Teacher strikes blanket the nation as a labor of love meets economic hardships [feedly]

Teacher strikes blanket the nation as a labor of love meets economic hardships
https://www.epi.org/blog/teacher-strikes-blanket-the-nation-as-a-labor-of-love-meets-economic-hardships/

School districts around the country, faced with a historic shortage of teachers, should be scrambling to offer those educators higher pay and better working conditions. That's what the economics of supply and demand would dictate.

Instead, we are seeing a spread of teachers' strikes and protests, with Denver and Oakland among the latest in a series of protest waves spreading from West Virginia to Los Angeles.

The gap between the estimated number of additional teachers needed in U.S. public school classrooms and the number that are available to be hired grew from zero to over 110,000 in just the last few years.

What gives? The lack of reaction from policymakers shaping the education landscape is emblematic of a broader disrespect for teachers as professionals over time. Teachers face a curious social situation—clearly and deeply needed but demonstrably undercompensated and poorly supported at work. The spate of recent strikes suggests conditions have reached a breaking point as teachers are forced to take on second and third jobs to make ends meet, and to spend money out of their own pockets to supply classrooms.

Our new analyses for EPI suggest that breaking point is here. This week, we released the first in a series of reports on the growing teacher shortage and the working conditions and other factors behind it. Our research shows that, when we account for the shrinking share of teachers who hold credentials associated with more effective teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, the teacher shortage is worse than estimated. The reports of the series will also show that low relative pay, tough working conditions, and a lack of supports for teachers aren't isolated problems in a handful of districts but challenges being reported by teachers nationwide. The depth and breadth of the crisis shows that the education industry—i.e., the nation's state and local departments and boards of education—urgently need to rethink how they cultivate, train, recruit, and support teachers.

While teaching has long-required forgoing the additional income that teachers could earn if they pursued other careers with similar educational requirements, that income loss has grown substantially in recent years. As our colleagues Larry Mishel and Sylvia Allegretto have shown, in 1994, the pay gap between public school teachers and their comparably educated peers was negligible: teachers earned only 1.8 percent less in wages. In 2017, the teacher pay gap was 10 times that, 18.7 percent. Even accounting for teacher pensions and other benefits, which are often cited as substantially boosting educators' real compensation, the compensation gap is still large, 11.1 percent in 2017. It should come as little surprise, then, that fewer people are choosing teaching as a career and more teachers are leaving.

That kind of situation is never good news. But at a time when the number of students who need teachers is growing, and when those students are more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse than ever before, but also more disadvantaged in terms of poverty, it is extremely bad news. We should all be alarmed at the failure of our school systems and our country as a whole to support educators on the front lines who make it possible for students to thrive.

Teachers who successfully struck in Los Angeles earlier in the year illustrate both the scope and scale of the problem and point to first steps toward alleviating it. In L.A., the teachers rejected the district's initial offer of a raise and held out for smaller class sizes and more counselors, nurses, and librarians—resources that should not be considered "extras," but guaranteed. Their emphasis on conditions in schools as well as pay is a sign both of the sorry state in which teachers try to do hard jobs well, and of the low pay they receive to work in those circumstances. But their victory offers hope.

And more change is coming. The L.A. strike kicked off protests in Denver, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia (again), and Oakland. Denver teachers, long unhappy that their salaries are contingent on student test scores, are now speaking up and walking off the job. Kentucky teachers protested a pension bill that would remove teachers from the nominating process for the pension board. In Oakland, soaring housing costs and resources lost due to the spread of charters, motivated teachers' walkouts. These protests build on the momentum of the wave of strikes that started in West Virginia just about a year ago and rapidly spread to Oklahoma, North Carolina, or Arizona. Those strikes shined a much-needed spotlight on some of the lowest wages and toughest working conditions for teachers in the country. But as we learn from teachers in districts in states that are relatively "high-paying" states, like California, even relatively "high-paying" states are far from providing what teachers need.

We hope that the series of papers we will publish in the coming months will boost that spotlight and accelerate the development of solutions. As we grapple as a society with rapidly growing income and wealth disparities, those on the front lines, teachers prominent among them, deserve a central place at the table where policy solutions are discussed.

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Enlighten Radio:Recovery Radio: The Wake Up Everybody Show

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: Recovery Radio: The Wake Up Everybody Show
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2019/03/recovery-radio-wake-up-everybody-show.html

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Gerald Epstein: Is MMT “America First” Economics? [feedly]

A progressive MMT skeptic

Is MMT "America First" Economics?
https://urpe.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/is-mmt-america-first-economics/

By Gerald Epstein, Modern Money Theory (MMT) has recently gained a remarkable amount of attention. This has stemmed largely from the "shout-outs" it has received from prominent progressive politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Its recent appearances in the news and social media have also drawn a variety of criticisms from economists of different stripes. Though … More Is MMT "America First" Economics?  

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Tim Taylor: What Did Gutenberg's Printing Press Actually Change? [feedly]

A great retelling in economic terms of a classic historical parable: the impact of Gutenberg's printing press spurred both science, knowledge, and capitalism

What Did Gutenberg's Printing Press Actually Change?
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-did-gutenbergs-printing-press.html

There's an old slogan for journalists: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." The point is not to be  too quick to accept what you think you already know.

In a similar spirit, I of course know that the introduction of a printing press with moveable type by to Europe in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg is often called one of the most important inventions in world history. However, I'm grateful that Jeremiah Dittmar and Skipper Seabold have been checking it out. They have written "Gutenberg's moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution," for the LSE Business Review (March 19, 2019). It's a nice accessible version of the main findings from their  research paper, "New Media and Competition: Printing and Europe'sTransformation after Gutenberg" (Centre for Economic Perfomance Discussion Paper No 1600 January 2019). They write:

"Printing was not only a new technology: it also introduced new forms of competition into European society. Most directly, printing was one of the first industries in which production was organised by for-profit capitalist firms. These firms incurred large fixed costs and competed in highly concentrated local markets. Equally fundamentally – and reflecting this industrial organisation – printing transformed competition in the 'market for ideas'. Famously, printing was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation, which breached the religious monopoly of the Catholic Church. But printing's influence on competition among ideas and producers of ideas also propelled Europe towards the scientific revolution.While Gutenberg's press is widely believed to be one of the most important technologies in history, there is very little evidence on how printing influenced the price of books, labour markets and the production of knowledge – and no research has considered how the economics of printing influenced the use of the technology."

Dittmar and Seabold aim to provide some of this evidence. For example, here's their data on how the price of 200 pages changed over time, measured in terms of daily wages. (Notice that the left-hand axis is a logarithmic graph.) The price of a book went from weeks of daily wages to much less than one day of daily wages.  



They write: "Following the introduction of printing, book prices fell steadily. The raw price of books fell by 2.4 per cent a year for over a hundred years after Gutenberg. Taking account of differences in content and the physical characteristics of books, such as formatting, illustrations and the use of multiple ink colours, prices fell by 1.7 per cent a year. ... [I]n places where there was an increase in competition among printers, prices fell swiftly and dramatically. We find that when an additional printing firm entered a given city market, book prices there fell by 25%. The price declines associated with shifting from monopoly to having multiple firms in a market was even larger. Price competition drove printers to compete on non-price dimensions, notably on product differentiation. This had implications for the spread of ideas."

Another part of this change was that books were produced for ordinary people in the language they spoke, not just in Latin. Another part was that wages for professors at universities rose relative to the average worker, and the curriculum of universities shifted toward the scientific subjects of the time like "anatomy, astronomy, medicine and natural philosophy," rather than theology and law.
The ability to print books affected religious debates as well, like the spread of Protestant ideas after Martin Luther circulated his 95 theses criticizing the Catholic Church in 1517.

Printing also affected the spread of technology and business.

Previous economic research has studied the extensive margin of technology diffusion, comparing the development of cities that did and did not have printing in the late 1400s ...  Printing provided a new channel for the diffusion of knowledge about business practices. The first mathematics texts printed in Europe were 'commercial arithmetics', which provided instruction for merchants. With printing, a business education literature emerged that lowered the costs of knowledge for merchants. The key innovations involved applied mathematics, accounting techniques and cashless payments systems.
The evidence on printing suggests that, indeed, these ideas were associated with significant differences in local economic dynamism and reflected the industrial structure of printing itself. Where competition in the specialist business education press increased, these books became suddenly more widely available and in the historical record, we observe more people making notable achievements in broadly bourgeois careers.

It is impossible to avoid wondering if economic historians in 50 or 100 years will be looking back on the spread of internet technology, and how it affected patterns of technology diffusion, human capital, and social beliefs--and how differing levels of competition in the market may affect these outcomes. 

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Shaun Ferguson (Triple Crisis): Greening the New Deal [feedly]

The economic price tag is not what will stop us going green: its the political price tag: You have to be prepared to rollback the pol and econ power of the private energy industry and subordinate it to public policy committed to combating destructive climate change, and doing so in a manner  that  simultaneously addresses the catastrophic levels of inequality fracking every election cycle. THAT is a transformation of class, corporate and public power relations.  The energy industry owners, like the insurance and pharmaceutical complexes, will not fall on their swords. They are drawing them instead.

Greening the New Deal
http://triplecrisis.com/greening-the-new-deal/

By Shaun Ferguson (guest post)

The Green New Deal is desperately needed, and arguing about a price tag is like Henry Ford wondering if the country will be able to afford his brand new automobile.  With the introduction of a House Resolution by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts), a debate has surged across the country on the affordability of the Green New Deal. The sheer distraction of the affordability discussion is enough to ensure that very few people will pay attention to what is really at stake. For when the bigger fish eat up this little fish we will need to remember how we got here and what matters most.  As the bright young critics have quickly observed, the Green New Deal could hardly be too green. Time is wearing thin and we need to make haste.

But there can be no greening that abstracts from political economy realities and while the tug of war taking place in the media at the moment is all about the so-called economy-of-it-all, there is next to no analysis on the political constraints of sustainably embarking on another New Deal when the first one withered away long ago. After World War II, the ambition of a nationwide spending program was quickly replicated on an international scale as the country rightly observed that in a vacuum the United States would be hard pressed to expand its economy and that what it needed to make large projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority which introduced unprecedented stimulus, sustainable in the long run was the integration of the United States capital stock's capacity to produce output with a global trend of expanding markets.  Unless the United States comes to terms with the global characteristics of its (not to mention everyone else's) economy, we will all the rest of us more than likely pay the brunt of another American adventure.  How does America exact these payments?  By imposing continued low growth trajectories, low wage growth,  contractionary balance of payments adjustments, and what Keynes called "forced exports", which is basically what we call today narrow and specialized development: all opposed to diversification.

 

If the truth be told, the heavy handed unilateral approach of the United States renders the rest of the global economy akin to something that can be thrown off the back of a train to pay for America's projects. By America's choice, the world has pursued a most exclusionary development path with low growth trajectories being imposed on much of the world's population, even Europe's, to ensure the political dominance of one country, which itself is willing to sacrifice the high growth it could enjoy itself along with the rest of the world through inclusive multilateralism. The decision for this can be traced back to 1951, two years after what has sometimes been referred to as 'the Kaldor Report' was discussed at ECOSOC.  This would be the last serious consideration for institutionalizing Full Employment at the international level, which is to say that it was the last serious effort to institutionalize multilateral trading in support of an expansive global economy.

 

It is this author's opinion that this would have required the mediatory institutions sought by John Maynard Keynes.  As he confided to his compatriots, "the difficulties are thoroughly shirked" (Keynes, 1980: 325), "The two Institutions have become different from what we were expecting." (Ibid: 232)  These statements  commence a long line of lament by those working in the official institutions of international development.  Contrary to the less than exhaustive investigations by the most powerful parties involved in the post-War framing, certain extensive and earnest treatments of the rationale for full employment have been attempted.  The tensions that constituted the political sequence which framed the post-War economic institutions were all but resolved. They can fruitfully be resubmitted to thought.

 

The ability of the USA to pay for the Green New Deal is inherently connected to its relation to the global economy, at the broadest level. It can flounder on uninviting seas and when needed release its fury spanking the waves after Xerxes, or it can take stock of what Keynes called the "high ways of the real world", and awake to the rough realities it has imposed around the globe. To the extent that America's low growth trajectory displaces demand in the global economy— or to the extent that its low wage growth policy is the only way it manages to insert itself into the global economy, its longstanding policy of aggressive bilateralism will continue.  The world's economies are intimately interlinked and what is needed is not an American scheme but a global one — which picks up the multilateralism that once wanted to be born.

 

Shaun Ferguson has worked in development economics at various United Nations agencies including UNCTAD, ESCWA and UNSCO since 2002. He has a doctoral degree in Economics at the New School for Social Research.

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Raising the Curtain: Trade and Empire [feedly]

An interesting tidbit from Brad DeLong's many interests in economic history: 

My take: Trade and imperialism -- is not their ultimate legacy a global society? and thus, internationalism shall finally, and inevitably rise as the true humanism. The goods and  bads are intertwined.

Raising the Curtain: Trade and Empire

Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"  

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/raising-the-curtain-the-long-twentieth-centurytrade-and-empire-yet-another-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-e.html

Raising the Curtain: The Long Twentieth Century—Trade and Empire

The extent to which the navies and trading fleets of the great European sea-borne empires of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries shaped the industrial development of western Europe has always been one of the most fiercely-debated and unsettled topics in economic history. That European expansion in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were catastrophes for the regions of west Africa that were the sources of the slave trade; for the Amerindians of the Caribbean; for the Aztecs, Incas, the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley; and for the princes of Bengal and others who found themselves competing with the British East India Company in the succession wars over the spoils of India's Moghul Empire—that is not in dispute.

But how much did pre-industrial trade and plunder affect European development? That is not so clear.

It is clear is that even at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century trade not in luxuries but in staples had begun to profoundly shape history. For the first time transoceanic trade mattered not just for a ruling elite but for an economy as a whole. The export of cotton from the American South and had mattered. Without the appetite of British and New England factories for cotton and the power to ship ginned cotton to them cheaply, the slaves of the American South in 1860 would have been what they were for George Washington in the 1790s: a quarter of your wealth that you were willing to free, at least upon your death, because it was the right thing to do. By contrast, for Jefferson Davis it wasn't his land but rather his slaves that were three-quarters of his wealth—and so the U.S. Civil War of 1861-5 came.

Early-nineteenth century cotton showed what late-eighteenth century sugar had prefigured. The export of sugar from the Caribbean islands and Latin America (and also tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and so forth) meant that European agriculture did not have to grow nearly as much flax or raise as much wool or produce as many calories. It provided an extra edge to the British economy: as if there was perhaps one additional ghost worker who did not have to be fed or paid alongside every ten.

That, from the perspective of 1870, was what the expanded intercontinental division of labor and the higher productivity that resulted from it had done up to that point.

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Reentry from Out of the Labor Market [feedly]

A deeper look at what it means to be "in" or "out" of the labor market.

Reentry from Out of the Labor Market
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/03/reentry-from-out-of-labor-market.html

Each year, the White House Council of Economic Advisers published the Economic Report of the President, which can be thought of as a loyalist's view of the current economic situation. For example, if you are interested in a rock-ribbed defense of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed in December 2017 or of the deregulatory policies of the Trump administration looks like, then Chapters 1 and 2 of the 2019 report are for you. Of course, some people will read these chapters with the intention of citing the evidence in support of the Trump administration, while others will be planning to use the chapters for intellectual target practice. The report will prove useful for both purposes.

Here, I'll focus on some pieces of the 2019 Economic Report of the President that focus more on underlying economic patterns, rather than on policy advocacy.  For example, some interesting patterns have emerged in what it means to be "out of the labor market."

Economists have an ongoing problem when looking at unemployment. Some people don't have a job and are actively looking for one. They are counted as "unemployed." Some people don't have a job and aren't looking for one. They are not included in the officially "unemployed," but instead are "out of the labor force." In some cases, those who are not looking for a job are really not looking--like someone who has firmly entered retirement. But in other cases, some of those not looking for a job might still take one, if a job was on offer.

This issue came up a lot in the years after the Great Recession. The official unemployment rate topped out in October 2009 at 10%. But as the unemployment rate gradually declined, the "labor force participation" rate also fell--which means that the share of Americans who were out of the labor force and not looking for a job was rising.You can see this pattern in the blue line below.

There were some natural reasons for the labor force participation rate to start declining after about 2010. In particular, the leading edge of the "baby boom" generation, which started in 1945, turned 65 in 2010, so it had long been expected that labor force participation rates would start falling with their retirements.

Notice that the fall in labor force participation rates levelled off late in 2013. Lower unemployment rates since that time cannot be due to declining labor force participation. Or an alternative way to look at the labor market is to focus on employment-to-population--that is, just ignore the issue of whether those who lack jobs are looking for work (and thus "in the labor force") or not looking for work (and thus "out of the labor force"). At about the same time in 2013 when the drop in the labor force participation rate leveled out, the red line shows that the employment-to-population ratio started rising.

What especially interesting is that many of those taking jobs in the last few years were not being counted as among the "unemployed." Instead, they were in that category of "out of the labor force"--that is, without a job but not looking for work. However, as jobs became more available, they have proved willing to take jobs. Here's a graph showing the share of adults starting work who were previously "out of the labor force" rather than officially "unemployed."

A couple of things are striking about this figure.

1) Going back more than 25 years, it's consistently true that more than half of those starting work were not counted as "unemployed," but instead were "out of the labor force." In other words, the number of officially "unemployed" is not a great measure of the number of people actually willing to work, if a suitable job is available.

2) The ratio is at its  highest level since the start of this data in 1990. Presumably this is because when the official unemployment rate is so low (4% or less since March 2018), firms that want to hire are needing to go after those who the official labor market statistics treated as "not in the labor force."  

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