September 2, 2021

President Biden has said he wants to increase the benefits in a federal program for low-income children and adults with disabilities. But a long-running debate about the program is whether the direct cash assistance helps children when they grow up.

The Supplemental Security Income program, or SSI, clearly has immediate benefits. SSI provides nearly $800 in monthly cash payments and Medicaid health insurance to help parents care for their children and teenagers and manage their physical, cognitive, or behavioral disabilities. However, policy experts disagree on the program’s long-term effects.

Critics say it creates a negative dynamic if it causes poor parents, consciously or unconsciously, to lower their expectations for a child in order to preserve the payments. If the child has a relatively mild disability, the stigma might discourage educational achievements that would ultimately boost his earnings potential as an adult.

However, one analysis in a new study found no evidence that the future earning power of children receiving SSI was affected. This analysis compared kids whose benefits started before and after a 2001 administrative change that led to more benefit terminations.

A second analysis supported the argument made by SSI’s proponents that the program has broader long-term benefits for children. The additional financial resources enable parents to provide more of the educational experiences, nutritious meals, or stable home life that can improve their children’s future prospects.

To assess the merits of this long-term benefits story, the researcher used a different, more indirect approach. This approach was based on a medical exam for 18-year-old SSI recipients that was introduced in 1996 to determine whether their benefits would continue. The researcher compared the future earnings of the younger siblings in poor families in which the 18-year-olds did and did not lose their benefits.

When the 18-year-olds retained their SSI benefits, their younger siblings earned more as adults than the younger siblings in families that had lost benefits. This pattern held true both for the younger siblings who received SSI themselves and for the siblings who did not receive SSI. …Learn More

Research

May 6, 2021

As technology transforms the work world, jobs that were once routine might now require good interpersonal skills or the ability to quickly adjust to the situation at hand.

The people bearing the brunt of these challenges are the same people who were already at a disadvantage in the labor force: workers who never attended college.

New research on more than 700 occupations found that the types of jobs held by workers with only a high school education have become more difficult in recent years, which has sharply limited their job opportunities. The opposite is true for college graduates, whose jobs have gotten easier, opening up new opportunities for them.

“The changing nature of work over the past 15 years may have deepened inequality across educational groups,” according to the study funded by the U.S. Social Security Administration.

The data for this research came from an occupational database, as well as a one-time survey fielded by RAND in 2018 that asked workers to assess their current mix of natural abilities – as distinct from skills learned on the job – in four areas. The first area is cognitive abilities, which include communication and mathematical acuity. Physical abilities range from strength to flexibility. Sensory abilities include hearing and depth perception. Psychomotor refers to hand-eye coordination and fast reaction times.

The researchers first identified the abilities required to do more than 700 jobs held by the workers in the survey, as detailed in the federal government’s occupational database, and compared the current requirements with the 2003 requirements for each job.

The abilities required of workers with no more than a high school degree increased in all four categories. Construction workers are a good example. Their need for writing proficiency has increased dramatically. And today’s warehouse workers must move at breakneck speed to keep up with the sophisticated technology being used to fill orders for overnight delivery.

Contrast these workers to the college graduates, whose job requirements have lessened in three of the four categories. Only their need for sensory abilities, such as hearing and depth perception, has increased – and not by as much as the workers who didn’t go to college.

The researchers also found that the shifting job demands have very different implications for each group’s employment potential. …Learn More

Research

March 2, 2021

Blue-collar workers who end up applying for federal disability benefits find themselves in that position for a variety of interrelated reasons.

A dangerous or physically demanding job can either cause an injury or exacerbate a medical condition that could lead to a disability. And people with limited resources in childhood often develop health problems earlier in life, and their circumstances can limit their access to job opportunities, making them more likely to end up in dangerous or physically demanding jobs.

A new NBER study untangles all these factors to clarify who applies for disability and which applicants ultimately receive benefits through Social Security’s rigorous approval process.

Researchers at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin linked a survey of Americans 50 and older to occupational data describing the level of environmental and physical hazards they’ve faced during decades of working. Next, socioeconomic measures of their upbringing – the adults’ descriptions of their childhood health, education, and parents’ financial resources – were layered into the analysis. Finally, the researchers repeated the process, replacing childhood health with genetic data on their predispositions to various disabling illnesses.

Blue-collar and service workers are known to apply for federal disability benefits at higher rates than white-collar workers. But the researchers showed that low socioeconomic status in childhood – by limiting the options for less strenuous jobs – played an even bigger role than workplace demands in whether the workers applied for the benefits.

However, when it comes to who is approved for benefits, physical and mental job requirements were key – and socioeconomic status plays no role. This makes sense because the heart of Social Security’s approval process is a determination that a disabled person is unable to do his previous job or another job appropriate to his age and experience.

An applicants’ health is, by definition, always central to whether he qualifies for disability. The final step in the researchers’ analysis used genetic data to get a picture of the applicants’ underlying health – as distinct from the health problems originating from a disadvantaged childhood. …Learn More

Field Work

January 12, 2021

Something remarkable is happening in the economics profession. Top researchers in the field have begun arguing for policies to alleviate growing U.S. income and wealth inequality.

For decades, inequality wasn’t taken very seriously by economists. But that view “has changed dramatically,” said James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas at Austin, who moderated a Zoom panel at the annual meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations last week.

Inequality, Galbraith said, has “become one of the most important questions economists face.”

And COVID-19, argued Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, a panelist, “has brought out very forcefully the nature of the inequalities in our society” and has “exacerbated those inequalities.”

The pandemic’s effects include larger increases in unemployment for low-wage workers, who are disproportionately Black and Latino and often work for small businesses devastated by efforts to suppress the virus. In addition, front-line workers like home health aides and meat-packing workers are being exposed to the virus but don’t always have paid sick time. There are also growing concerns about the longevity gap and about a widening educational gap between students from poor and high-income neighborhoods resulting from online learning.

The economists, having agreed inequality is a problem, identified the myriad forces driving it. They range from the persistent segregation of Black and white neighborhoods to the ability of the wealthy to invest and accumulate more wealth, while wage workers can barely get by. In a cutthroat global economy, the decline of unions has also stripped workers of their ability to bargain with employers for higher wages, they said.

Another panelist, Teresa Ghilarducci, brought attention to the inequality that exists among retirees. This can be seen in the downward mobility many people experience after they retire and can no longer support the standard of living they had while they were working.

To address these complex problems, the economists said a comprehensive policy agenda is needed that includes beefing up Social Security benefits – the great equalizer – for disadvantaged retirees, more taxation of inheritances, educational equality at the preschool through college levels, sturdier social safety nets, and new labor rules that give workers back some of the power they have lost.

Another panelist, Jason Furman, former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, agrees that an array of policies will be required to combat inequality. But he also argued that the two major relief bills Congress passed last year – a total of $2.9 trillion – probably reduce inequality. …Learn More

November 24, 2020

How often do you eat red meat? Do you exercise regularly? Cancer in your family? Did you go to college?

These questions – among the varied and complex predictors of longevity – are packed into a calculator that will estimate how long you could live. The calculator was created by Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on longevity and the genetics of aging at Boston University.

Articles about the links between longevity and diet and lifestyle are perennial fodder for the popular press and health magazines. But Dr. Perls’ research dives deeper – into genetics.

In his work with geneticists, statisticians and computer scientists, he has studied the connections between genetics and people with exceptional longevity – nonagenerians (people living into their 90s), centenarians (living past 100), and super-centenarians (living past 110). His research has predicted, with a high level of accuracy, who makes it to the most advanced old ages based on hundreds of their genetic markers.

An interesting finding for women’s longevity involves the age their children were born: “Twenty percent of female centenarians had children after the age of 40 compared with 5 percent of [all] women from their birth cohort,” according to Dr. Perls.

His calculator also asks about attitude, specifically whether you’re aging well or dreading old age. Indeed, some research has found that optimism may contribute to a long life. Ike Newcomer, who was 107 when AARP shot the above video a few years ago, revealed a sunny disposition.

“I can’t really think of which was my best day,” Newcomer said. “They were all good.”

Dr. Perls’ calculator gave me some good news – I could live to 95. It would be nice if I take after my maternal grandmother, two of her brothers, my maternal great grandfather and a couple of great great aunts. All of them lived well into their 90s.

How long will you live? It takes just a few minutes to use the calculator – try it, if you dare. …Learn More

October 13, 2020

The COVID-19 recession demonstrates an axiom of economics. Black unemployment always exceeds the rate for whites, the spikes are higher in recessions, and, in a recovery, employment recovers more slowly.

A record number of Black Americans were employed in 2019. But when the economy seized up in the spring, their unemployment rate soared to 17 percent, before floating down to a still-high 12.1 percent in September.  Meanwhile, the white unemployment rate dropped in half, to 7 percent.

The much higher peaks in the unemployment rate for Blacks than whites and the slower recovery are baked into the economy.

This phenomenon occurred during the “jobless recovery” from the 2001 downturn. When the economy had finally restored all of the jobs lost in that recession, the Black jobless rate remained stubbornly higher.

And after the 2008-2009 recession, as the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center accurately predicted at the time, Black unemployment hovered at “catastrophic levels” longer than the white rate did.  This disparity is now the issue in the COVID-19 recession.

Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a Boston College economist who writes a blog about inequality, gives three interrelated reasons for Black workers’ higher unemployment rates.

First, “The U.S. still has a tremendous amount of education inequality, and the unemployment rate is always higher for people with less education,” he wrote in an email. Despite the big strides by Black men and women to obtain college degrees, roughly 30 percent have degrees, compared with more than 40 percent of whites, he said.

Second, Black workers without degrees are vulnerable because they are more likely to earn an hourly wage. An hourly paycheck means that a company can cut costs by simply reducing or eliminating a worker’s hours. “It’s much easier to lay off hourly workers, whose employment is more flexible by nature, than salaried workers,” Sanzenbacher said. …Learn More

Research

August 11, 2020

The X-rays look very similar for two 60-year-old women with arthritic knees.

But the less-educated woman has more severe pain than the person who graduated college.

A new study of men and women finds that the degree of knee-joint deterioration visible in an X-ray isn’t the primary reason one person experiences more knee pain than someone else. Instead, the overwhelming reason is knee strain caused by obesity and the toll taken by physically demanding jobs – both of which are more common among less-educated workers.

The researchers focused on knee arthritis, because musculoskeletal pain is one of the leading causes of Social Security benefit payments to people who develop a disability and can no longer work.

Understanding what’s behind the pain differences is important, because the need for workers in certain jobs requiring physical strength – home health aides, janitors, and construction workers are examples – is expected to increase in the future.

Given this growing demand and predictions of a continued rise in obesity, the researchers conclude that “pain is expected to contribute to an increase” over time in the percentage of the population who will be impaired by their pain.

The people in the study fell into three educational groups: a high school degree or less; some college; or a four-year college degree. The researchers also had information about their occupations, as well as several data sources that gauge the severity of their knee pain, including the ability to do things like walking a quarter of a mile.

Knee arthritis worsens with age. However, a surge in reports of severe knee pain came about a decade earlier for people with no more than a high school degree than the surge for college graduates. …Learn More