Media clips
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While the Great Recession officially ended six years ago, the labor market has not yet fully recovered, and that’s left many college graduates struggling to find jobs that match their skills and education level. “The depth of the recession and the slow pace of recovery since it ended means that seven classes of students have now graduated into a weak labor market and have had to compete with more experienced workers for a limited and slowly growing pool of job opportunities,” wrote researchers at the Economic Policy Institute in a recent paper.
CNBC June 22, 2015 -
In its new report, Inequalities at the Starting Gate, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found that race-based gaps in skills such as reading, math, eagerness to learn, persistence, and focus shrink significantly when socioeconomic status is taken into account. About 46 percent of black children live in poverty, the study noted. Sixty-three percent of Hispanic ELLs live in poverty. Emma García, an economist at EPI and the author of the report, said that there is an economic imperative to addressing these academic and non-cognitive skills gaps. “Not doing anything is going to be more costly than doing something,” she said. “We are compromising so much human capital by not making sure children are ready to learn and can develop fully when they go to school.” The report’s title is a deliberate allusion to a 2002 report, also published by the Economic Policy Institute, called Inequality at the Starting Gate. That study drew on the experiences of children who started school in 1998.
Education Week June 19, 2015 -
One report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the companies are abusing the H1-B visa program to help U.S. companies cut labor costs. Brookings, however, found that H1-B workers make more than their American counterparts.
The Atlantic June 19, 2015 -
Average CEO pay at the 350 largest U.S. companies by revenue surged 937 percent from 1978 to 2013, while the compensation of non-supervisory employees rose 10.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a research group that advocates for workers. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has returned more than 5,000 percent over the same time period, with dividends reinvested.
Bloomberg June 19, 2015 -
Despite numerous glowing depictions of the American Dream in movies and books, upward mobility is much more uncommon in the United States than you might think. In fact, there’s considerably more mobility in almost all other developed economies, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute.
Orange County Register June 19, 2015 -
A number of progressives dispute the assertion that automation is the prime culprit. In a 2013 report, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit organization in Washington, contends that between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs disappeared because of the ballooning trade deficit with China.
Columbus Dispatch June 19, 2015 -
From my brief observation, these are really sweet kids. But many face special burdens: fractured families; parents who don’t speak English and are sometime illiterate in Spanish; parents with crazy work schedules. There’s a larger issue, as a recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute warned: “Lower-social-class parents engage in fewer educationally supportive activities with young children, such as reading aloud or playing cognitively stimulating games.”
The Washington Post June 18, 2015 -
In fact, so many cities and states have boosted their minimum legal wage above federal government’s $7.25 an hour that at least 60 percent of the country’s workforce now lives in a place in which the minimum wage sits well above that national requirement, according to David Cooper, an economic analyst with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post June 18, 2015 -
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that between five million and 10 million workers could become newly eligible for overtime pay, depending upon the threshold increase and other rule changes. EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey forecast that the new rule would also create “several hundreds of thousands of jobs” in the year after it is implemented due to employers hiring new workers rather than paying overtime to existing employees.
Wall Street Journal June 18, 2015 -
These economists, along with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign, are part of a growing movement pushing for monetary policy that prioritizes full employment, and the wage growth that comes with it, rather than concerns about price inflation. “I think 2015 is too soon at the current economic pace” for a rate increase, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute. “There is strange eagerness to do it sooner rather than later, but the data just refuses to cooperate.”
Bivens noted that the same Fed projections that appear to show a consensus for raising rates in 2015 forecast slightly higher unemployment and slightly lower gross domestic product growth than previous estimates. Bivens said he wants the Fed to measure full employment on the basis of concrete wage growth, because wage growth accelerates when unemployment gets low enough that employers compete for workers. The Fed has a firm 2 percent inflation target, Bivens observed, but the criteria it uses to measure full employment are “not very firm.” Bivens and Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said they would like the Fed to tie a rate increase to annual wage growth of 3.5 percent, before inflation. Wages are currently 2.3 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
The Huffington Post June 18, 2015