.

“When you put it all together, their shopping baskets didn’t have improved nutrition,” says Epstein — they had the same amounts of fats and carbohydrates.

If subsidizing healthful foods leads to the unintended consequence of people spending more on junk, might there be another way to structure incentives?

The researchers tried a different price manipulation: They basically placed a hefty tax on high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. They found that that moms stopped buying so much junk.

The researchers say their findings suggest that the taxes were more effective than subsidies. This conclusion doesn’t surprise Karlan. He sites the theory of loss aversion: “People are just more responsive to price increases than decreases.”

Karlan says a “sin tax” — charging more for unhealthful foods — would not change families’ diets or approach to nutrition overnight. But it could serve as a first step in raising awareness of bad habits, alerting us to the kinds of things we choose to snack on.

Effecting Change In The Real World

All kids love a treat. And the students at the Argenziano School in Somerville, Mass., are no exception.

Some of their favorites? “Skittles” calls out one seventh-grader. “Doritos,” says student Marcos Azerbido. “I used to bring Doritos every day.”

But not anymore. These days, fresh fruit is the only choice for their mid-morning snack. On their way out the door for recess the kids reach into bins filled with apples and bananas and other fruits depending on the season. The fruit is funded through a USDA grant, and free to the students.

“Once they get it every day, they’ll eat like three bananas,” says teacher Sharyn Lamer, who has tried for years to enforce a healthful snack rule in her classroom. She says when parents were sending their kids to school with chips or sugary treats it was tough.

“But now it’s the rule in the entire school. And the kids are into it,” says Lamer. “It’s not me being the mean teacher who’s not letting them have their Doritos!”

As habits change it school, Lamer says the students may think differently about their choices at home. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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To help deliver on that promise, FCC officials commissioned a study from Yochai Benkler at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. They wanted to know more about how people in other countries connect to the Internet. Benkler says broadband in other developed countries is generally faster and cheaper than it is in the U.S.

“You’re looking at prices in the leading countries that are a third or a fifth of the prices that we’re paying — and they’re getting better speeds for it. So the differences are not subtle based on what we found,” Benkler says.

When it comes to speed and price of Internet connections, Benkler found that American cities trail far behind their counterparts in South Korea, Sweden — even eastern Slovakia. The big reason, Benkler says, is competition. You need lots of different companies competing for your Internet business, hustling to provide better service at a lower cost than their rivals. The way other countries do this is by essentially forcing the big companies to share their wires with the smaller ones. Benkler admits that won’t be an easy sell in the U.S.

“There will be enormous political resistance. But at the same time, the FCC has to get the next generation market structure right. This is the moment to do it,” Benkler asserts. “Either you are willing to take the step to get to more competition, or you are engaged in cosmetics.”

Thanks, But No Thanks

The FCC got Benkler’s report and basically said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC’s broadband initiative, says forcing companies to open their circuits to competitors — what’s called “open access” — just won’t work in the U.S.

“Other countries tend to have broadband dominated by a single telecom carrier: the phone company. The U.S. is very different. The majority of broadband subscribers [there] actually subscribe through cable. So it’s not always an apples-to-apples comparison,” Levin says.

There’s a bigger problem: money. Levin was also at the FCC in the 1990s, when the commission tried to impose open access on the U.S. telephone industry. The phone companies fought tooth and nail, and eventually won. Private investors have not forgotten that fight, says Paul Gallant, an analyst at Concept Capital. Gallant says any startup looking to compete with the big boys will have a tough time finding investors.

“You’d have to have a stomach for a fair amount of risk. And you’d have to have some pretty good lawyers on your staff who could tell you that, in the end, you’re going to survive the judicial gauntlet that you know the cable and phone companies are going to throw at you,” Gallant says.

It’s unlikely the FCC or Congress would want to pick that kind of fight in an election year, says Ben Scott, policy director at the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Free Press.

“Even if it’s the right answer to the question — which the academics at Harvard have told us it is — the ways of Washington are such that tangling with the combined might of the industry on that question, I think, is not one they’re going to take on,” Scott says.

The Answer May Be Wireless

The FCC’s Levin says there’s another way to get faster, cheaper broadband to U.S. consumers. He suggests taking back some of the airwaves that TV broadcasters aren’t using for wireless Internet connections.

“If we want broadband to be available everywhere, wireless has got to be part of it,” Levin says. “We don’t know necessarily whether wireless is going to provide perfect competition to wired. But we do know it’s a very important piece of the puzzle.”

In a few years, Levin says, the next generation of wireless companies may be able to compete with the big phone and cable companies that dominate Internet service today. Right now, the big players don’t seem to be worried. In fact, they seem to like what they know about the FCC plan to be announced in full Tuesday. That’s exactly what worries Ben Scott at Free Press.

“If the incumbents who have caused the problem that we have a plan to solve in the first place are cheering that the plan is good for them, I think we have to question whether it’s real reform, and whether it’s going to get the job done,” Scott says.

If it doesn’t get the job done, the FCC may find itself looking to eastern Slovakia for better answers. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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Kidnapping and extortion are so common that the government runs public service announcements on the radio about how to not be a victim. Executions occur in broad daylight. And teenage girls continue to disappear without a trace.

Ciudad Juarez is shouldering unfathomable sorrow, and the most public face of the suffering is the city’s mothers.

The grieving mothers are like ghosts. They drift through the city. They appear at the edges of protests, marches and public gatherings. They carry posters with photos of their children: the disappeared, the dead and the incarcerated. They demand justice from the authorities and anyone else who will listen. Often they hug the pictures of their kids against their chests.

I first met Olga Esparza Rodriguez last year at a memorial for a university professor in Juarez who had just been gunned down. Esparza was holding a giant banner with a picture of her 18-year-old daughter, Monica, who disappeared on March 26, 2009.

“A day for us is like an eternity,” Esparza says, sitting at her kitchen table with her husband. “It’s the worst in the night because during the day you have to work and go forward. But we miss her, miss her the way you’d miss an arm or a leg or the light.”

Over the past two decades, hundreds of teenage girls and young women have gone missing in Juarez. Some turn up dead or forced into prostitution rings. Prosecutors say some run off with boyfriends and will turn up when they want to be found.

The worst part for Esparza is not knowing her daughter’s fate and imagining the worst.

“She’s everything to us,” Esparza says, “and still, in reality, I don’t know what happened that day.”

Esparza and her husband say they keep going because Monica is still with them. They say she is here, at the kitchen table with them, you just can’t see her. And some day, they say, she’ll reappear.

Juarez is an industrial city of 1.5 million people shoved against the southern bank of the Rio Grande below El Paso, Texas. Maquiladoras — factories that assemble products exclusively for export to the U.S. — provide hundreds of thousands of low-wage jobs. Monica’s father works in one.

Juarez is also a battlefield in Mexico’s drug war. Last year, more than 2,600 people were killed in drug-related violence in the city, giving it the highest murder rate in the world.

On Jan. 30, around 11 p.m., Luz Maria Davila watched her two teenage sons go up the street to a birthday party.

Around 11:30 p.m., she says, she heard the gunshots.

“I ran out,” she says. “The first one I saw was my son.”

It was her 19-year-old, Marcos, who worked the morning shift with her at the maquiladora and then studied international relations at night. He wasn’t moving.

Then she saw her other son, 16-year-old Jose Luis. “The bodies were scattered everywhere,” she says. “I yelled to my husband, ‘They’re dead.’ “

Fifteen people were killed at the party, most of them teenagers. Thirteen others were injured. Local officials say the gunmen who blocked off the street and then opened fire on the students apparently mistook the fiesta for that of a rival drug gang.

Davila says she didn’t know what to do. They called the local equivalent of 911.

But the ambulances didn’t come for another two hours, she says. Emergency personnel in Juarez — and journalists, too — are hesitant to be the first on the scene of a drug-related shootout in case the killing isn’t quite finished.

Two weeks later, when Calderon went to Juarez in response to the massacre, Davila publicly confronted him.

The factory worker pushed past one of Calderon’s aides to tell the president that he is not welcome in Juarez.

“For two years, there’s been nothing but killing here,” she said, referring to the effects of Calderon’s drug war. “And no one does anything.”

More than 95 percent of murders in Juarez go unsolved.

Now, Davila says she wants justice for her sons and for all the people who have been killed in this recent wave of violence.

What would that justice be?

“More than anything, I want Juarez to change,” she says. “That’s what I’d like.” Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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Organizing for America, as the operation is now called, has held meetings, sent e-mails and knocked on doors advocating for health care. But it hasn’t added any oomph to the president’s top legislative priority.

Now Organizing for America, or OFA, is gearing up for an even tougher task: turning out voters for Democrats in the midterm elections.

A Disappointment

OFA was supposed to put the grass-roots muscle behind Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda. It had 13 million e-mail addresses — the biggest e-mail list in American politics. It had an army of committed volunteers, battle tested in the 2008 campaign. And it had a charismatic leader who took time out to acknowledge their contributions.

“I know how hard many of you have worked in your communities to do that, either as part of Organizing For America or simply by talking to your friends and neighbors, your co-workers,” Obama said last month in an interactive online event with OFA staff and volunteers. “What you do matters.”

But so far, what OFA has done hasn’t mattered enough, and many Democratic operatives now believe OFA hasn’t lived up to its potential. It wasn’t able to put enough grass-roots pressure on Congress to counteract the grass-roots opposition to the health care bill. And it never figured out how to recreate the “bottom up” interactive relationship with supporters that it had during the campaign.

“It has not worked the way a lot of us hoped it would,” says Steve Rosenthal, a veteran grass-roots organizer who was once the political director of the AFL-CIO.

Translating Campaign Enthusiasm

While sympathetic to OFA’s daunting task, Rosenthal thinks Obama’s grass-roots operation made a mistake by not keeping more field staff on the ground after the 2008 election.

“I think they’ve been trying to do what’s never been done before: to maintain an organization after an election, to keep people as engaged as they were during an election. To try to carry that over is a huge task. And takes a lot of resources, and I think it’s been severely underfunded,” he says. “And frankly, if we’re going to be successful, it’s going to need to be rebuilt.”

But Jeremy Bird, OFA’s deputy director, says that’s just not true.

“We have paid staff in all 50 states who are great organizers. But what was key during the campaign, and what has always been key when the president was organizing in Chicago, is that none of the campaign successes were about paid staff,” he says. “Paid staff are replaceable. Volunteers who are committed to their community, who are talking to their neighbors, [are] why we won the election.”

The Expectations Game

But many of those volunteers have had a hard time convincing their neighbors to support the president’s agenda.

Donna Miller was a team leader for the Obama campaign in Wisconsin. When the campaign morphed into Organizing for America, she stuck with it. Her experience illustrates why even when OFA has field staff and volunteers on the ground, it’s become harder to energize the president’s supporters.

“Part of that has to do with expectations,” Miller says, adding, “A lot of people just had really, really high expectations that things could be done really, really quickly and happen overnight. And they’re finding out that the process of politics is pretty ugly.”

Nothing looked uglier to some of the new Obama voters than the push to pass health care legislation.

Damaging The Brand

Joe Trippi, who ran Democrat Howard Dean’s grass-roots campaign in 2004, thinks the White House legislative strategy for health care made OFA’s job harder. Trippi, now a Fox News commentator and a Democratic consultant, says the White House chose to play an inside Washington game to pass health care, cutting deals with individual members of Congress.

“That hurts the Obama brand,” he says. “Because cutting a deal in Nebraska with a U.S. senator for $100 million for his state is not what the Obama brand was about. It was about not top-down cutting deals. It was sort of ‘bottom-up’ energy of people having more say and having a bigger impact on Washington.”

It wasn’t just that the legislative process looked too much like politics as usual. It was also that it didn’t deliver. Rosenthal says that also disillusioned Obama’s core supporters and made it harder for OFA to motivate them.

“Some of it’s been watching Congress spend a year debating health care and still seeing nothing happen,” Rosenthal says. “So for most Americans, if you spent a year on the job and didn’t have anything to show for it at the end of the year, you probably wouldn’t be working in that job for very long.”

The possibility of losing their jobs is exactly what Democrats face this fall. And that’s when the president’s grass-roots operation will face is biggest test: getting his supporters to the polls at a time when his party’s hold on both chambers of Congress is at stake. It will certainly be an uphill battle. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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“Work cannot be everything,” Sleep says. “People who have their lives are far better workers.”

In a large majority of families with children, both parents work, and women now hold half of all jobs. Sleep’s company, List Innovative Solutions, is among a growing number of American firms adapting to the needs and wants of a changing workforce.

The company is located amid a tangle of highways in Northern Virginia — a real commuter nightmare. So Sleep lets employees largely set their own hours and telecommute at will. And it’s not just mothers but also fathers who take advantage of these flexible work options.

‘People End Up Getting Their Job Done’

“They want the ability to go to their children’s play, which is usually at 3; it’s never at 5 or 6,” Sleep says. “And what you find out is, people end up getting their job done.”

Sleep has nearly 100 employees, but on a recent early afternoon visit, many offices are empty. Human Resources Director Kristy Stumpf prepares to head out in time to beat rush hour traffic and to meet her children’s school bus.

“When I’m in the office, that’s my face time,” Stumpf says. “Today were my meetings, filing, that kind of stuff.” At home, she works on self-guided projects.

Stumpf’s dad was a long-suffering commuter, and she used to think that’s just the way life was.

“Now that I’ve worked here, I realize I would never in a million years be able to be in an office 40, 50 hours a week and commute forever. It just wouldn’t work.” Stumpf starts to laugh, then seems to catch herself, almost as if she feels guilty about her own good luck.

Work Time Revolution

U.S. labor laws are perfectly suited to 1960, says University of Minnesota sociologist Phyllis Moen. The 40-hour workweek and 9-to-5 workday were all codified in an era when men went off to an assembly line and women stayed home.

“We’re really in the middle of something like an industrial revolution,” Moen says. “But it’s a work time revolution.”

First, more and more employers are discovering that loosening the traditionally rigid work schedule pays off. Sleep says her retention rate over 16 years is an astonishing 95 percent. And study after study shows productivity also shoots up. More than half of companies now say they offer flextime, and one-third allow telecommuting at least part-time.

On the other hand, research also shows that employees don’t find their workplaces nearly as flexible as managers report. Work-family experts say arrangements often appear more generous on paper than in practice and can be highly dependent on the generosity of immediate supervisors.

So, what about that revolution? Well, work-life experts say another force is building: working parents are no longer the only ones who want flexible hours.

Millennials Want Balance

“When you talk about Gen-X or Gen-Y or the millennials, they’ve taught us that we can’t necessarily say work-family balance,” says Lisa Horn of the Society for Human Resource Management. The preferred term now is work-life, because young workers apparently value their flexibility just as much as a working mom.

You may have heard that millennials in the workplace are lazy and “entitled,” but sociologist Moen says that’s a bad rap. She says young workers simply don’t want to wait decades until retirement for their quality of life — an attitude that has been reinforced by the recession, as they’ve seen parents and boomer relatives lose their jobs.

“They no longer believe in the myth that working in rigid ways for long hours necessarily pays off,” Moen says. “That’s a real change.”

Another change is the degree of mobile technology young workers have grown up with.

“This generation is completely untethered. They have laptops in grade school,” says Jody Thompson, a co-founder of Culture Rx, a consulting firm that promotes a completely flexible work style. Thompson says young people today are used to getting stuff done — on their laptops, cell phones, iPods — wherever they are, whenever they want.

“Then we bring them into the work environment and we say, ‘Here’s this 6×6 square you’re going to work in, with a desktop computer,’ which to them, by the way, is a gaming computer,” Thompson says. “‘And here’s your phone with your cord. You come in at 8 and you leave at 5, and between 10 and noon, that’s when we’re creative.’”

Thompson says young workers simply can’t relate to such a system.

Signs Point To Flexibility

If moms and millennials united aren’t enough to loosen rigid work rules, experts say yet another push for flexibility will come from an unlikely source: the very baby boomers who defined 9-to-5 culture in their prime. Sociologist Moen says as they grow older, many will want or need to keep working well past traditional retirement age.

“And older workers who you may want to keep on because of their skills or contacts will want to work differently— more flexibly and less,” Moen says.

It’s hard to find the case against flexible work these days. Even the staunchly pro-business Chamber of Commerce promotes it, though Marc Freedman, the chamber’s director of labor law policy, says it only works for some employees and jobs.

“You can imagine certain jobs where you have to be at the workplace,” he says. “And if you’re not there, somebody else is going to have to pick up the load, and that won’t be fair to them.”

In fact, researchers are looking into ways to bring more flexibility to the hardest case low-wage and hourly jobs.

But even at her software development company, Sleep agrees, all flex arrangements are not for everyone. In fact, she says she could never work at home.

“It’s not good for me. I like being around the people!” she says.

Sleep has also had to fire employees who took advantage of the flexibility she offers. But she says it’s worth finding those who can handle the freedom, even if it makes her job more difficult.

“There’s not a day that I don’t kind of panic when I know that my workforce is all working from home,” she says. “So it’s not like you’ve got it all wrapped up and the answers are simple. It’s whether or not you can let loose of that anxiety and really trust in people.” Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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The Labor Department says the number of women ages 45 to 64 who are long-term unemployed — out of work for more than six months — has more than doubled in the past year. The number is now 900,000, and it is growing.

This Time Is Different

In July 2008, Barbara Bosch, who is 49, was laid off from her job as a bookkeeper at a small CPA firm. At the time, she wasn’t too worried because she’d never really been without a job. But within a month she knew this time was different. Every day she searched the Internet from CareerBuilder to Craigslist. The rest of her week she’d spend going to interviews set up by temp agencies.

Often during these interviews, Bosch would be told that the people she would be working with were much younger, she says. “And I’m looking at them thinking, well, I don’t really look that old — at all. And I think I fit in with no problem.” But she still wondered if that was why she wasn’t getting any call backs.

So three months ago Bosch made a decision. When she heard the medical field was still hiring, Bosch enrolled in a local college to get certified as a licensed vocational nurse. She says it hasn’t been easy being a student again, but she felt it was her only option.

“I need to live in order to have a roof over my head,” Bosch says. “I have to financially be able to take of myself. I don’t have anybody else to fall on.”

To help her cover the rent for her three-bedroom condo in West Los Angeles, her son moved into the first bedroom down the hall. And she’s just rented out the second bedroom. She says it’s been awhile since she’s had roommates, but she can deal with losing her privacy if it means keeping the home she’s lived in for seven years.

‘I Don’t Know What I Am Going To Do’

Across town Denise Dubois is sitting at a computer perusing the source of some of her income — the personal belongings she’s sold on eBay.

“I’ve sold shoes,” she says. “I’ve sold my whole set of Danish teak salad bowls.”

Dubois describes herself as a young and hip 56 — someone with a film degree who has worked in marketing, development and real estate for most of her life. She’s been without a job for 13 months.

“And after sending out 1,000 resumes, I’ve gotten two phone calls,” she says. And she was going to go crazy if she had to write another cover letter.

At an L.A. County job center run by Jewish Vocational Services, the chairs are full. Director Angie Cooper says they’re seeing women of all ages and educational levels — especially one group.

“They’re women who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s,” Cooper says. “They’re telling us they can’t do what they did before. And that they feel there is ageism out there. They feel that their skills are outdated.”

Back in the classroom, nursing student Bosch takes a seat in the first row. School has now become her full-time job, and she worries that in three months her unemployment benefits will run out.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” says Bosch, who won’t receive her nursing license until March of next year. “I really don’t.” Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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Flextime is when employees choose their own work hours within limits set by their employer — for example, working an 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule instead of the traditional 9 to 5 schedule, or working extra hours one day to make up for shorter hours worked another day.

Telecommuting is when employees work outside the office — say, at home or on a laptop in a coffee shop. The benefit can be offered on a one-time or ad hoc basis — for example, when a commuting crisis such as a snowstorm keeps workers away from the office — or as a part-time benefit.

Job sharing is when two or more employees share one full-time job; the employees can either alternate weeks, split the workday in half or work 2 1/2 days each week, with one overlapping day.

Still another option is a compressed workweek, which means, for example, working a four-day/10-hour-day workweek or a three-day/12-hour-day workweek.

Companies can also give employees flexibility when it comes to when they take their breaks or meals. For example, mealtime flex allows employees who take shorter lunch breaks to leave early. Employers can also let workers adjust their schedules by picking up shifts or trading them with co-workers, an option called shift flexibility.

Seasonal scheduling is when employees work only a certain number of months a year. And some companies allow employees to work part of the year in one location and part of the year in another location.

Finally, a results-only work environment basically turns the traditional workplace model of work hours and meetings on its head. Under this arrangement, employees can work where and whenever they wish, as long as projects are completed on time.

Work-life experts caution that many flex-work programs appear more generous on paper than in practice and can be highly dependent on individual supervisors. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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Porter is 27, and he’s making his first album at a local studio, even though he doesn’t have a recording contract.

“The indie music scene has gone beyond record labels now,” Porter says. “We don’t need Sony giving us $200 million to make an album. We can cut an album fairly cheaply and the quality’s still there, and you can play in so many places online. You can get online like CD Baby and all that, and you’re distributing to all those places. You don’t need a label anymore.”

Porter is also signed up with ASCAP — that’s one of the major organizations that collects royalties for songwriters. They keep track of when songs are played on the radio, in clubs and online, then divvy up the royalties. He might even collect a few cents for NPR airplay. Artists used to wait until they had a recording contract to sign up with ASCAP, but not anymore.

“Performance of that music has never been greater,” says Phil Crosland, vice-president of marketing at ASCAP. “It’s just being used in more ways and more places than ever before. Mobile devices — certainly radio, television, video games — are going through the roof in terms of music use.”

New Ways To Get By

Membership is soaring in ASCAP and BMI, the two biggest performing rights organizations. Over the last decade, ASCAP membership has quadrupled. One of its 375,000 members is Jess Furman. Furman says she doesn’t think she’ll make her money selling CDs. After all, record sales are down by half over the last decade.

“If you’re an artist, you’re trying to make money,” Furman says. “The best thing would be getting your song on a TV show or getting it in a film. You get paid residuals for whenever that airs. So I think that artists now — you’re looking at all those multiple income streams because the sales have kind of dried up.”

So far, Furman hasn’t seen much money from ASCAP. She made between $500 and $800 after a short snippet of one of her songs played on MTV in Europe and Latin America — not exactly a living. And without a label, Furman says she has to keep track of her own music, fill out forms and alert ASCAP about where it plays. A lot of independent musicians find that, without a label, they are their own bookkeepers, publicists, designers and bookers.

“And what started out as this enthusiasm started to lead to this kind of slumped-shoulders feeling of, like, ‘Uh, yeah. I can do it all myself. Great. Now that means I have to,’ ” says Derek Sivers, who in 1997 founded CD Baby, one of the first online outlets for unsigned musicians.

Ponying Up Royalties

There is also an imprecise side of how ASCAP does its work. The owner of the Bazaar Cafe has put a large sign on the wall, easily seen from the audience as the musicians perform. It reads, “ASCAP and BMI want my dough. If you play covers, out you go.”

Owner Les Wisner says he doesn’t want to pay royalty fees because he doesn’t trust that ASCAP can keep track of what gets played in his cafe.

But dreams of being a successful musician never die. Musician Alex Stein says he’s hopeful he’ll see royalties someday, but he’s not holding his breath.

ASCAP says that even though the royalty pool is growing, 20 percent of its members get 80 percent of the money. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio

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