No Apparent Motive

My guilty pleasure this television season is the remake of the “classic” series Hawaii Five-O. My initial interest was fueled by a heavy dose of nostalgia. The series started in the fall of 1968, when I started first grade, and went off the air in the spring of 1980, when I graduated from high school. […]

This may be the only good use of a pie chart ever. Arthur Buxton shows the five most common colors in 28 Van Gogh paintings. (H/T boingboing.)

The CEPR blog has launched a new feature: a weekly roundup (every Friday) of progressive labor market policy research reports. The first installment includes links to recent reports from:  CEPR, Center for American Progress (CAP), Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Demos, Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) […]

The total number of unionized workers in the United States fell about 600,000 in 2010, according to data released yesterday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The drop in membership lowered the overall unionization rate from 12.3 percent of all workers in 2009, to 11.9 percent last year. In the private sector, the unionization rate […]

Hye Jin Rho, Nicole Woo, and I have updated our paper on the economic benefits of unionization for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers. AAPI workers are, with Latinos, the fastest growing part of the unionized workforce. About one of every twenty union workers (and about the same share of the overall labor force) […]

On Saturday, the New York Times ran an interesting piece on older workers. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited in the story, the US workforce is a lot older now than it was at the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007. Total employment of workers under the age of 55 is […]

In advance of Martin Luther King Day next Monday, United for a Fair Economy has released its 8th annual “State of the Dream” report, surveying the economic challenges facing workers of color. The 2011 edition focuses on the impact of economic austerity on African American and Latino workers. The report documents several ways in which […]

I’ve posted several variations of the simple graph showing the monthly change in employment from the onset of the recession –the one that looks like an upside-down bell curve tracing out bigger and bigger job declines from December 2007 through the summer of 2009, followed by smaller and smaller monthly losses until about the beginning […]

The NYT’s Charles M. Blow has produced a long, slender chart of the changing religious affiliation of the United States Congress from the early 1960s through the Congress sworn in last week. The big winners are “Catholic”, followed by “Unspecified/other Protestant” (a group that includes many evangelical Christians) and “Jewish”. “Baptist”, “Lutheran”, and “Mormon” are […]