"A Nation at Risk" — Twenty-Five Years Later
The Cato Institute recently invited EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein to assess the Reagan Administration's influential report, A Nation at Risk, on the 25th anniversary of its issue. Rothstein's essay appears here.
Listen to Arianna Huffington at EPI
On Monday, May 5, EPI hosted a public talk with Arianna Huffington and Jared Bernstein about their respective new books. Listen to the entire discussion in EPI's Audio/Video Archive. Also available online is a video of Bernstein discussing his new book, Crunch — Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries).
Making new moms work
Sunday is Mother's Day, but plenty of new mothers won't get the day off. While the Family and Medical Leave Act gives eligible parents 12 weeks unpaid leave to care for a new child, it is limited to workplaces of more than 50 employees, leaving out about 48.1 million working Americans. In fact, out of 19 comparable countries, the United States provides the fewest maternity leave benefits in both length of leave and paid time off. Read about it in this week's Economic Snapshot.
Is globalization to blame for U.S. workers' troubles?
Wages no longer keep pace with productivity, the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, education gets more expensive while college loans are cut—with all the pressure on working-class Americans, is too much being made of the role globalization plays in job loss and lower wages? In a new Issue Brief, Trade, Jobs, and Wages, EPI economist L. Josh Bivens argues that concern about globalization's effect on the majority of American workers is well-founded. Bivens looks specifically at two important pressures that globalization puts on workers: job loss due to trade deficits and downward pressure on wages.
Nation's payrolls decline again; hours, wages, and incomes squeezed
For same-day analysis of the latest employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, read EPI's Jobs Picture.
The weakest recovery since WWII
The Commerce Department's announcement that GDP growth continued to falter in the first quarter of 2008, coming on top of rising unemployment and three straight months of declining employment, makes it all but certain that the nation has entered a new recession whose starting date, when it is finally declared, will be sometime in early 2008. A new EPI report, A Feeble Recovery, provides a comprehensive look at the business cycle just concluded and reveals that the recovery that began in November 2001, when measured against other post-WWII recoveries on nine key economic indicators, is one of the worst on record.
Since When Is 0.6% GDP Growth Good News?
Read EPI's GDP Picture for analysis of the most recent Commerce Department report on gross domestic product (GDP).
Investing in U.S. Infrastructure
EPI's April 29 Agenda for Shared Prosperity event on infrastructure marked the release of two new briefing papers. The first report, Good Buildings, Better Schools, makes the case that the various benefits to both educational outcomes and a slumping economy argue for a one-time federal investment infusion to address the nation's crumbling, long-neglected education infrastructure. The second paper, Investing in U.S. Infrastructure, offers an overview of the myriad areas in which federal investment could provide short-term stimulus while strengthening the economy's foundation for long-term growth. Audio and video from this event are now available. (A full written transcript will be available soon.)
The Teaching Penalty
Read EPI's op-ed on why education reformers should be concerned about the severe teacher 'pay penalty.'
Secret side of offshoring needs policy action
The U.S. government's failure to develop a coherent policy on specific outsourcing arrangements called trade offsets has resulted in lost jobs and the transfer of technological innovation to other nations. These technology transfers and lost jobs in turn threaten long-term harm to national security and the economy. A new Agenda for Shared Prosperity Briefing Paper, Offsets and the Lack of a Comprehensive U.S. Policy: What Do Other Countries Know That We Don't?, points out that demand for such deals is increasing steadily over time in all regions, based on the U.S. government's limited data on offsets.
Education reform is no cure-all for low-income, low-achieving schools
Read EPI president Lawrence Mishel's op-ed about how the Nation at Risk report distorted the debate on education reform.
EPI urges Congress: cut or eliminate H-2B visas
As the country drifts into recession and U.S. workers face rising unemployment, Congress is fiddling with the idea of expanding a controversial visa program that enables employers to recruit tens of thousands of foreign workers for jobs they claim they can't fill with U.S. workers. In testimony before Congress, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey makes the case that, rather than expand H-2B visas, we should scale these much-abused visas back significantly or eliminate them altogether. Read the full testimony in EPI's Viewpoints.
Health insecurity now a broadly shared American experience
Holding on to health care is getting much harder, even if you have a good job, and a good education, and especially if you are a full-time worker of prime working age. In the EPI Briefing Paper, A Decade of Decline: The Erosion of Employer-Provided Health Care in the United States and California, 1995-2006, economists Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz demonstrate that the dramatic drop in employer-provided coverage has occurred across the entire age, education, occupation, industry, race, and ethnicity spectrum. Moreover, the decline in employer-provided coverage is caused by employers cutting coverage within existing jobs, rather than the shifting of jobs from high-coverage industries like manufacturing to lower-coverage industries. This Economic Snapshot illustrates how coverage has declined for workers across the education spectrum.
Pulling Apart 2008
The gap between the richest and poorest families, as well as between the richest and middle-income families, grew significantly in most states over the past two decades. A new study of the latest Census Bureau data shows that the nation's long-standing trend of growing inequality has only accelerated in the last several years, as incomes fell for poor and stagnated for middle-income families in a number of states. Read the full-report (Pulling Apart — A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends), the press release, and fact sheets on every state co-published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute here.
Reading the labor market's vital signs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics release of its jobs report on Friday, April 4, provides an important set of labor market vital signs, which are key indicators of our overall economic health and the living standards of the vast majority of working families who rely primarily on wage income. A new EPI issue brief outlines some of the most important indicators and benchmarks from the monthly jobs report, what they mean for families' economic well-being in the current downturn, and the longer-term trends that give them context. Also be sure to check EPI's Jobs Picture for our full analysis of the jobs data for March.
Benefits of dollar's rebalancing begin to emerge
In two new analyses, EPI's Robert Scott parses the latest data and explains why, for further progress on taming our trade debt, all eyes are now turning to Asia. EPI's latest International Picture shows that the combination of progress on revaluing the dollar and growth abroad has begun to level international playing fields. This Economic Snapshot, which compares the dollar's value against the currencies of its trading partners, shows that further gains on the trade deficit will depend on convincing Asian nations, especially China, to end policies that are continuing keep the dollar artificially high against their currencies. (News release)
Surging inequality and the rise in predatory lending
A new Briefing Paper published by EPI as part of its Agenda for Shared Prosperity contends that increasing economic inequality and diminishing access to conventional financial services have become inextricably linked. Read Do Subprime Loans Create Subprime Cities? for a full analysis.(News release [PDF]) (Listen to an interview with the author)
The Teaching Penalty
The ability to effectively educate the nation's children hinges on the quality of our teachers. And to recruit and retain quality teachers requires that they receive pay commensurate with that offered in other career opportunities available to them. Unfortunately, teachers' pay increasingly lags significantly behind that found in comparable occupations or those requiring similar levels of education and experience. When all college graduates' inflation-adjusted wages began to stagnate in the 2000s, teachers seemed to be hit harder, widening the pay gap even more. A new EPI study, The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground, expands upon the research published in How Does Teacher Pay Compare? (2004) by providing new insights and updated data on the erosion of relative teacher pay, including new analysis that takes into account seniority levels for the first time. (News release [PDF])
Remaking Manufacturing
EPI's latest Agenda for Shared Prosperity event, with a keynote address from Senator Sherrod Brown, saw the release of three new reports on manufacturing in America. The new reports include: Sue Helper (Case Western Reserve, NBER, and MIT) on Renewing U.S. Manufacturing: Promoting a High-Road Strategy; George Sterzinger (Renewable Energy Policy Project) on the need for a strong domestic manufacturing sector in promoting renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and EPI economist Robert Scott provided background data on the continued importance of manufacturing to the U.S. economy. Audio, video, a written transcript, and other materials from this event are now available. (News release [PDF]) (Video highlights)
Health Care for America
A health care plan that combines the best elements of the current employer-based system and the Medicare model would create big savings, offer more choices, and guarantee affordable coverage to all U.S. residents, according to a new cost and coverage analysis of EPI's plan[PDF] by the Lewin Group, a nationally respected nonpartisan consulting firm. Health Care for America, developed for EPI by Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, would achieve these goals and maximize consumers' health care choices without unraveling existing health security, forcing individual to obtain coverage on their own, pressuring patients into health savings accounts, or using inadequate vouchers. (News release [PDF]) (Video highlights)
Strategy for an economic rebound
Because the United States is either already in a recession or is headed for one, policy makers need to act now to craft an effective economic stimulus package to spur growth and job creation. Without a stimulus of sufficient magnitude, the U.S. economy is likely to see a decline in growth or even a formal recession, leading to higher unemployment, declining or stagnant wages, and a host of other economic problems. A package that provides $140 billion of stimulus—1% of GDP—would begin to reverse our economic course by creating an additional 1.4 to 1.7 million jobs. EPI unveils a broad-based, three-part prescription for stimulating the economy in its new Briefing Paper, Strategy for Economic Rebound—Smart Stimulus to Counter the Economic Slowdown. (News release [PDF])
Stay in the loop
Sign up now to receive the weekly EPI News and stay informed of institute projects, releases, and events.
What is RSS?
