This New York Times chart misleads by not noting that the number of working-age whites fell while that age group grew for other ethnicities.
Eduardo Porter used his column (New York Times, 12/13/16) to point out that Donald Trump got support from many whites who felt that they were being left behind. While there is evidence to support this view, one item in the piece may have misled readers.
The column includes a table showing the change in employment since the start of the recession for white, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. While the latter three groups all had increases in employment of at least 2 million, employment for whites fell by almost 1 million.
This can be misleading, since the main reason for the difference is that the number of working-age whites actually fell during this period, while the number of working-age people in these other groups rose. The Census Bureau reported that there were 125.2 million non-Hispanic whites between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2010. In 2015, this number was down to 122.9 million.
By contrast, the number of non-Hispanic African-Americans rose from 24.2 million to 25.6 million. The number of Asian-Americans in this age band rose from 10.1 million to 11.8 million. There was a considerably larger rise in the number of Hispanics over this period.
In short, this was a period of weak employment growth, but workers from all demographic groups suffered. The numbers in this piece give a misleading picture in implying that white workers suffered disproportionately.
* * *
Despite accounting for less than 15 percent of the labor force, Hispanics got more than half of the net additional jobs. Blacks and Asians also gained millions more jobs than they lost. But whites, who account for 78 percent of the labor force, lost more than 700,000 net jobs over the nine years.
The racial and ethnic divide is starker among workers in their prime. Whites ages 25 to 54 lost some 6.5 million jobs more than they gained over the period. Hispanics in their prime, by contrast, gained some 3 million jobs net, Asians 1.5 million and blacks 1 million….
This lopsided racial sorting of jobs is only one of the fault lines brought to the fore by the presidential election.
—Eduardo Porter, “Where Were Trump’s Votes? Where the Jobs Weren’t” (New York Times, 12/13/16)
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (12/15/16).
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Already happens: Capitalism destroys human labor force and goes to the next phase
http://bit.ly/1JPiUzp
Don’t subject yourself to NYT propaganda. Propaganda has become their main function.
Wonder if Trump will tweet this twaddle out?
My best guess would be that “white” people are less likely to accept temporary, casual non-union, minimum wage (if that), no-benefit lawn mowing, agricultural picking, fast food making, Amazon warehouse running, circular distributing, laundry working jobs than those not so “white.” Even the USPS now offers zero benefits to its new-hires for the first year, and makes those new-hires do the dirty work of exclusive Amazon deliveries on Sundays.
Pseudo-science is not my field, but do Canadians differentiate those of French and First Nation heritage as a different “race,” in the same way that we Exceptionals do in the US, with the “Hispanics?” I don’t ask in order to criticize Dean Baker–he’s just reporting what the NYT publishes. Separating people into rigid categories based on factors totally out of their individual control seems to be an effective means to contain and control such people, by those born into power.
And when can we expect Jeff Bezos (owner of Amazon) and his Washington Post to echo this startling, disturbing and shallow story, in its “news” section and editorial page?
I’m generally a fan of Dean Baker, but was frustrated by this particular piece.
Since his point has to do with proportionality rather than raw numbers, why couldn’t he simply tell us the number of net jobs gained or lost, say, per 10,000 or 100,000 workers in each category? Or (same thing) the per capita percentages?
Then we could judge at a glance how well or poorly the Times represented (or misrepresented) the facts.
agree entirely. a weak critique from normally spot-on Dean Baker. this post cries out for a corrected chart. the fact that there isn’t one makes me wonder whether it would support Dean’s point.
I agree about this article. I’m trying to verify some of the numbers for an assessment of this claim. However, the two Census Bureau links above are broken. Also, it states “There was a considerably larger rise in the number of Hispanics over this period.” How much? Why isn’t there a number associated with this? I’d love to have the raw numbers for population by race and jobs by race.
Has Dean Baker yet responded to the accurate critique of his analysis expressed by the previous commenters? If so, where is it? (I find it curious that yuo give a number of ways to communicate with the Times about the Porter piece but none for communication with Mr. Baker or FAIR about his piece.)
“…communicate…about the Porter piece…with FAIR”. I believe you just did.
More direct: FAIR, 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001, 212-633-6700, fair@fair.org. Source: fair.org/contact-fair (under “About” in the nav bar).
In a follow-up column, Dean Baker calculated the employment-to-population ratio for white and black Americans for 2007 and 2016 (the first 11 months of each): For whites, it declined by 2.0 percentage points; for blacks, 1.7 percentage points–virtually the same trajectory.
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/washington-post-passes-along-mistaken-information-on-white-black-employment-rates