Archive for February 2014

The Mobility Myth

A short clip from a great short piece by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker: “Increasing economic opportunity is a noble goal, and worth investing in. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that more social mobility will cure what ails the U.S. economy. For a start, even societies that are held to have “high” […]

CBO and the minimum wage, Pt. 2

In a post yesterday, I reviewed a long list of ways in which Tuesday’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report embraced arguments made by supporters of the minimum wage. In this post, I want to make some observations on CBO’s analysis of the employment effects of the minimum wage, the aspect of the report that has […]

CBO and the minimum wage, Pt. 1

You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but on almost every issue in dispute, yesterday’s Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the minimum wage sided with supporters of increasing the federal wage floor. The only major exception –which has so far dominated the media coverage– was with respect to the employment effects of a minimum-wage […]

The Union Advantage for Black Workers

Since at least the early 1970s –and likely earlier– black workers have been more likely than other workers to be union members. Janelle Jones and I have a new CEPR report out today that looks at the wage and benefit boost that black workers get from union representation. We estimate that unions raise the wages […]

Against Internet Surveillance

When Mandates Work

My copy of When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level, edited by Michael Reich, Ken Jacobs, and Miranda Dietz, arrived earlier this week and I finally had a chance to look through it this weekend. The book is a collection of papers that assess the results of San Francisco’s unique experiment, conducted over […]