“I don’t think that kind of job creation is likely to happen anytime soon, but I’m all for setting ambitious benchmarks to get the unemployment rate down,” said Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington group that says it focuses on the economic condition of low- and middle-class Americans.
“To me, the bigger issue is who has policies that are more likely to do that, and I don’t think Romney has identified any,” Bivens said. “Nobody is putting policies on the table right now that would lead us to a rapid recovery.”
Bloomberg
May 11, 2012
How does offshoring relate to America’s growing trade deficit? Both stifle job-creation, which in turn is affected by U.S. trade policy. Since 2001, for example, the U.S. trade gap with China has resulted in a loss of 2.8 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank. More broadly, a widening deficit can act as a drag on the economy by muting the job-creating effects of consumer spending. Why? Because when people hit their local mall or big-box retailer, what they buy is mostly made abroad.
CBS News
May 11, 2012
In a new paper the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, calculates that chief executives at America’s 350 biggest companies were paid 231 times as much as the average private-sector worker in 2011
The Economist
May 9, 2012
The voluntary quits rate is an indicator of how willing and able workers are to leave one job for another. During an economic downturn, far fewer people quit because finding another position is tougher. In March, quits rose slightly. The number of quits was 2.1 million in March 2012, up from 1.8 million at the end of the recession in June 2009.
Quits increased in March by 75,000. They are up about 8.5 percent over March 2011 and registering the highest level since 2008. But voluntary quits are still 25.6 percent below their 2007 average.
As Heidi Shiefholz at the Economic Policy Institute points outs, however, the odds are still stacked against workers:
[T]he “job seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—declined moderately to 3.4-to-1.
Daily Kos
May 9, 2012
While the number of jobs added to the economy was disappointing and a drop from recent months economists says given seasonal factors, the average job growth of the last three months — 176,000 jobs — is probably a better measure of the jobs market trend.
“This trend is well above the roughly 100,000 jobs per month we need to keep the unemployment rate stable, so the labor market continues to very slowly improve, 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, “said the Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think thank.
Philadelphia Tribune
May 9, 2012
A fairer tax would not only be, well… fairer and simpler, but also could generate jobs, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. In “A Perfect Match: Coupling tax fairness with job creation for a stronger economy,” senior policy analyst Ethan Pollack, states, “Congress could simply use tax fairness reforms to pay for job creation policies.”
Business Finance
May 9, 2012
“The improvement in the unemployment rate we saw in April was entirely due to people dropping out of — or not entering — the labor force because of weak job prospects,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2012
“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute who has done several studies on interns. “But now I’ve even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools.”
Matt Gioe had little luck breaking into the music and entertainment industry after graduating with a philosophy degree from Bucknell last year. To get hands-on experience, he took an unpaid position with a Manhattan talent agency that booked musical acts. He said he answered phones and looked up venues. Although he was sometimes told to make bookings, he said he received virtually no guidance on how to strike a deal or how much to charge. But the boss did sometimes ask him to run errands like buying groceries.
“It was basically three wasted months,” he said.
Mr. Eisenbrey said many companies were taking advantage of the weak labor market to use unpaid interns to handle chores like photocopying or running errands once done by regular employees, which can raise sticky legal questions.
The New York Times
May 7, 2012
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
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
The average U.S. chief executive earned more than $11 million last year in salary, stock options and other compensation, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about 231 times more, on average, than workers.
That ratio has shrunk a bit since the height of the dot.com bubble, when a ballooning stock market inflated CEO compensation to 411 times that of working stiffs.
Los Angeles Times
May 3, 2012
By now the whole wonky set is familiar with the stylized fact that for thirty years after World War II, productivity gains fed into higher earnings for the media worker. In the past thirty years, that hasn’t been the case. But people rarely dive deep into the question of where the “missing” gains went. A great report that Larry Mishel wrote for the Economic Policy Institute last week does the work and the answer is pretty interesting. Rather than a single cause, there are three separate sources of divergence. One is structural shift in which labor claims a smaller share of national economic output and capital claims a larger share. A second is a shift within the labor share toward greater inequality such that the mean wage rises faster than the median wage. And a third is a very interesting phenomenon that has to do with the existence of different inflation indexes.
Slate
May 2, 2012
The New York Times
May 2, 2012
The 99 percent are extremely productive workers, but aren’t compensated for their productivity. While productivity has been on the rise among workers, average wage and compensation has remained nearly flat. That means while workers are producing more, they’re being compensated the same. This chart from the Economic Policy Institute details the change:
Think Progress
May 2, 2012
Josh Bivens says that the United Kingdom’s double-dip recession is proof austerity doesn’t work.
The New York Times
May 1, 2012
Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?
The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.
The New York Times
April 30, 2012
“The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010,” the site notes. “Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.” In 2005, the average U.S. CEO made 262 times as much as the average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Protesters with the “99 Percent” movement this week disrupted the shareholder meeting of another U.S corporate giant, General Electric, with chants of “pay your fair share.” That meeting was held at the Renaissance Center in Detroit – the same building that’s home to GM’s headquarters. Akerson should understand that it might not take much for him and his company to get similar treatment.
The Fiscal Times
April 30, 2012