Among young and old, men and women, high school and college grads, part-time work is more common in Massachusetts than in the bulk of the United States. Overall, roughly one of every three workers in the Bay State clocks less than 35 hours a week, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. While this may seem like a dubious distinction, it’s actually a sign of rare flexibility in the state job market.
Boston Globe
April 1, 2016
Richard Rothstein joined the program.
Diane Rehm Show
April 1, 2016
One expert, Robert Scott at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that the U.S. lost roughly 800,000 jobs to Mexico between 1997 and 2013. He cites NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1993—as the key driver for job losses.
CNN Money
April 1, 2016
In 2013 an updated estimate of his model showed that trade with poor countries depressed unskilled workers’ wages by 10% in 2011, up from 2.7% in 1979, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank. In that time, trade accounted for one-third of the rise in the college premium.
The Economist
April 1, 2016
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump offers a lot of policy ideas that progressive economists hate. He wants to close up the country’s borders and crack down on immigration, something that could seriously hurt the economy. His tax plan would cost trillions and offer most of the relief to the wealthiest, with very little for the middle class and poor. But when it comes to his positions on trade, the same economists say he’s identified the right problems, even if some of his solutions might get him into trouble. “Trump has stumbled on, and I think it’s the right word, stumbled on to a very important issue,” said Robert Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Think Progress
March 31, 2016
A report by the Economic Policy Institute concludes that unilateral MES status for China would endanger 3.5m jobs in EU industry by limiting anti-dumping tariffs. Almost all the EU’s 350,000 steel jobs would be a risk. If this is correct, and if allowed to run its course, Europe would be finished as an industrial and military region. It would be civilisational suicide.
Telegraph UK
March 31, 2016
That’s why PolitiFact called into question a Bernie Sanders ad that refers to 850,000 jobs lost under NAFTA. Sanders cites that number from a report from the Economic Policy Institute, which gets about a quarter of its funding from unions.
Chicago Tribune
March 31, 2016
He was one of the five founders of the Economic Policy Institute, which distinguished itself for both setting and anticipating the American economic agenda.
The Washington Post
March 31, 2016
I got to know Les Thurow because we were part of a fairly small cohort of non-Marxian, left-of-center thinkers on economics. Thurow joined Robert Reich, Ray Marshall, Jeff Faux, Barry Bluestone, and myself in 1986, to found the Economic Policy Institute. We acted because virtually the entire mainstream economics profession had become something of a commercial for the proposition that markets are almost invariably efficient. Marxian economists, of course, had an entirely different view. But among non-Marxists, Thurow was perhaps the most eminent and well credentialed of those who challenged market verdicts as neither necessarily efficient nor just. We founded EPI in part because there was a huge hole in the world of think tanks. Before EPI, there were outfits like the American Enterprise Institute on the right and the Brookings Institution in the center but no real left-liberal institution committed to high quality research.
The American Prospect
March 31, 2016
The battle has political ramifications. If conservatives can chip away at the funding of public-employee unions, they can weaken them and, in turn, hurt labor’s ally, the Democrats. “It’s totally political,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a foundation- and union-supported think tank in Washington. “The business community doesn’t like unions by and large, and whenever they get an opportunity to undermine collective bargaining, they take it.”
Christian Science Monitor
March 31, 2016