Yet, while the left and center-left now agree that inequality is both rising and something to worry about, they still disagree about its causes and what to do about it. “I think remarkably over the past year and half, there’s been a convergence that skill-biased technological change doesn’t do much to help explain the [increase in inequality during the] 2000s,” said Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive economic think tank. “This really burst into the public sphere by Larry Summers calling educational upgrading essentially an evasion of the key issues.” But when I asked Jason Furman, the current CEA chair, about Mishel’s argument, he wasn’t convinced. “I personally think the rise in inequality has been large enough that there’s room for a lot of explanations without them having to compete with each other.”
The New Republic
May 19, 2015
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Here is another change that might be a broader sign of a pending reset: A heavy burden of adjustment in the overall labor market is being borne by the young. Wages for the typical graduate of a four-year college have dropped more than 7 percent since 2000, and the labor force participation rate of the young has been falling.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, estimates that increased globalization, aided by a strong dollar that led to a persistent trade deficit, reduced the annual earnings of the roughly 70 percent of American workers without college degrees by about $1,800.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
In a recent study done by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, these sorts of statistics just jump off the page:
- Incredibly, 89 percent of minimum-wage recipients are over the age of 20 — not teens flipping hamburgers.
- Interestingly, 56 percent of those working for the minimum wage, which in New York is $8.75 an hour, are women.
- Many have children — 28 percent of those working for minimum wage have kids.
New York Post
May 18, 2015
In particular, U.S. automakers have long complained that they have been undercut and forced to shed jobs in recent years by Japan’s undervaluing of the yen — and they are pushing aggressively for the Portman-Stabenow amendment to give Americans more power to push back with its trading partners. Roughly 150,000 jobs would be created in Ohio alone if the currency issue is addressed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
May 18, 2015
In 2003, after a decade of NAFTA, a report from the Economic Policy Institute by Robert E. Scott summarized the situation: Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.
Salon
May 18, 2015
The move will cut costs and let Fossil invest in other projects, he said. But what’s the message to the 1,200 who work at Fossil headquarters in Richardson? “It’s a reminder of just how little bargaining power they have,” said Ron Hira, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and an associate professor at Howard University. “Workers have to feel like they’re very disposable.”
Dallas Morning News
May 18, 2015
But that isn’t the full story. In an important recent paper, Josh Bivens, of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that estimates like the one produced by the Peterson Institute don’t take into account the distributional aspects of trade agreements. The traditional argument for free trade is that it reallocates resources, workers included, to their most productive uses, and that this causes over-all income and output to rise. But this churning process doesn’t only create winners, such as consumers who can buy lower-cost imported goods. It also creates losers, such as the Maytag-plant workers in Illinois and many others who make things that poorer countries can produce more cheaply because they have lower wages.
The New Yorker
May 15, 2015
Fifty years after the repeal of Jim Crow, many African-Americans still live in segregated ghettos in the country’s metropolitan areas. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.
Fresh Air
May 15, 2015