What were reading on July 24th, 2019

Black men have a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by the police

Black men between 20 and 35 years old have a one in 1000 chance of being killed by the police. The research comes from a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The researchers used news reports and other publicly available sources to collect the information.  The FBI, state and local police do not record police killings by race.

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Black women start business in record numbers

We just found a report from the KC fed on Black women in business. The report is here.  The report has no date but was based on focus groups conducted in 2017 in Kansas City, MO.

The survey found that the number of Black women owned businesses increased by 179% during the period from 2002 to 2012.  Business owned by Black women were concentrated in service, healthcare and social assistance and administrative support. Many businesses were small, employed few people and were community or passion related. The business owners reported trouble securing financing.

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Economist report manufacturing job losses 20 year late

In the "Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted" category, three economists report that multi-national corporations (MNC) were responsible for most of the manufacturing job losses in the US after China joined the WTO in 2001.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has the story.

The story is sad on a lot of levels:

1) It's the year 2019 and they are coming out with the paper now.  Not 20 or 30 years ago when it would have been useful to prevent the huge loss of good paying jobs in the US..  So there is a huge speed problem in academia related to useful policy research.

2) Second, the researchers themselves could not even get the data. They had to develop their own data set. In other words, corporations didn't want the data collected and the government went along with them. We all looked the other way. This is another instance of the Senators and US représentatives directly hurting our economy by using their power to block data collection.

3) Third, the loss of good jobs played a direct role in electing president Trump. The large amount of the loss which was not replaced was in the US midwest. Coastal cities replaced much of their manufacturing with real estate, finance and technology.

4) Fourth, We all kind of knew what was happening.  This writer was laid of twice during this same time period. It's just surprising how little was done to stop this devastating process.

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Tax cut in 2017 causes huge increase in deficit

The C ongressional Research Service has reviewed the 2017 tax cut. The tax act of 2017 added $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the long term, with only a short bump up in GDP from it's long term trend of 2.1%.  A large amount of money was repatriated to the US and then used for dividends.

Congressional Research Service preliminary report on Tax Act of 2017

Consensus view of economists is that deficits don't matter

However, most economist have moved to the position that deficits, below a certain level of GDP, don't matter.  They believe the US is below that level.  Instead the deficits were and are used a political weapon again government spending and entitlement programs.

Deficits don't matter #1: Bloomberg
Deficits don't matter #1: Quartz 
Deficits don't matter #2: The Conversation

A little annoyed that articles always run a picture of the photogenic AOC
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Let's beat up Labor

The Trump administration is one of the most anti-labor presidencies of all time -- LA Times. I just can't figure out how they get away with it.

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Tipping's Racist Past -- Article

Rev. Dr. William Barber writes about tipping as racist in Politico. His goal is to abolish the tipped wage.  Herman Cain, Trumps favorite Black person, gets a mention in the story so you know it's good.

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Amazon hates cashiers

Amazon is spending on  store without cashiers. According to the BLS, as of May 2018, there were about 3.6 million cashiers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-18/amazon-s-most-ambitious-research-project-is-a-convenience-store

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Looking at Black women's economic status

Black women's equal pay day is August 22, 2019. In other words, they have to work until August of the following year (2019) to earn what White men earned in 2018.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/06/08/report-black-women-are-working-hard-but-our-country-is-not-working-for-them/?noredirect=on


Black / White wage gap may be due to Whites not sharing knowledge on the job with Blacks.  The study notes how difficult it is for Blacks in a predominately White environment.

Again on CEPR Vox. 


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Other stuff

This one is a must read

New York Times 1619 Project on the impact of slavery

We also had to go back to Raj Chetty's article on inter generational wealth.

Depressing as always.

Mr. Chetty also promotes a big data website on economic inequality called

Equality of Opportunity

A nice safe name to be sure. I guess "Reparation Now" or "Welfare for the Undeserving" were taken.