The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) projects that between now and 2030 California will fall 1.1 million bachelor’s degrees short of workforce demand. Closing this gap will require substantial improvements in access to four-year colleges, transfer rates from community colleges, and completion rates among college students.
Economists seeking to explain slowing productivity growth have pointed to a downturn in global innovation. Overlooked in that debate is how hard it is to innovate in services, which are lapping up a growing share of consumers’ budgets as goods prices fall. Technology has transformed many services—think of TurboTax, for instance—but has left many sectors like education relatively untouched.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced in October, “In 2015 California’s farms and ranches received approximately $47 billion for their output. This represents a decrease of nearly 17 percent compared to 2014.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service said prior-year comparable receipts were $56.6 billion. That’s a revenue loss of $9.6 billion in a single year. . . It’s estimated that the average California farmer now is required to pay and be compliant with nearly 80 local, state, and federal regulatory agencies in order to grow food, fiber, and fuel for our nation’s citizens and the world.
In a ruling that has ramifications for land-use and water policy across the United States and California, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that scientists can draw on long-range climate projections to determine whether a species should be listed as threatened.
It’s often said that the U.S. has recovered more strongly from the last recession than most other developed nations. Data on jobs, though, suggest that’s not quite true. . . As of June, the G-7 as a whole had recovered almost completely, while the U.S. was only 60 percent back from its lowest point . . .
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s plan to reform the city’s three pension plans has received the backing from the Houston Police Department , Houston Fire Department and the Houston Municipal Employees, Turner said Monday. . . The plan is designed to eliminate $5.6 billion in unfunded pension liability within 30 years, but would also reduce benefits avoiding more than $2.5 billion in future costs, and include the issuance of at least $1 billion in bonds.
As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’ lives: scheduling.
California’s unrelenting economy refused to slow in September, amassing another 30,000 new jobs even as more people seeking work opted into the labor market, according to state data released Friday. . . “We are adding jobs at the two extremes, in higher paying industries and lower industries. Where we aren’t seeing stronger growth is in the middle,” Vitner said.
The largest actors union in Hollywood officially called a strike early Friday morning against several prominent video game companies after the two sides failed to reach an agreement on an increase in compensation for performers who do voice-over and motion-capture work for popular games.
The Los Angeles Unified school board on Tuesday refused to renew three Magnolia schools serving 1,400 sixth- through 12th-grade students, including Magnolia Science Academy campuses in Reseda and Van Nuys, as recommended by district staff. Hundreds of students, staff and other Magnolia supporters wore orange T-shirts at Tuesday’s meeting, with some holding signs that read “I stand for Magnolia” and “Stop School Closing.” . . . Both the Magnolia schools in the Valley were in the top 3 percent of all high schools in the nation, according to an April issue of U.S. News & World Report.
The union is trying to get a bigger raise than the 2.96 percent pay hike Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration is offering. Brown’s proposal would raise SEIU salaries by 12 percent over four years, but also require its members to begin paying a contribution toward their retiree health care costs.
The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries. . . Despite efforts of non-English-speaking nations to attract high quality workers, almost 75% of the total OECD highly skilled workforce in 2010 lived in the four main Anglo-Saxon countries—almost 40% in the U.S. alone. Around 70% of engineers in Silicon Valley and 60% of doctors in Perth, Australia, were foreign-born in 2010.
As factory floors become more automated and data-driven, companies such as Yaskawa America Inc. need computer engineers but often find themselves outgunned by Silicon Valley tech firms.
Here is the lesson: What some economists now call “secular stagnation” might better be termed “ordinary performance.” Most of the time, in most economies, incomes increase slowly, and living standards rise bit by bit. The extraordinary experience of the Golden Age left us with the unfortunate legacy of unrealistic expectations about our governments’ ability to deliver jobs, pay raises and steady growth.
They find the number of people earning at least $1,000 a year on personal businesses in the taxi, limousine and ground transportation industry has skyrocketed to 346,000 in 2014 (the latest available data) from 197,000 in 2009. The numbers seem to align with what the companies themselves have revealed: Uber, for example, was founded in 2009 and had 160,000 drivers by the end of 2014.