According to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, entry-level, college-educated men age 23-29 earned an average $21.68 an hour in 2011, a 7.6% decline from 2000. For women, the corresponding figure fell 6%, to $18.80. Men and women both now earn just a bit more than they did in 1989, when measured in 2011 dollars.
Wall Street Journal
May 7, 2012
Those with only some college, or with high school degrees or less, are the worst off. But “every way you cut it — by race or gender, with or without a college degree — young people are just not getting the job opportunities they need, and it will have a lasting impact on their careers,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies the labor market at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
The New York Times
May 7, 2012
Other analysts, citing the distortions caused by the warm winter weather, said they expected job growth to rise again to 175,000 to 200,000 in the coming months — a pickup from the average job growth of 153,000 a month last year. But even that wouldn’t be anything to write home about, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, who worries about the fresh crop of college graduates who will soon be entering the job market.
“Their prospects are better than for the class of 2011, but not by much,” she said. “It’s still very grim.”
Los Angeles Times
May 7, 2012
On Wednesday, Paul Krugman swung through town to promote his new book, “End This Depression Now!” I caught up with him at the Economic Policy Institute to talk about whether Ben Bernanke could actually end this depression, the prospect that Mitt Romney could be a closet Keynesian, and what we’ll be worrying about in 10 years. A lightly edited transcript follows.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2012
“The fact that the labor force participation rate continues to slide is largely due to the fact that, despite the labor market slowly getting stronger, it is still a very difficult environment for job seekers,” says economist Heidi Shierholz with the Economic Policy Institute. She says that many people who stopped looking for work won’t re-enter the labor force until job prospects improve.
AARP Blog
May 7, 2012
The first finds that rising income inequality in the United States means that the benefits of better productivity are accruing mainly to the very wealthy. The EPI offers this startling nugget of data as basic food for thought: U.S. productivity grew 80.4 percent from 1973 to 2011, while average hourly compensation rose just 39.2 percent in the same period, and median compensation, which excludes outliers, gained a paltry 10.7 percent.
Reuters
May 7, 2012
The three-month average of job growth has been 176,000 jobs per month, the Economic Policy Institute pointed out. While that’s more than enough to keep unemployment from rising, it’s still not good enough, given the deep hole the job market is still in.
“The labor market continues to very slowly improve,” the EPI wrote in a press release, “but it is a far cry from the 300,000 or 400,000 jobs we would need per month to get back to full employment in a reasonable timeframe.”
The Huffington Post
May 7, 2012
As the economy recovers, global competition and skill-biased technological change will drive the skill requirements of good jobs even higher. And if the level of educational attainment does not keep pace (a disturbing trend since the late 1970s), the median wage will continue to decline; wage inequality, a major source of income inequality, will widen further; and the structural unemployment rate may well increase.
Economic Policy Institute
The New York Times
May 7, 2012
But some of it is just an economy that remains weak. On Wednesday, at an event at the Economic Policy Institute, Paul Krugman explained why, in his new book, he calls the current moment “a depression. ” “A recession,” Krugman said, “is when the economy is going down. A depression is when it stays down for a long period of time. Remember that the Great Depression included two separate recessions and recoveries.”
The Washington Post
May 7, 2012
That imbalance hinders the U.S. economic recovery by stifling job creation. Between 2001 — when the People’s Republic entered the World Trade Organization — and 2011, America’s trade deficit with China has cost the U.S. 2.8 million jobs, the Economic Policy Institute concluded in a recent report. That includes nearly 2 million manufacturing jobs eliminated or displaced over that period, according to the Washington think tank.
CBS News
May 7, 2012