Doug Hall is Director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at The Economic Policy Institute. This is a slightly revised version of a post that originally appeared on EPI’s Working Economics blog.

Later today, I will pass through two of our nation’s airports, where I will see ample evidence suggesting that we collectively place a very high priority on protecting our transportation infrastructure from harm. On my way through security, I will dutifully remove my shoes, and will remove from my pockets such benign items as a marker, an extra paper napkin from lunch, and the keys to my bike lock.

Yet throughout this same country, there are nearly 70,000 bridges that the U.S. Department of Transportation has identified as “structurally deficient.” We all recall with horror the 2007 collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis, yet there are thousands of such ticking time bombs throughout America today. In three states — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania — there are over 5,000 bridges deemed to be structurally deficient. While not every one of those bridges is in imminent danger of collapse, these remain alarming numbers.

Fixing America’s crumbling infrastructure should be a top priority for every national, state, and local official throughout the nation. It’s easier than often is the case in public policy debates to connect the dots on this one:

• Crumbling infrastucture + alarmingly high rates of unemployment (particularly amongst construction workers) + interest rates at rates that remain at unprecedented low levels = jobs plan that helps put Americans back to work today, while laying the foundation for future economic growth and prosperity. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Norris is Board President of Fab Lab Tulsa, Inc. and is one of the principal founders of the organization. This post originally appeared on the Fab Lab Tulsa blog.

Fab Lab Tulsa opened on a hot September 13th in 2011 amid the bustle of central Tulsa’s Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood. It is incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit operating a 3,500 square foot public access fabrication facility, making it one of the largest Fab Labs in the world. Its organization, its size and its location make Fab Lab Tulsa a truly unique enterprise.

This is all the more important because we are encountering a rapidly changing social and economic world. When dealing with change I like to quote the Executive Director of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Randall Suffolk: “if you dislike change then you’re going to hate irrelevance.” Economically, our nation, our states and cities must confront the notion of irrelevance with a robust response. This response, I believe, should be in the form and practice of personal fabrication.

Personal fabrication, like in a Fab Lab or Hackerspace or Makerspace, is making things you need with tools which are accessible to you. This IS the next industrial revolution, except that it won’t be industrial, it will be personal. People will use and develop custom products or technology which will impact their lives in ways profound and ordinary…from creating your own smart phone to building a kitchen table so your family can enjoy a meal together. Read the rest of this entry »

Kasey Hughart worked as an intern at the Oklahoma Policy Institute while attending the University of Tulsa as a Sociology major/Spanish minor.  Kasey is active in advocating for immigrant rights as the co-affiliate lead for DREAM Act Oklahoma, an official affiliate within the United We DREAM National Network. Kasey hopes to pursue a career in social work after graduate school. 

Wage theft, or an employer’s failure to pay a worker for completed labor, has emerged as a serious danger in the 21st century labor market.  According to a 2011 report by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), wage theft is widespread. It is not limited to a specific industry or employer, and it is frequently deliberate.  It can take many forms, including “being paid less than the minimum wage, working off the clock without pay, getting less than time and a half for overtime hours, having tips stolen, and seeing illegal deductions taken out of paychecks.” Read the rest of this entry »

Several state leaders have taken to promoting more income tax cuts as the best way to improve Oklahoma’s economy. But is that true? We recently heard Timothy Bartik, senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, discuss the latest research on which state-level policies are most effective at boosting the economy. [You can see the full transcript of his remarks here.]

Bartik explained that across-the-board business tax cuts are usually not the most cost-effective tool for economic development. Because state government resources are small relative to the size of a state’s economy, we need policies with a high “bang-for- the-buck” to see meaningful increases in per capita earnings. Across-the-board cuts are not targeted enough to account for the opportunity cost of paying for them though reductions in public services or increases in other taxes.

Instead, Bartik recommended five policies with proven effectiveness and high bang-for-the-buck: Read the rest of this entry »

This blog post was excerpted from remarks by Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, during the opening session of PolicyLink’s 2011 Equity Summit in Detroit, Michigan.  The speech presented a new framework for creating an equitable economy.  Click here for a new report from PolicyLink looking at how demographic changes and deepening inequality demand an urgent re-imagining of our economy.

This is a critical moment.  The economy is in crisis.  The middle class is shrinking.  Inequality has come front and center in our conversation in America and we have rapidly changing demographics in which the racial and ethnic composition of the country is changing fast.  This economic crisis really represents a failed growth model, one that was based on a housing bubble; one that was allowed to present itself as opportunity when it was really only credit-fueled consumption that was improving the lifestyles of people [..] Read the rest of this entry »

This post is the third in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment. Part One introduced the unemployment gap and presents preliminary descriptive data on state labor market trends by race. Part Two explores underlying and immediate causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence. Part Three evaluates solutions for addressing and closing the gap.

The first two posts in this series established the existence of a nation-wide, decades-old disparity in the unemployment rate between black and white workers. Black Oklahomans were unemployed at more than twice the rate (13.1 percent) of their white counterparts (5.9 percent) in 2010. The unemployment rate among black men is exceptionally high, about two and half times higher in Oklahoma.  While the reasons for the disparity are numerous, our last post focused on two explanations around which evidence seems to converge:  the high incarceration rate among blacks and discrimination in the hiring process.  This post explores solutions for closing the unemployment gap in Oklahoma, with an emphasis on reducing incarceration rates and strategies for preserving equal opportunity employment. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing high unemployment rates, weak economic growth, and stock market volatility are all contributing to concern and uncertainty about the national economy. But how’s Oklahoma faring in these turbulent times? I recently spoke with Chad Wilkerson, the Oklahoma City Branch Executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City about conditions in the Sooner State. This is an edited and abridged transcript of our conversation on August 24, 2011.

David Blatt: How would you characterize the current state of Oklahoma’s economy?

Chad Wilkerson: I would say things are still pretty solid for us. We’ve had fairly solid job growth over the past year. Unemployment’s down to 5.5 percent, and in some parts of the state… it’s less than 5 percent.

However, I think that measure may be overstating the degree to which we’ve recovered from the recent recession. There’s been a fairly sizable number of people drop out of the labor force in the last couple of years. This has been interesting me of late because of the fact that Oklahoma’s unemployment rates are down to a level that many economists consider full employment levels, 5 – 6 percent. But if the same share of the adult population was looking for jobs today as in 2007, our unemployment rate for the state would be a little over 8 percent. That’s probably too high because I think the share of the population that was looking for jobs in 2007 was also a bit abnormal – the boom was going on, perhaps too many people were looking for jobs from a productivity standpoint. So our actual unemployment is probably somewhere between 5 and 8 percent. We’re probably not quite fully recovered, but we’re still doing much better than the nation. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone concerned about the impact that long-term and short-term changes in the American economy are having on the working families that form the pillar of the American middle class should read the cover article in this month’s Atlantic monthly, “Can the Middle Class Be Saved”?

The article, by features editor Don Peck, provides a powerful and sobering look at how economic opportunity and financial security are increasingly out of reach for a growing segment of the American population. He argues that:

Arguably, the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class.

While Peck provides lots of data about widening income inequality and the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, his essay is most compelling in its focus on the fading fortunes of the majority of Americans who are without a college degree and who make up the ranks of the non-professional middle class. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is the second in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment.  Part One introduced the unemployment gap and presents preliminary descriptive data on state labor market trends by race.  Part Two explores underlying and immediate causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence.  Part Three will evaluate solutions for addressing and closing the gap.

Part One of this series examined the stubborn persistence of the unemployment gap between black and white workers.  Despite decades of improvement in social, political, and economic status, black Americans are still unemployed at twice the rate of their white counterparts, a ratio that hasn’t changed since the 1940s.  Why aren’t black workers achieving employment parity?  Researchers point to two factors: (1) the high incarceration rate among blacks, especially black men; and (2) discrimination in the hiring process. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite a modest recovery in the overall economy, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City finds that low- and moderate-income populations continue to face increased hardship in Oklahoma and other states in the Tenth Federal Reserve District.

The FRB of Kansas City conducts a quarterly survey of non-profit and community organizations that serve low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations in the Tenth District.* Respondents are asked about the economic conditions of the clients they serve. The results are used to construct indices measuring the financial condition, service needs, jobs availability, affordable housing, and credit access of LMI populations.  The June report found conditions continuing to worsen for LMI populations in the 2nd quarter of 2011, although in some sectors the gap between the number of respondents reporting things are getting worse and those reporting things getting better is narrowing : Read the rest of this entry »

June’s jobs report saw Oklahoma’s unemployment rate hold steady at 5.3 percent, the fifth lowest rate in the nation. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household employment survey showed that the number of employed Oklahomans declined by 6,900. To try to make sense of the numbers, I spoke with Lynn Gray, Director of the Economic Research and Analysis Division of the Oklahoma Economic Security Commission. This is an abridged and edited transcript of our conversation.

David Blatt: If we step back and look at what’s happening in the labor market in Oklahoma over the past six months or the past year, what is the story there?

Lynn Gray: Well, it’s actually kind of a disappointment. The unemployment rate in the state has dropped from 7.0 percent to 5.3 percent. The number of unemployed has dropped by 30,000 –  from 122,000 to 92,000. On the surface that look great, that is a very good recovery. The average person who hears this might assume that 30, 000 people went from unemployed status to employed status. But that hasn’t happened. Employment is only up by about 6,400 in the household survey in the past year. The number of unemployed has fallen by 30,000, but the number of employed is only up by 6,400… This tells me that this really is a weaker recovery than just the unemployment rate by itself would indicate. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is the first in a three-part series on “Oklahoma’s Unemployment Gap,” examining the persistence of racial disparities in unemployment.  Part One introduces the unemployment gap and presents preliminary descriptive data on state labor market trends by race.  Part Two explores underlying and immediate causes for the state’s black-white unemployment gap and suggests reasons for its persistence.  Part Three evaluates solutions for addressing and closing the gap.

LIFE Photograph by M. Bourke-White, 1937

Black unemployment in the United States has reached depression-era levels in the wake of the Great Recession, and some speculate that long-term unemployment is reversing decades of black economic gains.  Black unemployment at the state level mirrors the national trend.  Oklahoma experienced a comparatively less severe recession and maintains one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country.  Yet black workers in the state were unemployed at more than twice the rate (13.1 percent) of white workers (5.9 percent) in 2010.  This is comparable to the national gap – where the unemployment rate for black workers is about twice (16.2 percent) that of whites (8 percent).  Andy Kroll at Salon.com explains that this entrenched unemployment gap has a puzzling statistical persistence:

The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question why has vexed and divided economists, historians and sociologists for nearly as long. Read the rest of this entry »