South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Tracking Poverty And Policy

A new interactive graphic prepared by Demos tracks key statistics related to poverty and anti-poverty policies from 1967 to the present. Click on the image below to access the resource.

Around The Dial – July 16, 2012

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• The New York Times reports on state budget choices.
• The Washington Post documents declining tax rates.
• Politico unpacks the politics of food stamps.
• Beat the Press considers “outsourcing, offshoring, and the presidential campaign.”

A Gap Of Their Own Creation?

Writing in the online edition of The New York Times, Peter Cappelli of the University of Pennsylvania argues that “if there’s a gap, blame it on the employer.”

In the midst of the greatest surplus of talent in modern times, many employers nevertheless say that they cannot find people to hire. For every anecdote about employers who cannot find good candidates, though, there are a dozen stories of highly qualified candidates struggling even to be seen by employers.
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Surveys of actual hiring managers have shown for decades that they are not complaining about academic skills among applicants. Few are interested in hiring recent graduates because they do not want to train them. The candidates they want are already employed, doing the job in question someplace else. What is in short supply is work experience specific to the immediate job, and no one wants to give anyone that experience, a Catch-22.

Job Openings In May

From the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the May version of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) …

The May Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, provides evidence that the recovery continues to stagnate. While job openings in May increased by 195,000, unemployment in May increased by 220,000 …. This means that the “job-seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—fell slightly (by one-tenth), to 3.5-to-1.
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The ratio has been slowly but steadily improving since reaching its peak of 6.7-to-1 in summer 2009. However, the odds are still stacked strongly against job seekers; a job-seekers ratio above 3-to-1 means that for more than two out of three unemployed workers, there simply are no jobs.

Around The Dial – July 13, 2012

Economic policy reports, blog postings, and media stories of interest:

• Jared Bernstein looks at “The Other America” some 50 years later.
• Bloomberg reports on the consequences of student loan debt.
• Naked Capitalism discusses “America’s broken jobs engine.”
• Off the Charts notes “the difference Medicaid makes.”
• Policy Shop analyzes unemployment among young adults.