June 21, 2018, Dean Baker

CEPR Co-Director Eileen Appelbaum took part in a recent panel discussion on the Future of Work. This is a Q&A prepared for the event. What are the most important takeaways from the new CWS data? In February 2005, 7.4 percent of workers were independent co

Lara MerlingThe Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 2018

That’s what New York Times readers were wondering when they saw Harvard Economics Professor Greg Mankiw’s column, “Why Aren’t Men Working?” The piece notes the falloff in labor force participation among prime-age men (ages 25 to 54) for the last 70 years and throws out a few possible explanations.

We’ll get to the explanations in a moment, but the biggest problem with explaining the drop in labor force participation among men as a problem with men is that since 2000, there has been a drop in labor force participation among prime-age women also.

In we take the May data, the employment to population ratio (EPOP) for prime-age women stood at 72.4 percent.[1] That is down modestly from a pre-recession peak of 72.8 percent, but the drop against the 2000 peak of 74.5 percent is more than two full percentage points. That is less of a fall than the drop in EPOPs among prime men since 2000 of 3.2 percentage points, but it is a large enough decline that it deserves some explanation. In fact, the drop looks even worse when we look by education and in more narrow age categories.   

In a paper last year that compared EPOPs in the first seven months of 2017 with 2000, Brian Dew found there were considerable sharper declines for less-educated women in the age groups from 35 to 44 and 45 to 54, than for men with the same levels of education. The EPOP for women between the ages of 35 and 44 with a high school degree or less fell by 9.7 percentage points. The corresponding drop for men in this age group was just 3.4 percentage points.

The EPOP for women with a high school degree or less between the ages of 45 and 54 fell by 6.7 percentage points. For men, the drop was 3.3 percentage points. Only with the youngest prime-age bracket, ages 25 to 34, did less educated men see a larger falloff in EPOPs than women, 8.2 percentage points for men compared to 6.9 percentage points for women.

Looking at these data, it is a bit hard to understand economists’ obsession with explaining the drop in EPOPs for men. It is also worth noting that there are also drops in EPOPs for many groupings of more educated workers.

For example, there was a drop of 0.9 percentage points in the EPOP for women between the ages of 35 and 44 with college degrees.  The drop in EPOPs among women with college degrees between the ages of 45 to 54 was 1.6 percentage points.

Every year, the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ report, released earlier this month, provokes a range of responses. This year’s report was no exception, even though it was very similar to last year’s report. For Social Security, an essential progra

Dean Baker
Truthout, June 18, 2018

Donald Trump's trade wars seem to lack any logic and are likely to end up badly for both the United States and our trading partners, but that is not a good reason for serious people to start making up numbers to bolster their arguments. That is the route the NYT took in its latest editorial attacking Trump's tariffs.

While the piece makes many valid points, it includes many assertions that can at best be called "truthful hyperbole." For example, the piece tells readers that Trump's steel tariffs "meant a 40 percent increase since January in the cost of steel for their customers who use it in their finished products, according to the US Chamber of Commerce."

It's not clear where the Chamber of Commerce came up with this number, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that the price of steel mill products are up 10.4 percent over the last year. BLS is likely a more reliable source on this issue than the Chamber of Commerce which has been known to produce studies showing massive job loss from policies like minimum wage hikes or mandated family leave.

The piece also warns us about the impact of aluminum tariffs on domestic beer producers.

"Brewers are forecasting that they’ll pay $347.7 million more for aluminum cans. That has small craft-beer makers such as Melvin Brewing in Alpine, Wyo., which packages 75 percent of its products in cans, fretting about impending prices rises and the risks of passing them along to consumers."

It would have been useful to put this $347.7 million figure in context. Beer sales in the U.S. were over $34 billion in 2016, which means that the increased cost of aluminum is equal to roughly 1.0 percent of what the public spends on beer. We are supposed to believe that people paying $10 a six-pack for their craft beer, will get seriously bent out of shape if the six-pack now costs $10.10? (I actually would have thought most craft-beer is sold in bottles, but whatever.)

Alan BarberFortune, June 15, 2018

Dean Baker
Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2018