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.
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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).
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.