News

California – and particularly Los Angeles County – are leading the nation in non-Anglo business ownership, a new Census Bureau report says.

Los Angeles County, Calif., led the nation in the number of Hispanic-, Asian-, and American Indian and Alaska Native-owned firms in 2012, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. It also ranked second in the number of black or African American- and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander-owned firms (after Cook County, Ill., and Honolulu County, Hawaii, respectively).

According to official poverty statistics, 16.4% of Californians lacked enough resources—about $24,000 per year for a family of four—to meet basic needs in 2014. The rate has declined a little from 16.8% in 2013, but it is well above the recent low of 12.4% reached in 2007. Moreover, the official poverty line does not account for California’s housing costs—or other key family needs and resources.

However, the official poverty rate calculated for the report used a half-century-old method that makes no allowance for regional differences in either incomes or living costs. The bureau has developed a “supplemental measure” that takes those and other factors into account and by that method, California’s poverty rate is the nation’s highest at 24.3 percent, largely due to its extraordinarily high housing costs.

Despite a sharp drop in the price of solar panels and innovative financing plans that have brought the technology to many middle income households over the past decade, it is still seen as a luxury only rich, mostly white, consumers can afford. . . Data from U.S. online solar marketplace EnergySage showed that just 4 percent of more than 10,000 people actively shopping for solar systems on its site identified themselves as black, with 11 percent split between Hispanic and Asian shoppers. Those who identified themselves as white made up 73 percent of the shoppers and the rest did not declare their race. EnergySage said nearly 80 percent of shoppers reported household incomes of $50,000 or more and nearly a third declared incomes of $125,000 or more.

Rapid growth of upper-income households, coupled with an increase in less-educated low earners, has driven the decline of the middle-income population to a hair below 50% of the total this year, Pew found. In 1971, the middle class accounted for 61% of the population, and it has been declining steadily since.

These projections reveal the significant impact the aging population will have on labor demand and labor supply. Health-care jobs will grow fastest, and nearly one-quarter of the labor force will be older than prime working-age (a term that might itself need to be retired). More generally, job growth will favor women and those with advanced degrees, while men with high school degrees may face the biggest labor-market challenges.

After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.

The Census Bureau’s 2012 decision to begin releasing an alternative measure of poverty that included cost of living has appeared to have far-reaching effects in California as politicians, community leaders and residents react to the new measure’s depiction of the Golden State as the most impoverished place in America.

A huge growth in the over-65 population, from about 4.5 million today to more than 11 million by 2050 – nearly a quarter of the state’s residents then – will disrupt labor markets as it imposes major new costs on taxpayers for health care and other services.

About 14.3 percent of Californians between 65 and 75 worked full time in 2014, up from 7.5 percent in 2000. As baby boomers become seniors, that translates into almost 440,000 senior citizens working full time last year in California, more than double the number from 2000.

In sum, men and women of all ages experienced a rise in LTU after the Great Recession. In this essay, we document the lesser-known fact that LTU affected older women more strongly. This group experienced a remarkable change: from a low pre-recession LTU-to-unemployment ratio of 14 percent to a post-recession rate of 50 percent.

Perhaps because of their economics background, Ms. Case and Mr. Deaton theorized that this overdose epidemic may be tied—at least in part—to “economic insecurity.” This claim is hard to establish but, seeing how Mr. Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics less than a month ago, worth considering in detail.

For decades, the U.S. government has used the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) to calculate several of the most important measures of national well-being. The CPS reaches roughly 100,000 households each year and captures important information about poverty and other things. And that’s a problem, because, over time, the survey has become a misrepresentation of what is actually happening.

According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, also finds that the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.