A roundup of the labor market research reports released this week and last week.

Center for American Progress

Workers and Their Health Care Plans: The Impact of New Health Insurance Exchanges and Medicaid Expansion on Employer-Sponsored Health Care Plans
Alan Reuther

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Letting Payroll Tax Cut Expire Would Shrink Worker Paychecks and Damage Weak Economy
Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith

Note: Requires latest version of Flash to play. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in the second quarter of 2011 the United States produced goods and services at a $15 trillion annual rate (Table 1.1.5). The Congressional

Dean Baker and Jagdish Bhagwati
CNN Money, September 16, 2011

Dean Baker
The New Republic, September 15, 2011

September 15, 2011

September 15, 2011 (Prices Byte)

In a news story in the Financial Times, historian Alice O'Connor—whose Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century History is must-read for any serious student of anti-povery policy—says "we are entering territory w

I have been dismissive of the claim that the financial crisis has condemned the country to 8-10 years of high unemployment and low growth. This claim is derived from the book by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, "This Time is Different."

Reinhart and Rogoff perform a valuable exercise in recounting the history of financial crises over the last six centuries. They note that these crises have been followed by a long period of adjustment in which economies are subject to weak growth and high unemployment. Based on this history, they and others have argued that the United States is condemned to a prolonged period of stagnation. The moral of the story is to stop your whining and live with it.

I find this to be a case of incredibly bad induction. If we had looked at the probability that newborns would live to age five, examining random 20-year intervals in different countries over the last six centuries, we would find that in most of these intervals, most newborns do not live to age five. If we therefore concluded that we should expect children born today to die before the age of five, we would be utterly crazy. The advances in health care, nutrition and sanitation over this period make it possible for the vast majority of children almost everywhere to survive to adulthood.

Mark WeisbrotFolha de São Paulo (Brasil), 14 de setembro, 2011Em Inglês