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Historically, California’s great strength was the diversity of its economy, stretching from high-tech and aerospace to finance, entertainment, energy, basic manufacturing and homebuilding. Yet, during the most recent boom, the growth of high-wage job growth largely took place in one region — the Bay Area — while other sectors generally stagnated or shrank. . . . Perhaps most damaging of all, the allure of the tech boom has been used to justify Sacramento’s crushing regulatory and tax regime. The state’s strong performance since 2010 has convinced many in the political class and the media that business climate does not matter. It has made apologists able to ignore some 10,000 businesses that have left or expanded outside of the state, many of them employing middle- and working-class people. High-tech and entertainment are great industries to have, even at slower growth rates, but they cannot long carry such a diverse state with the highest poverty rate in the country and severe affordability challenges. California has been largely lulled to sleep by a now fading boom. We could experience a very rude awakening that will cause havoc to the state budget, produce a potential housing correction and challenge communities across the state.

For the second year in a row, the number of babies delivered in the U.S. fell in 2016, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. For some groups of women, the birth rate reached record lows.

For months, I’ve planned to write a column on the future of the U.S. labor market. Stacked on my desk are reports on “the gig economy,” “independent workers,” “contingent workers,” “freelancers” and the like. All signify a new, less secure labor market. Workers won’t have long-lasting career jobs, as the old post-World War II employment model promised. Now it’s survival of the fittest. Workers who can adapt to constant change will thrive. As for everyone else, tough luck. I never wrote that column. The main reason is that I never felt certain that this widely prophesied labor market would prevail. Indeed, the postwar employment model might make a comeback. Demographics — the ongoing retirement of the massive baby-boom generation — would make experienced and competent workers prized resources. Because the labor force would be growing only slowly, many companies would try to stabilize their employment by offering career jobs with better wages and benefits. I still don’t know which of these models will triumph: the first reflecting a management belief that workers must be hired and fired as business conditions dictate; the second based on the notion that good workers will be scarce for the foreseeable future and smart companies will do their best to train and retain them.

But the shortage is particularly problematic in places such as Kosciusko County, where the unemployment rate rests at 2 percent. Of the county’s 41,136 adults who can work, 40,311 are employed, according to government statistics. This region — a land of clear lakes, duck farms and medical device makers — escaped the industrial decline that rocked other communities throughout the Rust Belt. It prospered, thanks to a local industry that proved largely immune to competition from China and Mexico. But without more people to grow Warsaw’s business, the chances of companies relocating is “extraordinarily high,” said Michael Hicks, a labor economist at Indiana’s Ball State University

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in May, the lowest in 16 years, so teens started looking for summer jobs in the best labor market since the tech boom of the early 2000s. The May unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds was 14.3 percent, but teens usually find it harder to find jobs than their more experienced elders. Back in 2009, the teenage jobless rate hit 27 percent. 

A think tank founded by San Francisco billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer to find solutions for income inequality in California released a sweeping report Thursday outlining the root causes behind the state’s widening wage gap and how Californians should go about closing it.

The report, produced by the Fair Shake Commission on Income Inequality in California, represents largely a collection of long-standing liberal policy positions and talking points. Steyer has previously insisted that creating and chairing the commission was not tied to his exploration of a possible 2018 gubernatorial run. But political strategists said it was difficult to divorce the group’s mission statement — and Steyer’s populist projects on issues like high gasoline prices and climate change — from the looming election.

But top economists now are pointing to another explanation. Women seem to be leaving the workforce for some of the same reasons men are: Middle-class jobs are in short supply and working at the bottom pays less than it used to. Single women without children drove most of the downturn in women’s workforce participation from 1999 through 2007, according to a study by Professor Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University. Those women don’t have to care for a child and they aren’t counting on a partner to provide for them. They are, Moffitt said, “the same as a lot of men … even though it sounds a little strange to make that analogy.” They’re also staring down the same long odds as men who lost their footing in an economy in which low-skill jobs that pay well have all been shipped abroad or obliterated by technology.

The Fair Shake Commission report is an effort to help build a consensus about how we can come together to meet our common challenges. By coming together to generate ideas to help our working people thrive, we can show the nation and the world that American ideals are still alive and well, and are not bound by race, color, or creed.

This report offers ideas to level the playing field and to create opportunity for all Californians. It is borne from the understanding that a more inclusive, diverse California is key to a stronger future and that more inclusive prosperity leads to more, not less, economic growth.

Using panel data on individual labor income histories from 1957 to 2013, we document two empirical facts about the distribution of lifetime income in the United States.  First, from the cohort that entered the labor market in 1967 to the cohort that entered in 1983, median lifetime income of men declined by 10%–19%. We find little-to-no rise in the lower three-quarters of the percentiles of the male lifetime income distribution during this period. Accounting for rising employer-provided health and pension benefits partly mitigates these findings but does not alter the substantive conclusions.  For women, median lifetime income increased by 22%–33% from the 1957 to the 1983 cohort, but these gains were relative to very low lifetime income for the earliest cohort.  Much of the difference between newer and older cohorts is attributed to differences in income during the early years in the labor market. Partial life-cycle profiles of income observed for cohorts that are currently in the labor market indicate that the stagnation of lifetime incomes is unlikely to reverse. Second, we find that inequality in lifetime incomes has increased significantly within each gender group. However, the closing lifetime gender gap has kept overall lifetime inequality virtually flat. The increase within gender groups is largely attributed to an increase in inequality at young ages, and partial life-cycle income data for younger cohorts indicate that the increase in inequality is likely to continue. Overall, our findings point to the substantial changes in labor market outcomes for younger workers as a critical driver of trends in both the level and inequality of lifetime income over the past 50 years.

In this era of anti-Trump resistance, many progressives see California as a model of enlightenment. The Golden State’s post-2010 recovery has won plaudits in the progressive press from the New York Times’s Paul Krugman, among others. Yet if one looks at the effects of the state’s policies on key Democratic constituencies— millennials, minorities, and the poor—the picture is dismal. A recent United Way study found that close to one-third of state residents can barely pay their bills, largely due to housing costs. When adjusted for these costs, California leads all states—even historically poor Mississippi—in the percentage of its people living in poverty.

“The bottom line: If you see a growing Latino middle class, you will see a growing Latino representation in government,” said Mike Madrid, a veteran political strategist and author of a study by the newly formed California Latino Economic Institute. The CLEI report, which looks into economic as well as political issues, was jointly commissioned by the Legislature’s Latino Caucus and the California Business Roundtable.

The Los Angeles political establishment and media is virtually unanimous in its praise for the now quarter century old rail system. Yet, despite more than $15 billion being spent on rail transit the already meager levels of transit commuting in the city have fallen further, while solo driving has risen to an all time high. Unless platitudes are more important than results, rail’s success is a false narrative. People are driving more and using transit less according to the American Community Survey for 2015.

The fates of the less-educated and those who graduate from universities diverge in dire ways. Middle-aged white Americans without four-year degrees are at increasing risk of dying, a well-documented trend driven not only by drug use but also by alcoholism, suicide, and slowing progress against heart disease and cancer. Outcomes may worsen further as millennials—Johnson’s generation—grow older.

Older Americans have experienced dramatic gains in life expectancy in recent decades, but an emerging literature reveals that these gains are accumulating mostly to those at the top of the income distribution. We explore how growing inequality in life expectancy affects lifetime benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and other programs and how this phenomenon interacts with possible program reforms. We first project that life expectancy at age 50 for males in the two highest income quintiles will rise by 7 to 8 years between the 1930 and 1960 birth cohorts, but that the two lowest income quintiles will experience little to no increase over that time period. This divergence in life expectancy will cause the gap between average lifetime program benefits received by men in the highest and lowest quintiles to widen by $130,000 (in $2009) over this period. Finally we simulate the effect of Social Security reforms such as raising the normal retirement age and changing the benefit formula to see whether they mitigate or enhance the reduced progressivity resulting from the widening gap in life expectancy.

California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different. On one side is the much-celebrated, post-industrial, coastal California, beneficiary of both the Tech Boom 2.0 and a relentlessly inflating property market. The other California, located in the state’s interior, is still tied to basic industries like homebuilding, manufacturing, energy and agriculture. It is populated largely by working- and middle-class people who, overall, earn roughly half that of those on the coast.