Media clips

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• Jeff Bezos’s ‘shadow’ advisor position is empty for the first time in years as Amazon and his personal life face unprecedented scrutiny — here are the 7 most successful executives who once filled that role (AMZN)

  What 1 minimum wage chart tells us about the labor market A well-known factoid in American economic debates is that wages used to grow with productivity, but they don’t anymore. There’s a particularly famous chart, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute, that shows hourly pay for the typical U.S. household increasing…

  Business Insider January 24, 2020
• Uncertainty surrounds California arbitration bill

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 54 percent of nonunion private companies use mandatory arbitration contracts.

  SHRM January 24, 2020
• More women than men employed for first time in a decade in US

  Elise Gould, the senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, also said about this trend: ‘In recessions in general, men lose more jobs than women. That is because jobs in cyclical sectors like industrials and energy tend to employ more men than women, and are often the first to dwindle in a downturn’.

  Evoke January 24, 2020
• Trump’s USDA chief thinks farm workers are overpaid

  And while their wages have risen slightly in recent years, farm workers still bring home average hourly rates less than 40 percent below of what other non-supervisory US workers make, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Economic Policy Institute. On average, farm workers earned $24,620 per year in 2018, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s below the federal poverty line for a family of four. Another source, the 2015-2016 National Agricultural Workers Survey, calculated that “farm workers’ mean and median personal incomes the previous year were in the range of $17,500 to $19,999. ”

  Mother Jones January 24, 2020
• Low income residents are missing out on tax credits. Here’s what you can do to collect it

  Nationally, the tax credits, paired with rising minimum wages in states like California, is considered an effective method of reducing poverty, especially among single parents who work, according to a joint study from the Economic Policy Institute and Research on Labor and Employment at the UC Berkeley.

  The Fresno Bee January 24, 2020
• More single adults are living on the street, but D.C. expects to see decrease in overall homelessness

  To live modestly in D.C. itself, a family of four needs to make nearly $124,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Median household income is at a record high in the District>, but it’s still below that number. And the suburbs are in a similar situation: A family of four needs to make about $91,000 in Prince George’s County, where the median income is below $80,000.

  WAMU 88.5 January 24, 2020
• LIers to get their say about child care costs via survey

  In Nassau, the 2017 median household income was $105,744; in Suffolk it was $92,838, according to Census figures. Infant care for one child would take up 22.1% of a median family’s income in New York, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

  Newsday January 24, 2020
• 7 surprising ways divorce can impact your finances

  If you and your spouse have children, it may be expected that you’ll pay child support or that child support may not cover all your expenses. But have you thought about this in real-world terms and prepared for it? When the average cost of infant care in the US is $11,420.02 ($9,166.53 for a four-year-old), according to numbers provided by the Economic Policy Institute, not preparing can be a costly mistake.

  Finance Buzz January 24, 2020
• California’s crusade against CEOs

  There are many factors at work there, from globalization to changing social norms (the workforce-participation rate of men 25 to 54 has declined just a smidgen since 1998, but the workforce-participation rate of men 20 to 24 has declined by a tenth) to catastrophically stupid experiments with subsidizing subprime mortgages and then basing a whole bunch of economic assumptions on the resulting asset bubble. During that time, CEO compensation at the big firms went up and down, too — it fell by half from 2000 to 2002, to a measly $10.3 million! — but what executive pay at publicly traded companies tends to track most closely is, no great surprise, the performance of the S&P 500, as data from the Economic Policy Institute and others confirm. 
  

  National Review January 24, 2020
• Weakened labor movement leads to rising economic inequality

  The basic facts about inequality in the United States — that for most of the last 40 years, pay has stagnated for all but the highest-paid workers and inequality has risen dramatically — are widely understood. What is less well-known is the role the decline of unionization has played in those trends. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement dropped from 27 percent to 11.6 percent between 1979 and 2019, meaning the union coverage rate is now less than half where it was 40 years ago.

  Morning Consult January 24, 2020