The New York Times obituary for Douglas C. Englebart, identified as the “Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse,” is fascinating reading, in part because Englebart, an Oregon farm boy, was in many ways the father of modern networked computing. Beginning in the early 1960s, he put together a team of engineers and computer scientists, funded by the federal government, that developed a prototype for most of the computer tools we all take for granted today. He unveiled them at a conference in San Francisco in December 1968, which “set the computing world on fire.” In the words of the Times obituary:

“Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.

For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.”

Englebart was a visionary, but his ground-breaking work was not supported by venture capital and his innovations were not the result of the private market or corporate enterprise. His innovations were not spurred by the prospects of incredible income and wealth, all lightly taxed. Rather, the work was funded and organized by a visionary bureaucracy in the U.S. government. As the Times describes it, “during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department.”

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The drumbeat of doom-and-gloom about American education continues. The latest entry is a June report by the Council on Foreign Relations, warning that the “real scourge of the U.S. education system–and its greatest competitive weakness–is the deep and growing achievement gap between socioeconomic groups that begins early and lasts through a student’s academic career.”

Every industrialized country has an achievement gap between higher and lower-class children. In the United States, we have a similar and overlapping gap between whites and blacks. These gaps have narrowed, but not much, because both races have posted remarkable gains in recent generations.

Consider this: black achievement has improved so much that in elementary school mathematics, blacks now perform better than whites did only a generation ago. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black elementary and middle schoolers in reading and for black 12^th graders in both math and reading. White students have also improved in this time, however, so the gap remains.

The Council on Foreign Relations acknowledges that American student achievement is “higher than ever,” but says gains have been small. In fact, gains have been quite large, and for disadvantaged students, have outpaced gains in comparable industrial countries. One country with which we are typically and unfavorably compared is Finland. Yet although Finland’s scores remain high, achievement of its disadvantaged students has plummeted in the last decade, while that of comparable U.S. students has surged.

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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have reported that significant portions of China’s exports to the United States contain non-Chinese value added, including some small fraction of parts and materials originating in the United States. The OECD and WTO have proposed new estimates of trade in value-added (VA), a measure of trade that is net of foreign value-added. They claim that “China’s bilateral trade surplus with the United States shrinks by 25% on a value-added basis, reflecting the high level of foreign-sourced content in Chinese exports.” But, my new EPI report shows that the OECD-WTO analysis is “fundamentally flawed and should not be used in anti-dumping or other types of fair trade cases.”

The OECD-WTO analysis suffers from at least three critical flaws:

• The OECD-WTO analysis fails to account for rapid technological change and the fact that China is rapidly moving up the value chain and increasing the domestic content of its exports.
• The OECD relies, in part, on flawed Chinese data on its own trade flows. Estimates developed in the EPI report show that China’s global trade surplus was 117 percent to 250 percent (i.e., 2 to 3.5 times) larger than reported by China in the 2005-2009 period.
• The OECD-WTO estimates do not accurately reflect the flow of Chinese exports coming into the United States through third countries. China became the world’s largest exporter in 2006, and roughly half of its exports are intermediate products and transshipped goods. As a result, the United States absorbed $54.2 billion to $77.9 billion per year in additional, indirect imports originating in China and imported from the rest of the world between 2005 and 2009 that were not reflected in the OECD estimates. When indirect imports are included, U.S. VA trade with China exceeds conventional measures of the gross bilateral trade deficit in this period.

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Happy Fifth of July. Here’s what we read this week:

• War on the Unemployed (New York Times)
• The Fall of the American Worker (The New Yorker)
• Upgrade or Die (The New Yorker)
• Instituting Economic Cooperation in a Noncooperative World (Center for American Progress)

There are not enough thumbs-up graphics on the internet to show how much I agree with and how important I think this Paul Krugman blog post is. He goes through all of the obvious indicators signaling that the economy is far from healed from the Great Recession, as well as all of the puzzling ways policymakers seem determined to ignore this, and ends with:

“I guess what I’m saying is that I worry that a more or less permanent depression could end up simply becoming accepted as the way things are, that we could suffer endless, gratuitous suffering, yet the political and policy elite would feel no need to change its ways.”

We said much the same thing in the introductory chapter to State of Working America, 12th Edition published last Labor Day:

“We should be very clear about the danger of this complacency in the face of elevated unemployment. It’s not simply that full recovery to pre-recession health will come too slowly—though this delay alone does indeed inflict a considerable cost. Instead, the danger is that full recovery does not come at all. Nations have thrown away decades of growth because policymakers failed to ensure complete recovery. Japan has been forfeiting potential output—trillions of dollars’ worth, cumulatively—for most of the past 20 years. Recent research (Schettkat and Sun 2008) has suggested that the German economy operated below potential in 23 of 30 years between 1973 and 2002 because monetary policymakers were excessively inflation-averse. Lastly, U.S. economic history provides the exemplar of what can happen to a depressed economy when policymakers fail to respond correctly: The level of industrial production in the United States was the same in 1940 as it was 11 years before.”

And today’s jobs-numbers, while a nice mild boost above recent trends, really don’t change this assessment at all.

The official start of the recovery from the Great Recession began in June 2009. This coming Friday will mark the release of employment data for June 2013, allowing us to assess how this recovery stacks up against earlier recoveries 4 years in, as well as letting us diagnose obvious areas of economic weakness in the current recovery.

The figure below (also here) compares the current recovery to the three prior recoveries. Recessions are marked by the lines to the left of the zero point on the x-axis, while recoveries are to the right. The figure shows that job growth in the current recovery is slightly stronger than the job growth following the recession of 2001. However, it is slower than in the prior two recoveries and is in fact slower than in any other previous recovery dating back to World War II. Furthermore, jobs fell much further and faster during the Great Recession than in any other recession over that period, meaning that we are stuck in a much larger jobs-hole four years into recovery than in any previous business cycle. The fact that four years into the recovery we still have not yet come close to making up the jobs lost in the downturn, (much less the jobs needed to keep up with growth in the potential workforce over that time), is a grimmer situation than anything our labor market has seen in seven decades.

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The interest rates on government-backed student loans are set to double if Congress does not act today. Currently, low- and middle-income students can take out federal loans—called Stafford Loans—at a rate of 3.4 percent. Today, under current law, this rate will increase to 6.8 percent—a rate that will make repayment on student debt much more difficult than it is already. PLUS loans, which are issued to parents and graduate students at a rate of 7.9 percent, will become more costly, as well. If Congress continues to stall, millions of college students will see their future loan obligations increase substantially, putting further strain on upcoming graduates who already face a bleak job market.

If this crisis sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Congress made the same deliberations last summer, and eventually extended the low interest rates for an additional year. This year, there is bipartisan agreement that a long-term solution—rather than yet another year-long extension—is needed. The question what long-term rate is appropriate for student debt is a complicated one—but allowing rates to double today would hurt both current and future students in an already ailing economy.  Unemployment for young college graduates is close to 9 percent and underemployment is near 18 percent. What’s more, for recent graduates, wages increased 1.5 percent cumulatively between 1989 and 2012. For men, the increase was 4.8 percent, but women actually saw their real earnings decrease by 1.6 percent in this time period.

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Escalating CEO compensation is a major contributor to income inequality. Along with financial sector pay, growing CEO compensation has helped more than double the income share of the top 1 percent over the past three decades. Moreover, the fact that CEO pay has risen so quickly since the end of the Great Recession is an indicator that the top 1 percent is doing far better than ordinary Americans in the recovery.

One way to illustrate the increased divergence between CEO pay and an average worker’s pay over time is to examine the ratio of CEO compensation to that of a typical worker, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio. Our new EPI paper, CEO Pay in 2012 Was Extraordinarily High Relative to Typical Workers and Other High Earners, presents this analysis of CEO compensation based on our tabulations of Compustat’s ExecuComp data. The ratio measures the distance between the compensation of CEOs in the 350 largest firms and the workers in the key industry of the firms of the particular CEOs.

The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio1 in 2012 of 272.9 is far above the ratio in 1995 (122.6), 1989 (58.5), 1978 (29.0), and 1965 (20.1), as shown in the figure below. This illustrates that CEOs have fared far better than the average worker over the last several decades. It is also true that CEO compensation has grown far faster than the stock market or the productivity of the economy.

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Here’s what we read today. Did we miss something interesting? Share it in the comments.

• Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill (New Republic)
• For true immigration reform, hire labor inspectors, not border guards (Newsday)
• Forced to Work Sick? That’s Fine With Disney, Red Lobster, and Their Friends at ALEC (Mother Jones)
• The U.S. will stop financing coal plants abroad. That’s a huge shift. (Washington Post)

We just launched a new website, inequality.is. I want to take an opportunity to tell you a little about it. What this website does is help everyday people see themselves in the economy.

My team here at EPI and at Periscopic worked hard to make inequality.is  fun, accessible and informative. Generally, people get that inequality exists, what we are trying to do is explain why it matters.

The website takes people through a series of pages where they can see themselves in the story of inequality. There’s a great video, narrated by Robert Reich, which tells the story of how inequality was and is being created.

The site begins with a look at the income distribution and users can visualize how much money the top 10% takes home in income versus the bottom 90%. That’s inequality.is/real.

inequality.is/personal lets users see themselves through the eyes of their particular demographic characteristics—age, gender, race/ethnicity, and education—and sees how average wages differ depending on your personal characteristics. Users can play with this interactive feature, putting in different comparisons and seeing how things are different.

Any differences found in the inequality.is/personal section are dwarfed by the differences between the vast majority of Americans and what’s happened with wages and incomes in the top 1%

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