The Economic Policy Institute

EPI in the news

• Top 10 education policy wishes

  Here are the top 10 items on an education wish list for the holiday season and the new year. It was written by Greg Kaufmann, who reports on poverty for the Nation, and Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.

  The Washington Post | December 20, 2012
• Weak Social Networks Contribute to Black Joblessness

  Many see the wisdom of leveraging networks, but job hopefuls and employed workers alike often talk about social roadblocks. One is just numbers: Few blacks are in top positions empowered to make hiring decisions, notes Algernon Austin, director of the race, ethnicity, and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.

  Studies have suggested that social and professional networks, much like residential neighborhoods, are largely segregated, further limiting a black person’s access to those who are in a position to hire. “We don’t have as many people who have the opportunities to be in a position where they can both offer jobs to others or recommend places where others can work,” Williams says.

  Austin projects the jobless rate for blacks will exceed 10 percent well through 2015, continuing a 50-year trend he wrote about for BET.com. In his commentary, he draws a connection among weak school performance, joblessness, higher crime rates, and poverty.

  National Journal | December 20, 2012
• Children of working poor caught in pinch of recession: Many sacrifice school for wages

  Meanwhile, the numbers of working poor are on the rise, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. Workers earning less than $11 an hour — the equivalent of about $23,000 a year for those working full time — rose to 28 percent of the nation’s workforce last year, up from 23 percent in 2006, he said.

  “The impact on educational achievement is going to be one of the biggest scars left from the recession,” Mishel said. “From everything we know, high persistent unemployment will do more damage to the educational prospects of low-income students than all the positive outcomes from educational reforms that people talk about.”

  The Boston Globe | December 20, 2012
• Obama’s base pushes back on plan to cut Social Security

  The proposed change to Social Security is particularly controversial in progressive policy circles. Last month, a group of 300 economists and policy experts—including former Clinton administration Treasury official Brad DeLong, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Economic Policy Institute president Lawrence Mishel—signed a statement opposing the specific Social security cut that the White House is proposing, saying there’s “no empirical basis” for the change, and that it “could exacerbate, rather than correct, an existing problem.”

  MSNBC | December 20, 2012
• Black jobless rate is twice that of whites

  Meanwhile, analysts note, efforts aimed at fostering equality are waning. “There are really few public-policy resources to address the problem head-on,” said Algernon Austin, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute. “Support for affirmative action has gone from tepid to very weak.”

  Austin and other researchers said a federal direct-jobs program could address the disparity, but support for such large-scale initiatives is hard to find in the current political environment.

  The Washington Post | December 20, 2012
• Wanting Work, but Stuck in Part-Time Purgatory

  She may still be in for a tough slog. Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the basic issue plaguing involuntary part-time workers like Gray is the same one plaguing the overall labor market: There’s just not enough demand to compel employers to add to their labor costs substantially.

  Shierholz said she expects involuntary part-time workers to gradually see improvements but “it is a going to take a long time.”

  “I think by far the dominant reason that we aren’t seeing employment in both dimensions — full (time) people or ramping up hours for workers that already are there — is just a demand problem,” she said.

  CNBC | December 14, 2012
• A Giant Statistical Round-Up of the Income Inequality Crisis in 16 Charts

  “There is a huge amount of focus on progressive taxes in our policy world but progressive taxes are not much of a solution to this,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “We need to get unemployment down rapidly. We need to greatly change our labor standards. We need to raise the minimum wage.”

  He’s right: The middle class crisis — and its resulting income inequality — is the most important economic story of our time. There are a million ways to tell it, and here’s another: an annotated slide show, culled from the amazing 2012 edition of the State of Working America from EPI.

  The Atlantic | December 14, 2012

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