Image: Jason Hargrove via Flickr (CC-BY-NC-2.0)

by Nancy Galambos and Harvey Krahn

When we read about youth, titles like Generation X, Generation Me and Arrested Adulthood tend to paint an alarming picture of the younger generation in their 20s as directionless, floundering, and less likely than previous generations to become mature and productive citizens. In contrast, books like The Boomerang Age and Emerging Adulthood argue that more recent socio-demographic trends indicative of instability in education, employment, and living arrangements, as young people move from one job to another, seesaw between education and work, switch from one educational program to the next, and sometimes come back home to live with their parents are relatively benign.

There is no doubt that post-baby boom birth cohorts (labelled as Generation X, Generation Y, the millennials, and so on) have experienced such fluctuations, but are these experiences interpretable as floundering or do they merely reflect the freedom of young people in western societies today to explore their options until they find the best fit? Answers are important because we need to know whether shifts in how young people navigate the transition to adulthood are cause for concern and require appropriate policy interventions or whether they are simply reflective of a new and adaptive way of entering adulthood. In new research, we argued that fluctuations in employment and education statuses cannot be interpreted negatively as floundering, or more positively as exploring, unless we know something about their longer-term employment and career outcomes.

Read More

Image: Johannes Jansson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

by Jake Rosenfeld

The delivery service start-up Jet.com promises many things to its employees, including unlimited vacation, generous parental leave, and meals provided by the company. Many Silicon Valley firms now provide similar perks as they seek to entice workers in a tightening labor market.

What sets Jet.com apart from its peers is the promise of something ostensibly less tangible: financial transparency. The firm offers its salaried employees real-time financial information detailing how the company is performing. Why share such valuable data? The practice is part of the firm’s effort to cultivate a culture of transparency, which, CEO Marc Lore hopes, will engender greater worker trust, happiness, and, in the end, productivity.

Workers and their representatives have fought to “open the books” of their firms for generations. In the United Auto Worker’s strike against General Motors in 1945-1946, union leader Walter Reuther demanded access to the company’s financial information. GM resisted, as did many firms then and as many continue to today, classifying company financial data – information like detailed revenue reports – as proprietary, and off-limits to employees.

The existence of the exceptional companies like Jet.com, who preach and practice transparency, allows us to examine what, if any, tangible consequences financial transparency has on productivity, company profits and worker pay.

While it is too soon to tell whether Lore’s gamble on transparency generates a happier, more productive workforce, my research with fellow sociologist Patrick Denice suggests it could lead to a higher-paid workforce – an outcome Lore may not have intended.

Read More

Image: Reuters via Newsweek.

by David Jacobs

“It is our job to glory in inequality and to see that talents and abilities are given vent and ex­pres­sion for the benefit of us all.” –  Margaret Thatcher

“A quick glance at the curves describing wealth inequality or the capital/income ratio is enough to show that politics is ubiquitous and that economics and political changes are inextricably in­ter­twined and must be studied together.” – Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 577

What factors best explain the remarkable expansion in U.S. income inequality?  In a striking re­ver­sal in the long trend toward greater economic equality in the affluent democracies since 1900, the dif­fer­enc­es in U.S. family incomes accelerated sharply after 1980 (see Fig­ure 1) after experiencing only modest growth.  This de­par­ture, although present in other wealthy demo­cracies, has been less pro­noun­ced else­where.  Yet as the quotes above suggest, it is difficult to be­lieve that po­litics did not have a major influence on the rapid increase in income inequality after 1980.  To date, however, little syste­matic evidence for such a claim has been avail­able.  Yet political ac­counts are likely to mat­ter more in some per­iods as gov­ern­mental con­trol shifts from one political party to another.

Figure 1 –   Fluctuations in U.S. Income Inequality, 1951 – 2011

Note: Larger values denote greater inequality; vertical lines denote partisan shifts in the Presidency and “Rep” stands for Republican while “Dem” stands for Democratic Presidents.

With these as­sumptions in mind, Lindsey My­ers and I con­ducted a longitudinal analysis of the factors that pro­duced yearly changes in family in­come inequality from 1951 to 2010. We find that the steep decline in union strength and deregulation of the financial industry that occurred after Ronald Reagan’s presidency began in 1981 has contributed to the stagnation of middle incomes and the rise of income inequality.

Read More