Media clips
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The tweet included a chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing the economy’s productivity increasing while hourly compensation of production and non-supervisory workers in the private sector remained relatively flat.
Wall Street Journal July 10, 2015 -
In fact, a study released this year from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found worker productivity rose 74% between 1973 and 2013, while wages were only up 9%. In other words, Americans were indeed doing more work with scant increase to their compensation. And among the top earners—the 1%—incomes were up 138% since 1980, while the bottom 90% of workers saw wages rise just 15%.
Time Magazine July 10, 2015 -
But while Jeb has explained he was talking about part-time work, here’s the macroeconomic problem with his quote from yesterday: The U.S. workforce has been plenty productive, but wages haven’t kept up. The Atlantic: “Though productivity (defined as the output of goods and services per hours worked) grew by about 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, compensation for workers grew at a much slower rate of only 9 percent during the same time period, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.”
NBC News July 10, 2015 -
Analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, shows productivity growing 240% between 1948 and 2013, while wages of non-supervisory workers grew only 108% during the same period. There has been little gain in real wages of those workers since 1978.
CNN Money July 10, 2015 -
The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.3%, but there are still 8.3 million unemployed Americans and about 3.3 million “missing workers”. Missing workers are people who have stopped looking for work because they have given up hope of finding it. If these missing workers were counted, the unemployment rate would be closer to 7.3%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian July 10, 2015 -
Hillary Clinton slammed Jeb Bush late Wednesday for remarking that “people should work longer hours” during his meeting with The Union Leader in New Hampshire — though not by name. In a tweet, Clinton shared a graph from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute showing wages stagnating as productivity has risen over the last four decades.
Politico July 9, 2015 -
Both skeptics and supporters alike acknowledge that they are waiting to see how vigorously HUD enforces these rules to determine how significant their impact will be. “In my view, it’s a very modest first step because there’s no content in these rules about what HUD is going to do if jurisdictions don’t do something to desegregate,” Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, said ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
Los Angeles Times July 9, 2015 -
The pro-labor Economic Policy Institute contends that from 2001 to 2013, trade with China resulted in the loss of 3.2 million American jobs, 2.4 million of them in manufacturing, particularly in information technology and electronics. Academic research has found similar, though not quite as high, numbers of job losses, with ranges from 2.0 to 2.4 million (using the years 1999 to 2011).
Josh Bivens, the research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, put his finger on the problem for unions that expanding trade between China and the United States poses. While acknowledging some of the benefits of free trade, Bivens points out the danger of the global expansion of competition: Reducing trade barriers allows each to specialize in what they do more efficiently, and this specialization generally leads to national-level gains for both countries — that is, increased efficiency, worldwide production and total consumption. This is essentially chapter one in trade textbooks. However, a later chapter in the textbook points out that, when the United States exports financial services and aircraft while importing apparel and electronics, it is implicitly exchanging the services of capital for labor. This exchange bids up capital’s price — profits and high-end salaries — and bids down wages for the broad working and middle class, leading to rising inequality and wage pressure for many Americans.
According to Bivens, the downside is immense: Even if trade flows begin to balance and there is less job loss in the future, the integration of the U.S. economy with those of its low-wage trading partners will pull down wages for many American workers, and will contribute to the ever rising inequality of incomes in the U.S. economy.The employment declines resulting from China trade have been analyzed in several papers by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, economists at M.I.T., the University of Zurich, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively; a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment,” by Justin R. Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter K. Schott of the Yale School of Management; and by Robert E. Scott, the director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, who worked with Will Kimball, a research assistant.
The New York Times July 8, 2015 -
The rate of workers quitting remains 9.2 percent lower than it was in 2007, shortly before the Great Recession started, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
Associated Press July 8, 2015 -
On June 22, The Wall Street Journal published a piece with the headline, “Top CEO Pay Isn’t Driven by Talent,” citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute. The Journal quotes the study’s authors, saying “The growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares [i.e. the share of total income] of the top 1% and top 0.1% of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007.”
Fortune July 8, 2015