Weekend reading: April Fool’s Day edition (but no joke, this is good reading)

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth has published this week and the second is work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.

Equitable Growth round-up

The U.S. labor share has declined quite a bit over the past 15 years. But it’s actually increased since 2012, in part due to the continued economic recovery. Does this mean we can return the labor share to its old levels through strong economic growth alone?

Social insurance isn’t just a form of redistribution. It is, unsurprisingly, also a form of insurance. Programs like Medicaid don’t just insure against the risk of deprivation, but also encourage workers to move into riskier yet higher-paying jobs.

You’ve almost certainly heard of the gig economy. But you probably haven’t heard concrete numbers on its size or importance to the labor market. New research shows that reality is far from the caricature we often hear about Uber and its ilk.

The number of good-paying union jobs and manufacturing jobs have fallen sharply in the United States over the past several decades. Ben Zipperer explains why this downturn has hurt African American workers more than white workers.

Links from around the web

Discussions of higher education among policymakers and the media are dominated by talk about the experiences and challenges that students have when they apply to and attend selective four-year universities. But the typical college-going American has a very different experience. Ben Casselman describes how this skews the public debate about higher ed. [fivethirtyeight]

Larry Summers works through why record-high corporate profits may be a problem. “Suggestive evidence of increases in monopoly power,” he writes, “makes me think that the issue of growing market power deserves increased attention from economists and especially from macroeconomists.” [larrysummersdotcom]

There’s been a significant rise in the number of contractors and temps over the past decade, larger than the rise in overall employment from 2005 to 2015. This trend poses a number of big questions—specifically about the state of social insurance and how much of it will be shifted onto workers, writes Neil Irwin. [the upshot]

The Federal Reserve has a large impact on the U.S. economy, but you wouldn’t know that by the debates presidential candidates are having about the state of the economy. The public would be better served by the candidates talking about the role of the central bank. Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, offers some questions on the topic. [bloomberg view]

Speaking of the Federal Reserve, some commentators have worried that Congress is increasingly posing a threat to the independence of the central bank. But is that sense borne out by the data? Carola Binder takes a look and says it doesn’t look like it does. [quantitative ease]

Friday figure

Figure from “How the student debt crisis affects African Americans and Latinos” by Marshall Steinbaum and Kavya Vaghul.