Media clips
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Connecticut has been even more starkly divided between rich and poor, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
New Haven Independent January 16, 2020 -
Reporter Craig Torres visits a rural community just hours from the nation’s capital, illustrating how difficult it is to improve opportunities for the less fortunate. Then host Stephanie Flanders delves into the issue with scholar Elaine Weiss of the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg January 16, 2020 -
The report, published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Wednesday morning, arrives at a politically important moment. Early childhood policy is getting more attention than ever in American politics, with leading presidential candidates and senior members of Congress proposing that the federal government dramatically expand support for child care.
Huffington Post January 16, 2020 -
Federal, state and local governments spend $34 billion annually on early care and education, according the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Households, on the other hand, spend approximately $42 billion for child care and early education, the researchers said. They estimated that median hourly pay for early education teachers was $12.12 in 2019.
MarketWatch January 16, 2020 -
I’ve tried to put it into my own words before, but now for the sake of precision and clarity, I’m going to quote from Heidi Shierholz and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. I’ve bolded certain portions for emphasis:
“We certainly hear widespread employer complaints about not being able to find workers. Why? One reason is monopsony power in the U.S. labor market. There is a lot of evidence that many firms have monopsony power, either because of a limited number of buyers of labor or other sources beyond labor market concentration. When firms have monopsony power, they are able to pay workers less than what their work is “worth,” i.e., less than their marginal product. But a key dynamic of monopsony power is that even though monopsonists would like to hire more workers, the low wages they offer mean they can’t attract more workers unless they pay more. That is, it is a normal state of affairs for a firm with monopsony power to wish they could hire more workers at the wages they are offering, but to be unable to attract additional workers because their wages are too low. So when a firm with the power to set wages below a worker’s marginal product complains about not being able to find workers at the wages it is offering, it’s useful to remember that it is choosing to keep wages low in order to increase profits—which remain high as a share of corporate sector income—and could get more workers by simply raising wages. And importantly, when firms with monopsony power complain about not being able to find workers, it is not adequate evidence of a skills shortage. What would be good evidence of a skills shortage? The footprint of a bona fide shortage of workers with certain skills is a low number of available workers with those skills combined with unusually strong wage growth for workers with those skills.”
The Fabricator January 15, 2020 -
A 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 851,000 jobs were lost because of the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. The same group found that the trade deficit in goods with China cost 3.4 million jobs from 2001 to 2017
The New York Times January 15, 2020 -
What’s more, it will do little to lower the United States’ job-killing bilateral trade deficit with China, which has continued to grow under the Trump administration. In fact, new data from the Economic Policy Institute finds the United States’ China goods trade deficit has grown annually by almost 11 percent since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It was – wait for it – $419.5 billion in 2018 alone. That’s a record, by tens of billions of dollars, and will be eclipsed when 2019’s total trade figures are available in a few weeks.
Alliance for American Manufacturing January 15, 2020 -
“The policies of segregation that were followed by the federal government were so powerful that they determine the racial landscape of today,” says Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America. “African Americans are restricted to neighborhoods because the other neighborhoods are now unaffordable to them, restricted to neighborhoods where there are fewer trees, where there is more heat.”
NPR January 15, 2020 -
As recently as seven years ago, schools and colleges of education were graduating too many for too few jobs. Now, jobs are available, with outcries about existing or impending teacher shortages at the local and national levels. A report this year by the Economic Policy Institute finds that the teacher shortage is large and growing, and worse than anticipated. This report explains that when teacher certification and training are considered, the shortage is much worse than estimated, with low-income schools experiencing an acute shortage of credentialed teachers.
Lohud January 15, 2020 -
In the ’70s or ’80s, your labor and overall productivity were more or less in lock step. And we still pretend that if someone wakes up in the morning and says, “Hey, I need to put food on the table,” he can go out to his main street, he can sell his time for money at some hourly rate, and then he’ll be able to make a good enough living so he can feed his family, raise kids and the rest of it. That has become progressively less true over the last 40 years, unfortunately, where wages have stagnated while productivity has gone up and up,
Starting in 1979, productivity and pay sharply diverged — productivity rose nearly 70 percent, while typical hourly pay essentially stagnated, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
and that’s going to accelerate because of the convergence of capital and technology now, in unprecedented ways.
The New York Times January 15, 2020