Conf Board on living standards

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Sat Jul 1 11:08:23 PDT 2000



>
>By JACOB M. SCHLESINGER
>Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
>WASHINGTON -- The long economic boom has pushed unemployment to its
>lowest level in decades, but more jobs don't necessarily mean higher
>living standards.
>
>A new report shows that an American holding a full-time job in the
>late 1990s was still as likely to fall below the official poverty
>line as a similar worker in the 1980s, and more likely to do so than
>a full-time worker in the 1970s.
>
>"Working full-time and year-round is, for more and more Americans,
>not enough," the Conference Board asserts in a study titled "Does a
>Rising Tide Lift All Boats?" "This is not the outcome one would
>expect from the longest economic expansion in economic history,"
>adds the report to be released Thursday by the New York-based
>nonprofit business research center.
>
>Some economists said the Conference Board report was flawed...

Not flawed, exactly, but incomplete. It speaks to the distribution of market income, and forgets that we do have a feeble and anemic--but effective (even if in some ways less effective than it used to be)--social insurance state.

Brad DeLong



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