Later, he served as Bill Clinton’s principal economic adviser during the 1992 presidential campaign and directed economic policy at the Commerce Department during the Clinton administration. More recently, he’s done scholarship for the major Democratic think tanks (mostly the pro-trade, pro-immigration NDN, formerly known as the New Democratic Network) while also compiling statistical analyses for a stable of nonprofits, government agencies and corporate clients that include software and pharmaceutical industry associations (which will no doubt make his findings suspect to some liberals).
All of which is to say that Shapiro doesn’t approach this subject looking to validate any particular agenda. Perhaps because he came to economics late and to politics even later, he’s mostly interested in deciphering data, rather than trying to cram it into one ideological box or another.
More than a year ago, Shapiro noted that the Census Bureau had made available online, for the first time, data on household incomes broken down by age cohorts. In other words, before, if you wanted to understand what had been happening to incomes in America, the best you could do was to look at the averages for everyone over time.