{"product_id":"2940016041155","title":"Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?","description":"The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979.\u003cbr\u003eGiven that older and better educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of “good jobs” in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy has actually fallen.\u003cbr\u003eBy our definition of a good job – one that pays at least $37,000 per year, has employer-provided health insurance, and an employer-sponsored retirement plan – the share of workers with a “good job” fell from 27.4 percent in 1979 to 24.6 percent in 2010. The total share of good jobs had declined even before the Great Recession; in 2007, for example, only 25.0 percent of workers had a good job by our definition.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur estimates, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe standard explanation for the deterioration in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is that most workers’ skills have not kept up with the rapid pace of technological change. But, if technological change were behind the decline in good jobs, then we would expect that a higher – probably substantially higher – share of workers with a four-year college degree or more would have good jobs today. Instead, at every age level, workers with four years or more of college are actually less likely to have a good job now than three decades ago. This development is even more surprising because the economy also has almost twice as many workers with advanced degrees today as it did in 1979. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe believe, instead, that the decline in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is related to a deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the income scale. The main cause of the loss of bargaining power is the large-scale restructuring of the labor market that began at the end of the 1970s and continues to the present. The share of private-sector workers who are unionized has fallen from 23 percent in 1979 to less than 8 percent today. The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage today is 15 percent below what it was in 1979. Several large industries, including trucking, airlines, telecommunications, and others, have been deregulated, often at a substantial cost to their workers. Many jobs in state and local government have been privatized and outsourced. Trade policy has put low- and middle-wage workers in the United States in direct competition with typically much lower-wage workers in the rest of the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA dysfunctional immigration system has left a growing share of our immigrant population at the mercy of their employers, while increasing competitive pressures on low-wage workers born in the United States. And all of these changes have played out in a macroeconomic context that has – with the exception of the last half of the 1990s – placed a much greater emphasis on controlling inflation than achieving full employment. In our view, these policy decisions, rooted in politics, are the main explanations for the decline in the economy’s ability to generate good jobs.","brand":"ReadCycle","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47174742081776,"sku":"2940016041155","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940016041155_p0.jpg?v=1763628357","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940016041155","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}