December 18, 2016
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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