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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JUNE 13, 2016
In US, economic averages miss big picture
By CHRISTOPHER S.
RUGABER
Associated Press
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Doz-
ens of FedEx jets queue up for
takeoff at the airport here. Beale
Street, the heart of the music dis-
trict, hums with tourists. Yet the
empty storefronts in Memphis’
moribund downtown and the
cash-advance shops strewn near
its highways tell another story.
It’s a tale of two cities, all
in one place. And it’s a tale
of two Americas: the one that
national averages indicate has
all but recovered from the Great
Recession and the one lost in the
statistics.
The pattern is evident in cit-
ies and towns across Amer-
ica, from Memphis to Colorado
Springs, Colorado, from Wich-
ita to Jacksonville: The national
numbers aren’t capturing the
experience of many typical peo-
ple in typical communities.
A key reason is that pay and
wealth are lowing dispropor-
tionately to the rich, skewing
the data used to measure eco-
nomic health — and producing
an economy on paper that most
Americans don’t recognize in
their own lives. That disconnect
has fueled much of the frustra-
tion and anxiety that have pro-
pelled the insurgent presiden-
tial campaigns of Donald Trump
and Bernie Sanders.
Worried about the
economy
Again and again, primary
voters who were most worried
about the economy told exit
pollsters that they had cast their
ballots for Trump or Sanders,
according to Edison Research,
which conducted the surveys on
behalf of The Associated Press
and television networks.
Trump’s candidacy, in par-
ticular, has been driven by sup-
port in some of the most eco-
nomically distressed regions in
the country, where jobs have
been automated, eliminated, or
moved to other states and coun-
tries. It’s in these places that the
outsider message of an uncon-
ventional candidate promising a
return to the way things used to
be resonates most.
Mike Williams voted for
Trump in Tennessee’s March
primary, which the billionaire
won easily. To many, it would
seem that Williams is doing
pretty well — he earns $22 an
hour as a maintenance worker
at an Owens-Corning factory,
along with health care and retire-
ment beneits. But his hourly
pay has only recently returned to
where it was a decade ago, when
he worked as a welder.
“I feel like I’m going back-
ward rather than forward,” Wil-
liams, 51, said on a recent after-
noon after inishing his shift.
One reason he backed
Trump, he said, is that he feels
less secure than in the past,
when more manufacturing work
was available.
“I remember when you
could quit a job today and go
to work somewhere else tomor-
row,” Williams said. “There was
always someone hiring.”
The depth of that kind of
insecurity after seven years of
national economic expansion has
caught many observers off guard.
“The political reaction to the
economy leads me to wonder
if we’re looking at the wrong
things,” said Carl Tannenbaum,
chief economist at Northern
Trust and former economist
at the Federal Reserve. “The
averages certainly don’t tell the
whole story.”
Income, job growth
Consider incomes for the
average U.S. household. They
ticked up 0.7 percent from
2008 to 2014, after taking inla-
tion into account. But even that
scant increase relected mainly
the rise in income for the rich-
est tenth of households, which
pulled up the average. For
most others, incomes actually
decreased — as much as 6 per-
cent for the bottom 20 percent,
at a time when the economy was
mostly recovering.
Or consider employment.
The U.S. economy has added
a healthy average of roughly
200,000 jobs a month since
2011. Yet most have been
either high-paying or low-pay-
ing positions. By the end of
2015, the nation still had fewer
middle-income jobs than it did
before the recession, accord-
ing to the Georgetown Univer-
sity Center on Education and the
Workforce.
That relects what econo-
mists call the “hollowing out”
of the workforce, as traditional
mid-level positions such as
ofice administrators, bookkeep-
ers, and factory assembly-line
workers are cut in recessions
and never fully recover their
previous levels of employment.
Part-time jobs surged in the
recession, too, and remained
high in the recovery, even while
AP Photo/Karen Pulfer Focht
Pedestrians walk past a “for sale” sign on Elvis Presley
Boulevard in Memphis, Tenn., in May.
full-time work was slower to
return. The number of full-time
jobs has risen just 1.3 percent
since December 2007, when the
recession oficially began. Part-
time positions are up more than
12 percent.
In Memphis, hiring resumed
after the recession and the
unemployment rate has dropped
to match the national igure of 5
percent. But jobs in low-paying
industries, such as retail, restau-
rants and hotels, are the only
category to have fully recovered
from the recession, according
to Moody’s Analytics. Higher-
and middle-paying jobs still trail
their pre-recession levels.
In Millington, a Memphis
suburb where Trump held a rally
in February at a military airield,
residents complain that most of
the available jobs are in the fast-
food chains that dot Highway
51, the main thoroughfare.
The rebound from the reces-
sion has been felt in vastly dif-
ferent ways not only by income
levels but across geographic
lines. Areas like Las Vegas
that still bear deep scars from
the housing crisis have lagged
behind the nation’s recovery. So
have cities like Memphis that
need robust consumer spending
to fuel growth at the shipping
and logistics irms that form the
backbone of its economy.
By contrast, cities like Seat-
tle, Denver and Austin, Texas,
with heavy concentrations of
information technology, man-
agement consulting or other
highly paid services, have
enjoyed a disproportionate share
of the job and income growth. In
other words, the richest places in
the country are making the econ-
omy look better than it actually
is, while places like Memphis
stagnate.
In the irst half of the recov-
ery, jobs grew 5.6 percent
nationwide. Yet in the wealthi-
est one-ifth of zip codes, hiring
jumped 11.2 percent, accord-
ing to the Economic Innovation
Group think tank. For the rest of
the country, total jobs increased
just 3.3 percent.
“It’s hard to ind an average
city,” Tannenbaum says. “There
just aren’t a whole lot right in the
middle.”
The same is true for house-
holds. These data suggest that
the post-World War II trend of
a steadily growing middle class,
lifted by broader national pros-
perity, is reversing.
Shrinking middle class
Slightly fewer than half of
American adults now fall in
the middle-class camp, accord-
ing to the Pew Research Cen-
ter, a vast shift. In 1971, 61 per-
cent of households were middle
class, according to Pew, which
deines middle class as income
between two-thirds and double
the median household income.
And while home prices
have risen nationwide since
2012, they’re still below their
boom-era levels in most parts
of the country. Since most mid-
dle-class wealth is in home
equity, those families are poorer
than they were before the
recession.
By and large, more aflu-
ent Americans are the ones who
hold stock — and stock prices
are back near record heights.
In Las Vegas, which is still
recovering from its huge hous-
ing boom and bust, Tracy Brigi-
da’s husband, Michael, last sum-
mer lost his second job in three
years. Tracy, 48, has been pay-
ing the bills by substitute-teach-
ing while raising their two chil-
dren, one of whom is autistic
and is home-schooled.
They still owe more on their
Las Vegas home than it’s worth,
having bought it nine years
ago. They hoped it would build
wealth for their retirements.
Now, it’s a money pit.
The couple initially sup-
ported Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker’s presidential campaign.
But after Michael’s latest layoff,
they switched to Trump.
Families like hers, she says,
seem forgotten in the celebra-
tion of rosy national economic
averages.
“This administration wants
to tell us the economy is bet-
ter and people are getting jobs,”
she said. “But that’s not my
experience.”
With higher-paying jobs
clustering in wealthier metro
areas, business and political
leaders in the weaker cities ight
to attract and retain employ-
ers. Memphis has provided
tax breaks to attract or keep
36 companies, including Elec-
trolux, Mitsubishi Electric and
Unilever.
Education, job skills
Community leaders have
also focused on improving
the education and skills of the
area’s workforce, which trail
national averages. A Brookings
Institution analysis found that
three-quarters of jobs in Mem-
phis require post-high school
education or training — some-
thing that 40 percent of the
area’s adults lack.
Rising automation at many
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warehouses is also undercut-
ting efforts to create solid mid-
dle-income jobs. Memphis is a
leading transport hub: In addi-
tion to FedEx, shipping irms
such as UPS, DHL, and XPO
Logistics have warehouses in
the region. So do other compa-
nies like Nike. Yet Memphis still
has 3,200 fewer transportation
and warehousing jobs than it did
before the recession.
Contributing also to the
decline of middle-income posi-
tions has been the rising use
of temporary workers, whose
ranks have surged 54 percent
in Memphis since the recession
ended while the area’s overall
jobs grew just 3.3 percent. City
oficials involved in workforce
training say some of the unem-
ployed have 25 years of work
history — all of it through temp
irms.
Chris Rice, 29, has worked
steadily in the Memphis region
for the past 10 years, all at tem-
porary jobs. Rice most recently
worked as a forklift driver for
Electrolux and for CEVA Logis-
tics, a privately held warehouse
and distribution irm.
The CEVA job ended after
the company lost a contract to
distribute Microsoft’s X-Box,
Rice said during a job fair at a
community center in Bartlett, a
Memphis suburb.
Rice said he was hopeful of
getting a new temp job at an
assembly plant owned by printer
manufacturer Brother Interna-
tional. He was the only forklift
driver at the job fair.
Still, “I’d love to have a per-
manent job,” he said. “I’m tired
of going from temp agency to
temp agency when there’s no
work.”
Contributing to this report
were AP staff writers Nicho-
las Riccardi in Las Vegas and
Adrian Sainz in Memphis.
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