Nearly all Black adults—regardless of their education level—experienced a deterioration of their financial position last year, including adults with a college education, according to SHED. The share of Black individuals with higher education doing okay or living comfortably declined by nearly seven percentage points last year, the Economic Policy Institute reported.
The Root
August 10, 2026
Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argues that finance’s employment slowdown has everything to do with higher interest rates starting in the second half of 2022, and little to do with AI.
“Very few employment changes right now are due to AI. Were AI driving a substantial reorganization of the labor market, we’d be seeing much faster productivity growth than the current slow rates,” Zipperer texted NOTUS.
NOTUS
August 10, 2026
Sebastian Hickey, an analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, disagrees. “There continues to be an orthodox view that the minimum wage is destructive to economic outcomes, but 90 per cent of high-quality studies show that it doesn’t increase unemployment,” he said.
The Times (UK)
August 10, 2026
Some economists, such as Ben Zipperer from the Economic Policy Institute, said AI’s impact on jobs has so far been more limited than what some doomsday scenarios initially predicted.
Fortune
August 10, 2026
“People leave the labor force because they don’t see opportunities for themselves in it, and so they’re not actively looking for a job,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch
August 10, 2026
The sector that lost the most jobs in July was local government education. That category is mostly K-12 public school roles, which were down almost 50,000.
Such a sharp drop could be a flaw in “seasonal adjustment,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She said many teachers are laid off in the summer.
“At the same time, local education employment has fallen every month since March,” Gould said — as in, when school is still in session. “We know that there have been funding cuts at the Department of Education. Worse budget cuts may be coming, and that could cause even more uncertainty about hiring or keeping teachers on staff.”
Marketplace
August 10, 2026
In August 2019, there were more than 223,000 U.S. school bus drivers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The research group reported in August 2025 that there were only 202,000 drivers, a 9.5 percent decrease.
My Leader Paper (Missouri)
August 10, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan think tank funded by foundation grants and labor unions, published a paper in 2025 that found, “More stringent work requirements in the past have failed to boost work in significant ways because they don’t attack the core problems of weak economic conditions or the irregular and unpredictable scheduling practices of low-wage jobs. Instead, requirements increase administrative burdens for adults seeking needed benefits.”
Altamont Enterprise
August 10, 2026
- The Economic Policy Institute looked at the amount of taxpayer money — $4.4 billion — that’s currently being spent on forced deportations in Minnesota and explained what that money could have done for the people of Minnesota instead. The state could have hired 14,000 full-time teachers, kept 130,000 more rural Minnesotans on health insurance, fed every single hungry family in the state, or given every household a $2000 tax refund.
Civic Ventures
August 10, 2026
American taxpayers would pay about $2,358 each to fund President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, according to a new calculator released by the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsmax
August 10, 2026