Expanding access to college education is a key mechanism for building a strong middle class. The college wage premium—the percent increase that a college graduate earns compared to a similar worker without a college degree—is approximately 45 percent, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Furthermore, the overall middle class has shrunk as the supply of highly skilled workers hasn’t kept up with the demand for those skills. Approximately one-third of the rise in income inequality since the late 1970s is due to the rising college premium.
Center for American Progress
April 24, 2013
If you use visa demand as a kind of proxy for labor demand, it’s not hard to grasp how businesses view the problem. There just aren’t enough visas to hire all the foreign workers employers want. But some labor economists see nothing particularly special about foreign workers, aside from their cost, that should recommend them more highly compared to their American counterparts.
“The positions these workers fill are entry-level positions,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration lawyer at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “They’re cogs in a machine.”
National Journal
April 17, 2013
Yet critics of the H1B program say the visas put many foreign workers at a deep disadvantage. They tend to get paid less and cannot easily leave the companies that brought them to the United States unless they obtain green cards. In addition to proposed higher wages, the Senate plan seeks to protect U.S. workers by prohibiting U.S. companies from displacing Americans with foreign employees.
The Washington Post
April 17, 2013
Is it conclusive? One response has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios. Josh Bivens and John Irons made this case at the Economic Policy Institute. But this assumes that the data is correct. From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren’t releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right – it couldn’t be done.
Salon
April 17, 2013
Reinhart and Rogoff have always been careful to note that just because high-debt countries have tended to grow more slowly than low debt countries, it doesn’t mean that high-debt definitively caused slow growth. Critics have a pointed out, quite justifiably, that the causation could be the other way around — that slow growth causes debt
Time
April 17, 2013
I spoke to Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington who co-wrote one of the first critiques of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper in 2010. He said he wasn’t surprised by the UMass result: “There’s never a sound theoretical reason why there should be a threshold” at which debt suddenly becomes a serious problem—90 percent in the Reinhart-Rogoff paper.
Bivens also said it’s quite possible that rather than debt causing slow growth, in many cases it’s the other way around: Countries that are growing slowly tend to rack up lots of government debt. He said Reinhart and Rogoff in some of their nonacademic writings have ignored that possibility and asserted—without justification—that high debt does indeed harm growth.
Bloomberg
April 17, 2013
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute outlines the discouraging news about 16.2 percent unemployment for Americans younger than 25, along with low wages and underemployment for both high school and college students in the class of 2013.
“Young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during downturns,” the report notes. “The Great Recession and its aftermath has been the longest, most severe period of economic weakness this country has experienced in more than seven decades.”
Education Week
April 17, 2013
Only 88,000 new jobs were produced last month, and the only reason the unemployment rate ticked down to a still-alarming 7.6 percent is because so many people left the work force altogether, which sent the labor force participation rate down to 63.3 percent, the lowest point since 1979. If we were to include in the calculations those who have given up looking for work, the unemployment rate would actually be 9.8 percent.
The Huffington Post
April 17, 2013
Before I am deluged with angry comments, let me recognize that in recent years the one-for-one relationship between productivity and wages, especially median wages, has broken down. But that’s a subject for another day. (For those interested, Lawrence Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, has an informative survey article about it.)
The New Yorker
April 17, 2013
Challenges to success stories: Chicago, New York, Washington – all three have been described as showing success under hard-charging leaders demanding better results. But leaders of an organization called a Broader, Bolder Approach to Education released test data and other information last week that challenged that story line, saying the rhetoric didn’t match the reality and that, in some ways, all three had accomplished little, or even done worse, than other cities. The group, associated with the union-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said places showing more success, including Cincinnati and Charlotte, N.C., emphasize “holistic” approaches to children and their needs, and not test-oriented approaches.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
April 15, 2013