You still see commentators who haven’t kept up invoking this story as if it were obviously true. But the case for “skill-biased technological change” as the main driver of wage stagnation has largely fallen apart. Most notably, high levels of education have offered no guarantee of rising incomes — for example, wages of recent college graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 15 years.
The New York Times
July 17, 2015
Some economists point out that if you’re trying to compete on price, rather than superior quality or innovation, addressing currency manipulation by trading partners like China and Japan would get the U.S. much further down the road, much faster. “We’re just not getting millions of manufacturing jobs back unless we get much closer to balanced trade — and they key to that is currency,” says the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens. “Everything else is tinkering on the edges.”
The Washington Post
July 17, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, a vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center research group, said: “Bush should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Eisenbrey said the proposed rules do nothing whatsoever to bar employers from paying bonuses. “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense,” he said. Eisenbrey and Bernstein wrote a seminal article that helped persuade the Obama administration to change overtime rules.
The Guardian
July 17, 2015
It’s easy to dismiss pre-k as nonessential or overblown, but the array of skills integral to success—from creative problem-solving to effective communication—depends largely on how a kid performs in school from day one, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
July 17, 2015
Just as Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means’s 1932 book, “The Modern Corporation and Private Property,” helped shape the New Deal’s economic policies, so the CAP and Brookings studies have clearly influenced the perspectives of the current Democratic front-runner. It’s important to note, however, that those studies draw from the findings of more progressive economists, many of whom were critics of the deregulatory proclivities of Clinton’s presidency. These papers build on studies conducted over many years by the Economic Policy Institute and the work of such economists as Joseph Stiglitz, Dean Baker and William Lazonick, whose research into the rise of stock buybacks is increasingly influential across the Democratic spectrum.
The Washington Post
July 16, 2015
The move comes as the department steps up its enforcement of classification rules. Last year, it forced companies to pay $79 million in back wages to 109,000 workers in the janitorial, temporary help, food services, day care and hotel industries. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank, estimates that 10 percent to 20 percent of employers misclassify at least one worker.
Associated Press
July 16, 2015
In a 2005 report, Laura Powers and Ann Markusen of the Economic Policy Institute analyzed the effectiveness of retraining and job placement efforts for defense industry workers as the Cold War faded. “We estimate,” they wrote, “that a majority of the workers displaced … between 1987 and 1997 now work at jobs that pay them less than their former wages and that fail to take advantage of their defense-bred skills, and a sizable minority has experienced a drop in earnings of 50% or more.”
Los Angeles Times
July 16, 2015
A report published in June by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank based in Washington, said the practice of subcontracting work to companies that, in turn, also subcontract has apparently made it easier for misclassification to occur.
The Chicago Tribune
July 16, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that wages in the middle of the distribution have increased by all of 6 percent since 1979.
The New York Times
July 15, 2015
Adjusted for inflation, the income of a typical household in 2013 was 8 per cent below levels before the most recent recession, prompting calls for the Fed to be wary of squashing wage growth. Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said: “It is imperative that policy encourages an economy where workers actually see improvements in their pay.”
Financial Times
July 15, 2015