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That is in fact what his NYT column said, even though he writes it as though the opposite is the case. The basic argument is that the core Democratic constituency is in places like Silicon Valley and other tech clusters which Edsall claims are thriving in the global economy based on free trade. By contrast, he argues that Democratic populists like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders are trying to rally those left behind with a protectionist agenda. Edsall warns that this would run both counter to the interests of the key Democratic constituencies and threaten the country’s economic future.
That is great as propaganda for the status quo, but flunks as serious analysis. The prosperity of the country’s Silicon Valleys depends front and center on patent and copyright protections. These forms of protectionism have been made longer and stronger over the past four decades as a matter of conscious policy. The result has been an ever sharper divergence between the protected prices and free market prices. This is seen most dramatically in the case of prescription drugs where the ratio of the protected price to the free market price is often more than 100 to 1. This is equivalent to a tariff of more than 10,000 percent for folks who care about numbers. (Yes, we have alternatives to patent monopolies for financing research.)
We have also imposed these protections on other countries in trade deals, often at the expense of manufacturing workers. After all, getting stronger protections of drugs and software, while getting cheaper clothes and steel, is a win-win for the Silicon Valley types.
Rigging the market to make the items produced in the country’s Silicon Valleys expensive, while pushing down the price of the manufactured goods produced in the rest of the country might be good for the Silicon Valley types, it is not free trade. It is very generous for people like Thomas Edsall to provide cover for such class biased policies, but the rest of us might prefer to focus on reality.
Yes, this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free download available here).
That is in fact what his NYT column said, even though he writes it as though the opposite is the case. The basic argument is that the core Democratic constituency is in places like Silicon Valley and other tech clusters which Edsall claims are thriving in the global economy based on free trade. By contrast, he argues that Democratic populists like Keith Ellison and Bernie Sanders are trying to rally those left behind with a protectionist agenda. Edsall warns that this would run both counter to the interests of the key Democratic constituencies and threaten the country’s economic future.
That is great as propaganda for the status quo, but flunks as serious analysis. The prosperity of the country’s Silicon Valleys depends front and center on patent and copyright protections. These forms of protectionism have been made longer and stronger over the past four decades as a matter of conscious policy. The result has been an ever sharper divergence between the protected prices and free market prices. This is seen most dramatically in the case of prescription drugs where the ratio of the protected price to the free market price is often more than 100 to 1. This is equivalent to a tariff of more than 10,000 percent for folks who care about numbers. (Yes, we have alternatives to patent monopolies for financing research.)
We have also imposed these protections on other countries in trade deals, often at the expense of manufacturing workers. After all, getting stronger protections of drugs and software, while getting cheaper clothes and steel, is a win-win for the Silicon Valley types.
Rigging the market to make the items produced in the country’s Silicon Valleys expensive, while pushing down the price of the manufactured goods produced in the rest of the country might be good for the Silicon Valley types, it is not free trade. It is very generous for people like Thomas Edsall to provide cover for such class biased policies, but the rest of us might prefer to focus on reality.
Yes, this is the main theme of Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (free download available here).
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There seems to be a great effort to convince people that the displacement due to the trade deficit over the last fifteen years didn’t really happen. The NYT contributed to this effort with a piece telling readers that over the long-run job loss has been primarily due to automation not trade.
While the impact of automation over a long enough period of time certainly swamps the impact of trade, over the last 20 years there is little doubt that the impact of the exploding trade deficit has had more of an impact on employment. To make this one as simple as possible, we currently have a trade deficit of roughly $460 billion (@ 2.6 percent of GDP). Suppose we had balanced trade instead, making up this gap with increased manufacturing output.
Does the NYT want to tell us that we could increase our output of manufactured goods by $460 billion, or just under 30 percent, without employing more workers in manufacturing? That would be pretty impressive. We currently employ more than 12 million workers in manufacturing, if moving to balanced trade increase employment by just 15 percent we would be talking about 1.8 million jobs. That is not trivial.
But this is not the only part of the story that is strange. We are getting hyped up fears over automation even at a time when productivity growth (i.e. automation) has slowed to a crawl, averaging just 1.0 percent annually over the last decade. The NYT tells readers:
“Over time, automation has generally had a happy ending: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts are beginning to worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers — particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor — have not recovered.”
Hmmm, this time could be different? How so? The average hourly wage of men with just a high school degree was 13 percent less in 2000 than in 1973. For workers with some college it was down by more than 2.0 percent. In fact, stagnating wages for men without college degrees is not something new and different, it has been going on for more than forty years. Hasn’t this news gotten to the NYT yet?
There seems to be a great effort to convince people that the displacement due to the trade deficit over the last fifteen years didn’t really happen. The NYT contributed to this effort with a piece telling readers that over the long-run job loss has been primarily due to automation not trade.
While the impact of automation over a long enough period of time certainly swamps the impact of trade, over the last 20 years there is little doubt that the impact of the exploding trade deficit has had more of an impact on employment. To make this one as simple as possible, we currently have a trade deficit of roughly $460 billion (@ 2.6 percent of GDP). Suppose we had balanced trade instead, making up this gap with increased manufacturing output.
Does the NYT want to tell us that we could increase our output of manufactured goods by $460 billion, or just under 30 percent, without employing more workers in manufacturing? That would be pretty impressive. We currently employ more than 12 million workers in manufacturing, if moving to balanced trade increase employment by just 15 percent we would be talking about 1.8 million jobs. That is not trivial.
But this is not the only part of the story that is strange. We are getting hyped up fears over automation even at a time when productivity growth (i.e. automation) has slowed to a crawl, averaging just 1.0 percent annually over the last decade. The NYT tells readers:
“Over time, automation has generally had a happy ending: As it has displaced jobs, it has created new ones. But some experts are beginning to worry that this time could be different. Even as the economy has improved, jobs and wages for a large segment of workers — particularly men without college degrees doing manual labor — have not recovered.”
Hmmm, this time could be different? How so? The average hourly wage of men with just a high school degree was 13 percent less in 2000 than in 1973. For workers with some college it was down by more than 2.0 percent. In fact, stagnating wages for men without college degrees is not something new and different, it has been going on for more than forty years. Hasn’t this news gotten to the NYT yet?
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The NYT had an interesting piece discussing the National Institutes of Health collaboration with private companies in the development of new cancer drugs. As the piece points out, this collaboration has proven very profitable for the drug companies, but leads to drugs that are very expensive because the drug companies are allowed to have patent monopolies, with no restriction on the price they charge.
It also suggests an alternative path. It shows, contrary to conventional wisdom in right-wing circles, everything the government funds is not worthless garbage. If the tables were turned, and all the funding came from the government (rather than relying on government-imposed patent monopolies), then the new drugs could be sold at generic prices since everyone already would have been paid for their research.
In many cases, the generic price would be less than one percent of the patent protected price. New cancer drugs that might sell for $100,000 for a year’s treatment, might sell for hundreds of dollars. Policy types who don’t work for the pharmaceutical industry should be looking into more efficient alternatives for financing drug research.
The NYT had an interesting piece discussing the National Institutes of Health collaboration with private companies in the development of new cancer drugs. As the piece points out, this collaboration has proven very profitable for the drug companies, but leads to drugs that are very expensive because the drug companies are allowed to have patent monopolies, with no restriction on the price they charge.
It also suggests an alternative path. It shows, contrary to conventional wisdom in right-wing circles, everything the government funds is not worthless garbage. If the tables were turned, and all the funding came from the government (rather than relying on government-imposed patent monopolies), then the new drugs could be sold at generic prices since everyone already would have been paid for their research.
In many cases, the generic price would be less than one percent of the patent protected price. New cancer drugs that might sell for $100,000 for a year’s treatment, might sell for hundreds of dollars. Policy types who don’t work for the pharmaceutical industry should be looking into more efficient alternatives for financing drug research.
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The Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates last week and seem poised to do so again in the not distant future. The rationale is that the economy is now near or at full employment and that if job growth continues at its recent pace it will lead to a harmful acceleration in the inflation rate.
We have numerous pieces raising serious questions about whether the labor market is really at full employment, noting for example the sharp drop in employment rates (for all groups) from pre-recession levels and the high rate of involuntary part-time employment. But the story of accelerating inflation is also not right.
This is particularly important, since John Williams, the president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, cited accelerating inflation as a reason to support last week’s rate hike, and possibly future rate hikes, in an interview in the New York Times this morning. Williams has been a moderate on inflation, so there are many members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee who are more anxious to raise rates than him.
A close look at the data does not provide much evidence of accelerating inflation. The core PCE deflator, the Fed’s main measure of inflation, has risen 1.7 percent over the last year, which is still under the 2.0 percent target. This target is an average, which means that the Fed should be prepared to allow the inflation rate to rise somewhat above 2.0 percent, with the idea that inflation will drop in the next recession.
Anyhow, the 1.7 percent rate is slightly higher than a low of 1.3 percent reached in the third quarter of 2015, but it is exactly the same as the rate we saw in the third quarter of 2014. In other words, there has been zero acceleration in the rate of inflation over the last two years.
Furthermore, even this modest acceleration has been entirely due to the more rapid increase in rent over the last two years. The inflation rate in the core consumer price index, stripped of its shelter component, actually has been falling slightly over the last year. It now stands at 1.1 percent over the last year.
Core CPI, Minus Shelter
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It is reasonable to pull shelter out of the CPI because rents do not follow the same dynamic as most goods and services. In fact, higher interest rates, by reducing construction, are likely to increase the pace of increase in rents rather than reduce them.
This issue is hugely important, since if the Fed prevents the labor market from tightening further, it will be preventing millions of people from getting jobs. These people are disproportionately African American and Hispanic and also less-educated workers. The decision to tighten will also lessen the bargaining power of a much larger group of workers, making it more difficult for them to get pay increases.
The weak labor market of the Great Recession resulted in a large redistribution from wages to profits. The tightening of the labor market in the last two years has reversed part of this shift. If the Fed raises interest rates enough to prevent further tightening, then it will be locking in place this redistribution to profits. That would be bad news for tens of millions of workers, especially if the decision was based on a misreading of inflation data.
The Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates last week and seem poised to do so again in the not distant future. The rationale is that the economy is now near or at full employment and that if job growth continues at its recent pace it will lead to a harmful acceleration in the inflation rate.
We have numerous pieces raising serious questions about whether the labor market is really at full employment, noting for example the sharp drop in employment rates (for all groups) from pre-recession levels and the high rate of involuntary part-time employment. But the story of accelerating inflation is also not right.
This is particularly important, since John Williams, the president of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, cited accelerating inflation as a reason to support last week’s rate hike, and possibly future rate hikes, in an interview in the New York Times this morning. Williams has been a moderate on inflation, so there are many members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee who are more anxious to raise rates than him.
A close look at the data does not provide much evidence of accelerating inflation. The core PCE deflator, the Fed’s main measure of inflation, has risen 1.7 percent over the last year, which is still under the 2.0 percent target. This target is an average, which means that the Fed should be prepared to allow the inflation rate to rise somewhat above 2.0 percent, with the idea that inflation will drop in the next recession.
Anyhow, the 1.7 percent rate is slightly higher than a low of 1.3 percent reached in the third quarter of 2015, but it is exactly the same as the rate we saw in the third quarter of 2014. In other words, there has been zero acceleration in the rate of inflation over the last two years.
Furthermore, even this modest acceleration has been entirely due to the more rapid increase in rent over the last two years. The inflation rate in the core consumer price index, stripped of its shelter component, actually has been falling slightly over the last year. It now stands at 1.1 percent over the last year.
Core CPI, Minus Shelter
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It is reasonable to pull shelter out of the CPI because rents do not follow the same dynamic as most goods and services. In fact, higher interest rates, by reducing construction, are likely to increase the pace of increase in rents rather than reduce them.
This issue is hugely important, since if the Fed prevents the labor market from tightening further, it will be preventing millions of people from getting jobs. These people are disproportionately African American and Hispanic and also less-educated workers. The decision to tighten will also lessen the bargaining power of a much larger group of workers, making it more difficult for them to get pay increases.
The weak labor market of the Great Recession resulted in a large redistribution from wages to profits. The tightening of the labor market in the last two years has reversed part of this shift. If the Fed raises interest rates enough to prevent further tightening, then it will be locking in place this redistribution to profits. That would be bad news for tens of millions of workers, especially if the decision was based on a misreading of inflation data.
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It really is hard to kill a false story on the state of the economy. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) produced a report which purported to show that minorities were getting all the new jobs created by the economy and that whites were actually losing jobs. This report was made the central theme in a column by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times on Wednesday.
I pointed out that this conclusion was driven by demographics. While the number of prime age (ages 25–54) people had increased for the other demographic groups included in the analysis, it had fallen sharply for whites. This meant that the decline in employment for whites did not come from worsening labor market conditions, but rather whites retiring as they reached their sixties.
ECRI then did new analysis that looked at employment-to-population ratios (EPOPs) by age and compared November 2007 to November 2016. This showed a decline of 2.0 percentage points in the EPOP for prime age whites, while showing a modest 0.3 percentage point rise for African Americans. Porter highlighted this in a new piece on Friday. Porter also noted that ECRI find a rise in African American employment rates for the 55 to 64 age group, in contrast to a modest decline for whites in this age group.
The problem with this comparison is that the black employment data is extremely erratic so comparing single months of data can give a misleading picture. This turns out to be the case here.
As I noted, if we compare the first 11 months of 2016 with the first 11 months of 2007, the EPOP for prime age African Americans fell by 1.7 percentage points, almost the same as the 2.0 percentage point drop for whites. The decline in the EPOP for African Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 was actually slightly larger than the decline for whites in this age group.
Unfortunately, the Washington Post chose to highlight the response of ECRI to the initial complaints without checking with anyone familiar with the data. This leaves the mistaken impression that whites have fared worse than other demographic groups since the collapse of the housing bubble.
The take away is that workers, and especially workers without college degrees, have fared poorly in recent years. This gives them ample grounds for complaining about the course of the economy. However, white workers have not fared notably worse than non-whites.
It really is hard to kill a false story on the state of the economy. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) produced a report which purported to show that minorities were getting all the new jobs created by the economy and that whites were actually losing jobs. This report was made the central theme in a column by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times on Wednesday.
I pointed out that this conclusion was driven by demographics. While the number of prime age (ages 25–54) people had increased for the other demographic groups included in the analysis, it had fallen sharply for whites. This meant that the decline in employment for whites did not come from worsening labor market conditions, but rather whites retiring as they reached their sixties.
ECRI then did new analysis that looked at employment-to-population ratios (EPOPs) by age and compared November 2007 to November 2016. This showed a decline of 2.0 percentage points in the EPOP for prime age whites, while showing a modest 0.3 percentage point rise for African Americans. Porter highlighted this in a new piece on Friday. Porter also noted that ECRI find a rise in African American employment rates for the 55 to 64 age group, in contrast to a modest decline for whites in this age group.
The problem with this comparison is that the black employment data is extremely erratic so comparing single months of data can give a misleading picture. This turns out to be the case here.
As I noted, if we compare the first 11 months of 2016 with the first 11 months of 2007, the EPOP for prime age African Americans fell by 1.7 percentage points, almost the same as the 2.0 percentage point drop for whites. The decline in the EPOP for African Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 was actually slightly larger than the decline for whites in this age group.
Unfortunately, the Washington Post chose to highlight the response of ECRI to the initial complaints without checking with anyone familiar with the data. This leaves the mistaken impression that whites have fared worse than other demographic groups since the collapse of the housing bubble.
The take away is that workers, and especially workers without college degrees, have fared poorly in recent years. This gives them ample grounds for complaining about the course of the economy. However, white workers have not fared notably worse than non-whites.
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A Washington Post article headlined, “[w]hy so many U.S. manufacturers are putting up ‘help wanted’ signs” might have led readers to believe that this is a great time for anyone looking for a job in manufacturing. That is not the case, according the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to the JOLTS data, the job opening rate in manufacturing has been 2.6 percent for the last three months. This is small decline from the rate earlier in the year. The same rate was reported for three months in 2012 and two months in 2007. In two other months in 2007 the rate was 2.7 percent.
The article also tells readers that manufacturers have been raising wages as part of their effort to attract workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing rose 2.7 percent over the last year. This compares to an increase of 2.4 percent in the economy as a whole.
A Washington Post article headlined, “[w]hy so many U.S. manufacturers are putting up ‘help wanted’ signs” might have led readers to believe that this is a great time for anyone looking for a job in manufacturing. That is not the case, according the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to the JOLTS data, the job opening rate in manufacturing has been 2.6 percent for the last three months. This is small decline from the rate earlier in the year. The same rate was reported for three months in 2012 and two months in 2007. In two other months in 2007 the rate was 2.7 percent.
The article also tells readers that manufacturers have been raising wages as part of their effort to attract workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing rose 2.7 percent over the last year. This compares to an increase of 2.4 percent in the economy as a whole.
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I enjoy reading Eduardo Porter’s columns in the NYT and usually learn a lot from them, but I think he has made a mistake in arguing that white workers have fared worse in the recession and recovery than African Americans. In his Wednesday piece, he included a chart showing employment among whites had actually fallen by roughly 700,000 since November of 2007, while it had risen by more than 2 million for both African Americans and Asian-Americans and by twice this amount for Hispanics. This seemed to suggest a radically worse labor market experience for whites than for other groups.
After several people asked me about this chart, I checked the change in the working age (ages 16–64) population for each group. The number of whites in this age grouping had fallen by more than 2 million between 2010 and 2015, while the number of African Americans had risen by 1.4 million and the number of Asians had risen by 1.7 million. I’m sure the number of Hispanics grew even more, but these data are on a different table. In other words, the differences in the number of people working by demographic group reflected less their differences in labor market outcomes than their different population trends.
Porter has a piece today responding to this issue, the headline of which tells readers, “across age groups, whites fared worse in employment rates.” The problem is that the data really don’t support this claim. Porter notes that the percentage of prime age (ages 25–54) white workers who were employed fell by 2.0 percentage points from November 2007 to November 2016. By comparison, “[l]ast month 74.5 percent of prime-aged blacks held a job, 0.3 percentage points more than in November 2007.”
While that would seem to suggest that African Americans had a sharply different experience from whites, this conclusion rests on comparing single months in a very erratic data set. If we take the first 11 months of 2016, we find that the EPOP for prime age blacks was 73.2 percent. This is down by 1.7 percentage points from the 74.9 percent average for the first 11 months of 2007. This is only slightly better than the performance of the EPOP for whites, and of course starts from a lower level.
The same problem arises with the comparison of the 55 to 64 age group.
“The employment rate of whites from the ages of 55 to 64 declined slightly — to 63.6 percent from 64.1 percent. By contrast, the employment rate of blacks, Hispanics and Asians increased.”
Taking the first 11 months of both years, the EPOP for African Americans declined by 0.7 percentage points, from 52.7 percent to 52.0 percent. This is actually slightly larger than the decline for white workers.
I am leaving Hispanics out, both because I don’t have immediate access to their EPOPs by age group and because their EPOPs are likely to follow a different pattern due to immigration flows. Immigrants who have difficulty getting a job are likely to leave and others will not come if they face dismal job prospects. Asian-Americans actually saw a sharper decline in prime-age EPOPs than whites, as Porter notes.
To be clear, I think Porter is right in seeing support for Trump as being to a substantial extent a response to bad economic prospects. But the economic prospects of working-class whites in the last decade were not notably worse than the prospects of working-class blacks. The difference in their voting patterns can be explained by the fact that working-class whites who feel they are being left behind by the economy can see hope in a white nationalist like Trump, working-class blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans cannot.
I enjoy reading Eduardo Porter’s columns in the NYT and usually learn a lot from them, but I think he has made a mistake in arguing that white workers have fared worse in the recession and recovery than African Americans. In his Wednesday piece, he included a chart showing employment among whites had actually fallen by roughly 700,000 since November of 2007, while it had risen by more than 2 million for both African Americans and Asian-Americans and by twice this amount for Hispanics. This seemed to suggest a radically worse labor market experience for whites than for other groups.
After several people asked me about this chart, I checked the change in the working age (ages 16–64) population for each group. The number of whites in this age grouping had fallen by more than 2 million between 2010 and 2015, while the number of African Americans had risen by 1.4 million and the number of Asians had risen by 1.7 million. I’m sure the number of Hispanics grew even more, but these data are on a different table. In other words, the differences in the number of people working by demographic group reflected less their differences in labor market outcomes than their different population trends.
Porter has a piece today responding to this issue, the headline of which tells readers, “across age groups, whites fared worse in employment rates.” The problem is that the data really don’t support this claim. Porter notes that the percentage of prime age (ages 25–54) white workers who were employed fell by 2.0 percentage points from November 2007 to November 2016. By comparison, “[l]ast month 74.5 percent of prime-aged blacks held a job, 0.3 percentage points more than in November 2007.”
While that would seem to suggest that African Americans had a sharply different experience from whites, this conclusion rests on comparing single months in a very erratic data set. If we take the first 11 months of 2016, we find that the EPOP for prime age blacks was 73.2 percent. This is down by 1.7 percentage points from the 74.9 percent average for the first 11 months of 2007. This is only slightly better than the performance of the EPOP for whites, and of course starts from a lower level.
The same problem arises with the comparison of the 55 to 64 age group.
“The employment rate of whites from the ages of 55 to 64 declined slightly — to 63.6 percent from 64.1 percent. By contrast, the employment rate of blacks, Hispanics and Asians increased.”
Taking the first 11 months of both years, the EPOP for African Americans declined by 0.7 percentage points, from 52.7 percent to 52.0 percent. This is actually slightly larger than the decline for white workers.
I am leaving Hispanics out, both because I don’t have immediate access to their EPOPs by age group and because their EPOPs are likely to follow a different pattern due to immigration flows. Immigrants who have difficulty getting a job are likely to leave and others will not come if they face dismal job prospects. Asian-Americans actually saw a sharper decline in prime-age EPOPs than whites, as Porter notes.
To be clear, I think Porter is right in seeing support for Trump as being to a substantial extent a response to bad economic prospects. But the economic prospects of working-class whites in the last decade were not notably worse than the prospects of working-class blacks. The difference in their voting patterns can be explained by the fact that working-class whites who feel they are being left behind by the economy can see hope in a white nationalist like Trump, working-class blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans cannot.
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Eduardo Porter used his column to point out that Donald Trump got support from many whites who felt that they were being left behind. While there is evidence to support this view, one item in the piece may have misled readers.
The column includes a table showing the change in employment since the start of the recession for white, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. While the latter three groups all had increases in employment of at least 2 million, employment for whites fell by almost 1 million.
This can be misleading since the main reason for the difference is that the number of working-age whites actually fell during this period, while the number of working-age people in these other groups rose. The Census Bureau reported that there were 125.2 million non-Hispanic whites between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2010. In 2015 this number was down to 122.9 million. By contrast, the number of non-Hispanic African Americans rose from 24.2 million to 25.6 million. The number of Asians in this age band rose from 10.1 million to 11.8 million. There was a considerably larger rise in the number of Hispanics over this period.
In short, this was a period of weak employment growth, but workers from all demographic groups suffered. The numbers in this piece give a misleading picture in implying that white workers suffered disproportionately.
Eduardo Porter used his column to point out that Donald Trump got support from many whites who felt that they were being left behind. While there is evidence to support this view, one item in the piece may have misled readers.
The column includes a table showing the change in employment since the start of the recession for white, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. While the latter three groups all had increases in employment of at least 2 million, employment for whites fell by almost 1 million.
This can be misleading since the main reason for the difference is that the number of working-age whites actually fell during this period, while the number of working-age people in these other groups rose. The Census Bureau reported that there were 125.2 million non-Hispanic whites between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2010. In 2015 this number was down to 122.9 million. By contrast, the number of non-Hispanic African Americans rose from 24.2 million to 25.6 million. The number of Asians in this age band rose from 10.1 million to 11.8 million. There was a considerably larger rise in the number of Hispanics over this period.
In short, this was a period of weak employment growth, but workers from all demographic groups suffered. The numbers in this piece give a misleading picture in implying that white workers suffered disproportionately.
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