Andrew Sum

No Country for Young Men: Deteriorating Labor Market Prospects for Low-Skilled Men in the United States

The labor market fate of the nation’s male teens and young adults (ages 20—29) has deteriorated along most employment, weekly wages, and annual earnings dimensions in recent decades. The employment rates reached new post—World War II lows in 2009, with the less well educated faring the worst. The deterioration in the labor market well-being of these young men has had a number of adverse consequences on their social behavior. Less-educated young men, especially high school dropouts, are far more likely to be incarcerated than their peers in earlier decades. They are considerably less likely to be married and more likely to be absent fathers, with gaps in marriage rates across educational groups widening substantially since the 1970s. The decline in marriage among less-educated young adults, high assortative mating among younger married couples, and growing gaps in earnings across educational groups have contributed to a substantial widening in income and wealth disparities among the nation’s young families.

Devolution of Employment and Training Policy: The Case of Older Workers

Summary The case for the devolution of employment and training programs has traditionally been based on the supply side argument that state and local governments are in the best position to assess the training needs of their disadvantaged workers. We provide a different perspective by focusing on the demand side of the labor market and the link between aiding older workers and fostering economic growth. We illustrate the importance of this focus by examining the labor market in Massachusetts, where the full employment economy of the late 1990s resulted in serious labor supply bottlenecks. Older workers, whose ranks are growing rapidly, provide the largest known labor reserve for meeting these labor supply deficits in the next decade. Tapping this reserve, however, means improving skills, deferring retirement, bringing older persons back into the labor market, and increasing full-time employment. Massachusetts already has the policy tools needed to train older workers to fill emerging job needs, but these policies will need to be substantially upgraded and reoriented. Too little funding, an emphasis on short-term programs, lack of coordination among programs, weak linkages to the private sector, and the limited flexibility of human resources practices in both the private and public sectors have left both government programs and employers ill-prepared to utilize fully the older worker labor reserve.

The Massive Shedding of Jobs in America

Profits are rising sharply in the United States, but wages are not. The unemployment rate remains high, and a rapid increase in jobs is not forecast. Clearly, American business has shed jobs in short order. The resulting rise in productivity is not being shared by workers. How much longer can this go on? The authors analyze the disturbing numbers.

Ignoring Those Left Behind

The authors look at the breakdown by income group of those who are unemployed, those who have part-time jobs but want full-time work, and those who have more or less given up but would take a job if they could find one. The employment crisis in the United States hits low-income groups worst.

Employment Prospects in Information Technology Jobs for Non—College-Educated Adults

Does it pay to go to college? In a previous issue, we published an article arguing that college degrees helped workers gain access to the information technology job market. But workers without a degree had a wage disadvantage in IT that was less than widely assumed. In this article, three economists rebut the claim, contending that the disadvantage for those who do not attend college is striking and, in fact, has grown.

The Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the Blue-Collar Depression

Blue-collar workers have been devastated in the current recession. And their jobs are not likely to come back. Andrew Sum and his economics team dissect the disturbing facts. There is a crying need, they argue, for new jobs programs.

Deteriorating Labor Market Fortunes for Young Adults

The authors show clearly the path dependency from teen work to young adult employment in their twenties. They document how poorly teens and young adults have done in the last dozen years across rich countries. This jobs crisis is now widely understood by the public.

The Wealth of the Nation's Young

One of the sadder facts of modern economic life in the United States is that young people have done especially badly by former standards. In this piece, the authors analyze how the wealth of young families has fallen in recent decades. This trend bodes poorly for the well-being of their children.

The Widening Socioeconomic Divergence in the U.S. Labor Market

The first 10 years of the 2000s were the worst decade of job-creating performance experienced by the United States in the entire post-World War II era. The unemployment rate skyrocketed as high as 9.6 %, tied with 1982 and 1983 as the highest unemployment rates since the end of the Second World War. Yet the unemployment rate only provides part of the story of the United States’ weak labor market. This chapter goes well beyond the official unemployment statistics to look at the total pool of underutilized labor, including those who are working part time but cannot obtain full-time work (the underemployed) and those who have stopped looking for a job but want to be in the full-time work force (the hidden unemployed). It also rigorously examines the full array of labor market problems among U.S. workers in various education and income groups in 2013–2014 as well as providing relevant comparisons dating back to 1999–2000. We find that widening labor market outcome gaps have contributed to the growth of earnings and income disparities over the decade and a half since 1999–2000. Groups at the top end of the educational and income scales have come to experience virtually full employment and high earnings, while those at the bottom are dealing with unemployment and poverty that have sunk to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

The Plunge in Teen Summer Employment

The proportion of teens sixteen to nineteen years old with summer jobs has fallen consistently since 1999. If teens were working at the same rate as they did in 1999, 3.5 million more of them would have jobs. This is a tragedy. What can be done?