Media clips
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The wage gap between Black and white people who work is wider today than it was nearly four decades ago, according to research released last week. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, “Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality,” revealed that the disparity has ebbed and flowed over three distinct time periods rather than occurring along a straight line.
Rewire September 27, 2016 -
After a long period of rising inequality, Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington, added, the benefits of the improving economy finally began to seep downward. Wage increases were “even stronger at the bottom than in the middle,” she said.
The New York Times September 26, 2016 -
To be in the top 1 percent of incomes nationally, families need to take in a minimum of $389,436. The average income of America’s 1-percenters is $1,153,293, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Yet when incomes are measured state by state, the study shows wildly diverging fortunes for 1-percenters…“All high incomes are going up, but they’re going up much faster in places like New York, Maryland and California,” said Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center and co-author of the Economic Policy Institute study.
The New York Times September 25, 2016 -
A clear divide has emerged between productivity and compensation. A report from the Economic Policy Institute shows from 1973 to 2013, productivity rose 74%, while the hourly pay of a typical worker increased just 9%. For some perspective, from 1948 to 1973, productivity rose 96.7%, while hourly salary increased 91.3%. And sluggish wage growth isn’t a crisis faced only by the unskilled or undereducated—when adjusted for inflation, hourly-wages of recent college graduates who earned a four-year degree were lower in 2013 than 1998. Authors of the EPI report attribute this to the high unemployment rates that plagued the United States through the past few decades. Although America’s unemployment rate in August 2016 was 4.9%—its lowest since August 2007 when it rested at 4.5% just before December’s economic downturn—higher unemployment rates still exist in 21 states.
Forbes September 25, 2016 -
Racial discrimination, it seems, is like the salt that’s left in a pot after water boils away — much easier to identify in the absence of the other things. That was one of the big takeaways from a report released this week by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Researchers were studying the longstanding black-white wage gap, and their findings were grim: The distance between what white Americans and black Americans earn is larger than it’s been in almost 40 years. I talked to Valerie Wilson, who analyzes race and the economy for the institute. She told me that the wage gap has grown and shrunk over the years and has lingered in both boom and lean times. While it once varied by region — smallest in the Midwest and largest in the South — the gap is now more or less uniform across the country. It’s been a chronic blemish on our economy.
NPR September 23, 2016 -
“There are definitely places where that rule will have harsh effects on the employment of coal miners,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute. Eisenbrey says the health benefits — lower risk of lung cancer and asthma, for example — far outweigh the costs.
CNN Money September 23, 2016 -
“I’m an economist, not a psychologist,” quips Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. But there is evidence, he notes, of partisan perception of statistics, wherein people look at the same numbers and come to different conclusions depending on whether they like the president or Congress in power. A recent Economist/YouGov poll, for example, showed that while a strong majority felt America is on the wrong track, they were divided over who was to blame – Obama, Congress, Republicans, Democrats or some combination of those… “People have been very scarred by the great recession and by the period before that,” Mishel says, explaining the continued fretting over the state of the economy. Further, he says, there’s lingering resentment towards big banks and financial institutions people held responsible for the Great Recession. “People are also scarred by the sense that the crisis was caused by bankers who never paid any price. So there’s a blood lust that was never fulfilled,” Mishel adds.
U.S. News & World Report September 23, 2016 -
At the same time, the International Trade Administration says the TPP will be a boon for Ohio and will strengthen international partnerships. The group says that Ohio exported goods to TPP countries to the tune of $30.6 billion, most of which came from small and medium-sized companies. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, the TPP could mean the dramatic loss of domestic jobs. According to a recent report by the group, the U.S. trade deficit with TPP countries cost 2 million domestic jobs in 2015.
MSNBC September 23, 2016 -
Still, Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a longtime dissenter from the centrist consensus, told me he was struck by its direction: “Her agenda would have to be seen as more complete, more focused on generating wage growth and jobs than I’ve seen from other candidates [since the 1980s]—and therefore I think it’s more progressive.” And yet this realization hasn’t traveled very far beyond the small world of policy experts and activists. Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist who served in Bill Clinton’s White House and is now advising Hillary, told me: “I don’t fully think people are wrapping their heads around the ambition of what she is proposing,”
The Huffington Post September 23, 2016 -
After widening in the 1980s, tightening in the 1990s, and increasing again throughout the 2000s, the earnings gap between black and white workers in the U.S. is larger today than it was in 1979, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report. That increase doesn’t appear to stem primarily from changes in education levels or other observable factors like skill differences either. “Wage gaps are growing primarily because of discrimination,” the report finds, in addition to growing income inequality across American society
Next City September 23, 2016