“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
Other research backs up that disparity. Algernon Austin, director of the race, ethnicity and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, last year analyzed 2009 data on teens who were not attending school.
He found that 16- to 19- year-olds from poor families, whose income was below the poverty line, were less likely to be working than teens whose families had more money. That was true regardless of race or ethnicity.
“In terms of need, it is backwards,” he said.
MSNBC
May 7, 2012
The top CEO compensation adds to this picture. Lawrence Mishel and Natalie Sabadish at the Economic Policy Institute show us in detail what’s happened:
Though lower than in other years in the last decade, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in 2011 of more than 200-to-1 is far above the ratios prevailing in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and mid-1990s. This illustrates that CEOs have fared far better than the typical worker, the stock market, or the U.S. economy over the last several decades. That begs the question: is there any gauge against which to measure CEO pay that hasn’t been surpassed?
Daily Kos
May 7, 2012
Income inequality has vexed many economists, especially with the growing disparity in wages. Chief executives of the biggest public companies now make 231 times more than typical workers, according to a study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“CEOs have fared far better than the typical worker, the stock market and the U.S. economy as a whole since the late-1970s,” said Lawrence Mishel, the institute’s president, in the report. “Compensation growth for executives and for top-tier financial-sector workers has fueled the enormous growth of incomes at the top.”
MSNBC
May 3, 2012
“There is not enough demand,” Krugman said during an appearance at the Economic Policy Institute, where he gave a talk to promote his new book, End This Depression Now. “We focused a lot – too much – on the financial sector’s problems. Yet that is long since gone and we still don’t have a steady recovery. That tells us the crisis was far more about household debt.”
Fiscal Times
May 3, 2012