It is true that after long being flat at around 17 million, the number of factory jobs in America started a steady decline around 2001, the same time China entered the World Trade Organization. This is the alleged “turning point” cited by commentators such as Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. But this is like saying the sun rose after the rooster crowed. U.S. factory jobs plunged even when the yuan soared vis-à-vis the dollar. There is simply no correlation between the long-term trend in factory jobs and movements in China’s currency.
Wall Street Journal
May 21, 2015
The Atlantic
May 21, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group influential with Democrats in Congress, said the United States-Japan trade deficit reached $78.3 billion in 2013, with currency manipulation being “the most important cause.” That gap, it estimates, displaced 896,600 jobs in the United States.
The New York Times
May 20, 2015
That said, just about every measure finds they are struggling mightily. The Economic Policy Institute has reported that inflation-adjusted wages for recent college graduates have fallen by 7.7 percent since 2000. Last year, the San Francisco Fed produced this graph showing wages for recent college grads essentially hitting a flight ceiling around 2008 while overall wages continued to climb, however slowly.
The Atlantic
May 20, 2015
Such narrow portrayals of Baltimore and its residents are only possible if we exclude decades of state and federal policy from our frame of analysis. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute wrote something I suggest reading in its entirety. But to quote: In Baltimore and elsewhere, the distressed condition of African American working- and lower-middle-class families is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s—and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.
American Prospect
May 20, 2015
Recently, the president claimed that critics who say that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “is bad for working families … don’t know what they are talking about.” Skeptics would respond, “Show me the money. Show me the jobs and wages you’re going to generate for working Americans. Explain how the TPP is going to be different from the lousy trade deals we’ve had since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law in 1993.” The White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report touting the benefits of the TPP in pulling down barriers to U.S. exports abroad, but the report fails to mention the most important barrier to U.S. export success: several major trade partners (including TPP partners) managing the value of their own currencies for competitive gain vis-à-vis the U.S. Yet the Obama administration has refused to even discuss the currency issue in the TPP negotiations.
Newsweek
May 19, 2015
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