David Autor and David Dorn had an op-ed in the NYT this weekend, outlining their case that technology has been the primary headwind for middle-class living standards over the past generation. We tend to have a different view; we think that the cumulative effect of economic policy decisions made over this time-span has been the real barrier to decent growth in middle-class living standards.

The first question lots of people have upon hearing this dispute is “does it actually matter?” Autor and Dorn accept (and document) just how rough a go it has been for middle-wage/middle-income workers and clearly accept that the rise in inequality that has seen rewards flow away from the middle-class is a problem that needs to be rectified. Who cares why they think it happened if they’re on-board with attempts to fix it?

The answer to this is simple and important: the diagnosis matters because it implies a prescription. In Autor and Dorn’s NYT piece, the only real policy solution they nod to is boosting the share of workers with higher education, noting that “the payoff for college and professional degrees has soared.” And if one believes that technology is boosting demand for high-skill workers and that’s why middle-wage jobs are suffering, this policy solution does make sense. But in fact, the payoff to a college degree has actually been pretty flat for more than a decade now. Wages for those with an advanced degree have done better, but this group is just over 10 percent of the workforce—which is a key reason why Autor and Dorn note that boosting the share of workers with college or advanced degrees can’t be a “comprehensive solution to our labor market problems.”

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Here are a few articles we read recently. What did you read today?

• Should White House interns be paid? (The Week)
• Unfinished Work: Walter Reuther and the March on Washington (Dissent)
• The Socialists Who Made the March on Washington (The American Prospect)
• No More Second Chances for Larry Summers (The Nation)
• Professor Pants-on-Fire (The Nation)
• Five speakers to pay attention to at Jackson Hole (MarketWatch)

On Wednesday, Larry Mishel and Heidi Shierholz released a paper tracking wage-growth over the past decade. It’s familiar but still sad news—the vast majority of American workers have seen essentially stagnant or worse wage-growth over that time.

One angle on poor wage-growth over the past couple of years deserves some attention: the vastly disproportionate share of income-growth that has flowed to corporate profits (and other forms of capital income) rather to wages and (and other forms of labor income).

The figure below shows the share of total corporate sector income claimed by capital income – data that allows for the clearest measure of how much this capital income growth (profits, essentially) has crowded-out labor income growth (wages, essentially). This is the cleanest cut at this issue because in the corporate sector, all income is classified as either labor or capital income. (In the rest of the economy, categories like proprietors’ incomes that are a mix of capital and labor incomes muddy the waters a bit.)

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The Cato Institute recently released a wildly misleading report by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes, which essentially claims that what low-wage workers and their families can expect to receive from “welfare” dwarfs the wages they can expect from working. Using state-level figures, their paper implies that single mothers with two children are living pretty well relying just on government assistance, with Cato’s “total welfare benefit package” ranging from $16,984 in Mississippi to $49,175 in Hawaii. They then calculate the pretax wage equivalents in annual and hourly terms and compare them to the median salaries in each state and to the official federal poverty level. Tanner and Hughes find that welfare benefits exceed what a minimum wage job would provide in 35 states, and suggest that welfare pays more than the salary for a first year teacher or the starting wage for a secretary in many states.

So what makes this so misleading?

For one, Tanner and Hughes make the assumption that these families receive simultaneous assistance from all of the following programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, Housing Assistance Payments, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC), and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). It is this simultaneous assistance from multiple sources that lets the entire “welfare benefits package” identified by Cato add up to serious money. But it’s absurd to assume that someone would receive every one of these benefits, simultaneously.

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No week seems to go by without an imbalanced attack on regulatory protections by a trade association, a “think-tank,” a member of Congress, or a journalist. These attacks frequently feature a reference to the growth in the Code of Federal Regulations, even though it is a meaningless measure of whether we’re overregulated. In offering another bill to diminish regulation, Sen. Angus King, for example, wrote yesterday that, “According to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute, the number of pages of federal regulations has increased by 138 percent since 1975, from 71,224 pages to 163,301 in 2011.”

That might sound like a lot of pages, but if you’re not using methylene chloride, polyvinyl chloride or hexavalent chromium, the hundreds of pages devoted to regulating those chemicals have no effect on you or your business. The same goes for IRS transfer pricing regulations, the Department of Agriculture’s beef slaughtering regulations, or OSHA’s crane safety regulations. No one in a small retail business, the tourism industry, or Maine’s lobster industry cares about or need worry about any of them.

Like most of his colleagues, Sen. King denounces “excessive and unnecessary regulations” without identifying examples. If he has a legitimate example, he should let the secretary of the appropriate agency know about it, or work to repeal it legislatively.

Instead, he and his colleague, Sen. Roy Blunt, propose the creation of a 9 member commission that would identify regulations “in need of streamlining or repeal.” The commission would report their recommendations to Congress in the form of a bill that would be “fast-tracked” (protected from many of the normal motions and procedures) and that could not be amended. This proposal is flawed in a number of ways.

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A new paper released today by EARN (the Economic Analysis and Research Network) looks at what states can do to create strong state economies that support high wage jobs for their people. Is it low taxes, well educated workers, or something else?

When we look at data from across the country, two clear conclusions emerge:

• There is no correlation between the overall level of taxation in a state and the ability of the economy to support high wage jobs (see figure A in this post);
• There is a very strong correlation between how well educated a state workforce is and the ability of the economy to support high wage jobs (see figure B).

Looking at this graph of overall tax levels and median earnings (a measure of wages that includes both hourly and salaried employees) one might suspect that there are just too many differences between states to see a clear correlation on any one variable.

Figure A

There is no significant correlation between overall tax levels and high-wage economies: Median hourly wage, and state and local taxes as a share of state personal income, by state, 2010

State	State and local tax revenue as a share of state personal income	Median Hourly Wage (2012 dollars)
WY	0.13590238	$16.97
AR	0.10037558	$14.42
NV	0.10475355	$15.76
MS	0.097939908	$14.16
LA	0.09574187	$15.38
WV	0.10971793	$16.17
IN	0.10564875	$15.70
KY	0.097442473	$15.19
OH	0.10470439	$15.97
SD	0.079988074	$14.96
ID	0.087547352	$15.10
OK	0.08531404	$15.51
UT	0.093340332	$16.17
AK	0.1974031	$18.69
SC	0.088154942	$15.65
AL	0.082354177	$15.19
TX	0.089617786	$15.14
TN	0.081749962	$14.53
IA	0.10341089	$15.82
AZ	0.09064911	$16.31
NC	0.098868851	$15.71
MT	0.094412722	$14.69
WI	0.11274396	$17.19
MI	0.1053127	$16.75
NE	0.10207951	$15.59
MO	0.086906169	$15.95
FL	0.091142418	$16.65
ME	0.12008039	$16.04
PA	0.10247088	$17.23
NM	0.096224878	$15.98
HI	0.11820127	$16.81
ND	0.12142884	$15.75
GA	0.089791357	$16.82
US	0.1031523	$16.85
DE	0.10092502	$18.31
OR	0.095232536	$16.61
RI	0.10883045	$17.88
CA	0.11036228	$17.83
WA	0.094482239	$19.30
MN	0.10786811	$18.48
KS	0.10357631	$15.77
VT	0.11876957	$17.09
IL	0.099506408	$17.07
NH	0.086699291	$18.96
NY	0.1430054	$18.39
VA	0.088036271	$18.78
CO	0.096436107	$18.73
NJ	0.11515426	$20.26
MD	0.099771245	$19.93
CT	0.1080529	$21.03
MA	0.099847735	$20.88

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The data underlying the figure.

Source: Authors' analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata and Tax Policy Center's Tax Facts data

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Gov. Rick Snyder is corrupting Detroit’s recovery even before it begins. By ignoring the state’s constitution and its protection for accrued public employee pensions, Snyder is undermining the rule of law and adopting the kind of “ends justify the means” reasoning that usually precedes violations of public trust. Snyder has violated his oath to uphold and defend the state’s constitution by asking a federal court to reduce the pensions of Detroit’s public employees, including many who risked their lives for years in service of the city.

The Michigan constitution is unambiguous. Section 24 states:

“The accrued financial benefits of each pension plan and retirement system of the state and its political subdivisions shall be a contractual obligation thereof which shall not be diminished or impaired thereby.”

Yet, Gov. Snyder has set in motion a bankruptcy process whose aim is to do exactly what the constitution forbids – to diminish that contractual obligation and pay Detroit’s pensioners and retirees less than the full financial benefits they earned.

One can only hope that U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Steven Rhodes will rule, instead, that Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Gov. Snyder did not have the authority to file a bankruptcy petition that would unconstitutionally impair the city’s pension obligations.

So much is wrong in Stephen Richter’s NYT op-ed today, called “What Really Ails Detroit,” starting with his grossly inaccurate timeline. Richter says Detroit’s (and the United States’) “day of reckoning” came in the 1970s when American car manufacturers began facing competition on their home soil for the first time. That’s 20 years after the Big 3 started to abandon Detroit for the suburbs and Detroit began to hemorrhage its white population. As I said in an earlier blog post, “Between 1947 and 1958, the Big Three built twenty-five new plants in the Detroit metropolitan area, all of them in suburban communities, most more than fifteen miles from the center city. As the jobs moved away, so did the city’s residents. From 1.85 million in 1950, the city’s population declined to 1.62 million in 1960 and 1.51 million in 1970.” That’s a loss of more than 300,000 residents in two decades. The exodus of white residents (the entire decline was accounted for by whites, since the number of black residents increased), of jobs, and of wealth has never stopped. Detroit now has a population under 700,000, but the white population has declined by more than 1.4 million since 1950.

What ails Detroit is not the skills gap that Richter posits, but abandonment by its white population and by the owners of capital, starting with the auto industry, but including retail corporations, insurance companies and almost everyone else who had previously invested in the city. Detroit’s unemployment rate is the highest of any of the 50 largest cities because almost no one is investing there. When corporations do invest, as Chrysler did with its new Jefferson North assembly plant, they will find plenty of employees with the skills to make manufacturing a success again.

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In a NYT column today titled “What Really Ails Detroit,” Stephen Richter repeats a common story much beloved by serious-sounding pundits who don’t know much economics: that the thirty year run of broadly-shared growth after World War II was only possible because of “the absence…of any real competition from other nations,” and that American workers’ troubles since then are their own fault for not getting smart enough to compete on the global stage. He asserts that even as this international competition increased, “companies like General Motors continued to shower blue-collar workers with handsome pay and benefits,” hobbling their ability to compete, even as they refused to upskill sufficiently to compete in the global economy.

This narrative is really common—common enough to see if it holds up to any serious data scrutiny.

Start with claims that excessive blue-collar pay destroyed manufacturing.  For a paper examining those claims, check this out (pdf). Spoiler alert: it’s not. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages for production workers in U.S. manufacturing peaked in 1978 and were about 8 percent lower in 2007, while manufacturing productivity rose by well over 100 percent in that period.

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Here are a few articles we read recently. What did you read today?

• Walmart’s big lie: No, it doesn’t create jobs! (Salon)
• What to Expect on October 1 (Huffington Post)
• Immigration debate ensnares foreign workers (USA Today)
• Inequality is hindering economic growth (Baltimore Sun)
• Walmart’s ‘Worst Nightmare’ Competition Has Cashiers And Produce Clerks With $1 Million Pensions (Daily Kos)
• Civil Forfeiture: A Fiction the Offends Due Process (pdf, Regent University)