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Daily Archives: March 15, 2015

Income growth and decline under recent U.S. presidents and the new challenge to restore broad economic prosperity

“In this new study, economist Robert Shapiro, chairman of Sonecon, LLC, and a faculty member of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, analyzes new Census Bureau data to track the household incomes of Americans by age cohort, following their income paths as they age. Using this approach, Shapiro shows that income progress was broad and robust through the Reagan and Clinton years and stopped abruptly during the Bush and Obama administrations. Understanding what has really happened to the incomes of Americans as they aged over the last 35 years, he argues, is important to understanding our current economic challenges, the policies of recent presidents, and the politics that have resulted. Most importantly, Shapiro writes, the data show that the incomes problems that most households face today are not a long-standing feature of the American economy, but rather reflect the particular conditions and policies of the last decade or so. Other important findings from the report include:

  • Through the 1980s and 1990s, households of virtually every type experienced large, steady income gains, whether they were headed by men or women, by blacks, whites or Hispanics, or by people with high school diplomas or college degrees.
  • This broad income progress stopped around the turn of this century: From 2002 to 2013, the incomes of most households stagnated or declined even as they aged through nine years of expansion and two years of recession. The only types of households with rising incomes over this recent period were those headed by people in their mid-to-late 20s and those headed by college graduates — and their gains were much smaller than those achieved by young and college-educated households in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • This evidence contradicts the narrative told by those who simply track the value of aggregate median income from the 1970s to the present and claim that most Americans have made little progress for decades. The data used here report the median incomes of cohorts of households based on the age of the heads of those households each year, as those household-heads age. Unlike the dataset for a time series of aggregate median household income, the samples for this “age-cohort” series are stable over time.
  • This age-cohort analysis also highlights a distinct life cycle in the income progress of  most Americans as they age. Throughout this period and across all of our tested demographic groups, households headed by people in their mid-20s to mid-30s experience the largest percentage gains in median income, after which those increases generally slow and finally stop when they reach their 50s.
  • The analysis of these extensive data establishes that our current challenges are not a long-term feature of the U.S. economy or an after-effect of the 2008-2009 financial upheaval. Shapiro’s analysis further shows that these problems also are not driven by economic impediments based on gender, race and ethnicity, or even education.”

Two out of 3 people with invasive cancer are surviving 5 years or more

CDC press release: “Two out of 3 people diagnosed with cancer survive five years or more, according to a CDC study published in today’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The report found that the most common cancer sites continue to be cancers of the prostate (128 cases per 100,000 men), female breast (122 cases per… Continue Reading

Economic Indicators

“Available from April 1995 forward, this monthly publication is prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers for the Joint Economic Committee. It provides economic information on gross domestic product, income, employment, production, business activity, prices, money, credit, security markets, Federal finance, and international statistics. Economic Indicators back to 1948 are made available through FRASER, the… Continue Reading

High-Frequency Measures of Information Risk

Brennan, Michael J. and Huh, Sahn-Wook and Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar, High-Frequency Measures of Information Risk (March 12, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2578168 “We estimate each day for each stock the conditional probabilities of informed trading on good and bad news in the spirit of Easley et al. (1996), and provide new evidence that these… Continue Reading

Greatest Threat to the Power Grid: Our Own Government

“Today, the Institute for Energy Research released a new study titled Assessing Emerging Policy Threats to the U.S. Power Grid as a continuation of the Story of Electricity initiative. The report finds that the greatest threats to our power grid are not physical or cyber attacks, but rather existing and upcoming Federal and State policies including subsidies, mandates,… Continue Reading

EBRI: Current U.S. Retirement Savings Deficit is $4.13 Trillion

“With the U.S. Senate Special Commi ttee on Aging holding a hearing [March 12] on “Bridging the Gap: How Prepared are Americans for Retirement ?” the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) is re-posting recent findings that the aggregate national retirement savings deficit is about $4.13 trillion for all U.S. households where the head of… Continue Reading

New on LLRX – Emerging roles and possible futures for librarians and information professionals

Via LLRX – Emerging roles and possible futures for librarians and information professionals. Author, professor, editor, librarian – Bruce Rosenstein’s article addresses the following critical questions – What professional roles do you play as a librarian/information professional? How have they changed during your career? And perhaps most important, how do you see them changing and… Continue Reading