7 ms·
So 63% didn't. I wonder what the average netted out to. Increase or decrease and how much?
by missedthecue 29d ago
So 63% didn't. I wonder what the average netted out to. Increase or decrease and how much?
- jplusequalt 29d agoThe median worker saw a small wage growth, on the scale of ~.5% a year. However, it does says that 58% of all workers failed to keep up with the real wage growth trend we saw in the years leading up to the pandemic. >So 63% didn't. But more than a third of Americans did. You can't "glass two-thirds full" tens of millions of people seeing their actual purchasing power decrease.
- Dylan16807 29d agoYou can't glass one third empty it either. It's complicated and needs more numbers.
- jplusequalt 29d agoFor that 1/3 of Americans, that's a very real statistic to be frowning over.
- Dylan16807 29d agoMaybe it's very bad. Or maybe it's negligible. And which third of americans is it, the poor the middle or the rich or a mix of everyone? These factors are important before we can draw more than the most shallow of conclusions. There's a chart of the average that looks pretty bad. But also I don't have time to read 78 pages right now.
- GiorgioG 29d agoI feel like people are blind to the obvious. The price of everything has gone up and it has outpaced most people’s wages.
- lr4444lr 29d agoI don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.
- manlymuppet 29d agoI wouldn't mind the minority near the top losing ground if the majority near the bottom got more.
- platevoltage 29d agoBy getting more, you just mean getting the value of their labor.
- tqi 29d agoIts interesting, I thought it was pretty well established that COVID era stimulus helped lower earners make real gains, even adjusted for inflation, while higher earners who did not get stimulus checks lost ground? From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
- LPisGood 29d agoI’m pretty confused where you’re coming from. Stimulus checks were a one or two time payment of a couple thousand dollars, but stocks and corporate profits went absolutely parabolic. The share of wealth owned by the richest people went up far more than the bottom 90 (or even 99) percent. The data absolutely supports this perspective as well: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2011.1,2026.1 https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
- dan-robertson 29d agoThe stimulus was not just the checks, it was also pretty generous unemployment, and the discussion was about incomes of workers, not wealth.
- reilly3000 29d agoDon’t forget about the PPP loans.
- LPisGood 29d agoUnemployment almost by definition means they’re not getting as much money as they were before. We can focus strictly on wages, but for higher earners, it doesn’t tell the entire story, especially if we’re focusing on my new detail details like a couple thousand dollars per person.
- gboss 29d agoMy cousin and many others I knew were getting more money from unemployment than when they had their jobs during covid. Though I don’t believe that caused inflation. Inflation was an international phenomenon and countries experiencing inflation had very diverse stimulus responses to COVID. It seems the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot to a goods based rather than services based economy, coupled with climate changed caused shortages and retiring boomers caused it.
- Flameancer 29d agoMine increased 2.75x. If you count bonuses and other benefits it definitely increased more than 3x.
- yonaguska 29d agogood for you
- cyansands 29d agoWhat does that have to do with anything?
- ColdStream 29d agoOne could make the point that in a society that is primarily driven by capital, it is wise to keep an eye on the health of it from those that are within said system.
- cyansands 28d ago[dead]
- tokai 29d agoAnything below 100% seems like a potential warning sign in a growing economy.
- eru 29d agoThat's a bit silly. There's always some noise.
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- hatthew 29d agoThis thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
- hn_throwaway_99 29d agoNothing is "idealized" in the real world forever. The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary. So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.
- Legend2440 29d ago>In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. I don't think this is a reasonable expectation at all. In the absence of economic growth I would expect the average individual's earnings to be flat. The only way for wages to go up across the board is if productivity increases. If you're not creating more wealth than last year, the only way for one person's wages to go up is if someone else's goes down.
- fwip 29d agoI read it as 3% retire, 3% enter the workforce, and everyone else is slightly better / more senior than the year before. So the average wage could be flat.
- gchamonlive 29d agoThat's indicative of a growing economic inequality though, which in any orthodox economic book is bad
- manlymuppet 29d agoActually the opposite was stated in the paper. > This compression accelerated in 2021: real wage growth in the bottom two deciles remained positive and close to its pre-period pace, while all other deciles experienced declines of about 2 percent, roughly four percentage points below their pre-period growth
- gchamonlive 29d agoIsn't deciles every 10%? The top 90% is too rough, you need to compare the top 0.09% and the rest to see how much the social gap has widened
- manlymuppet 29d agoThat’s true, and you could even use any measure you’d like. Perhaps the Gini coefficient. I should specify that I’m not trying to make direct claim about inequality. Only that, for anyone against the ails of inequality, the bottom wage earners getting more (and even outpacing other deciles) is a win.
- gchamonlive 29d agoNot by itself, they all need to be at least outpacing inflation
- manlymuppet 29d agoThey (the bottom deciles) were outpacing inflation. By a significant margin too. That’s at the very least, a good stride against inequality’s problems.
- AlexCoventry 29d agoTime frame is '21-'24 (Biden term) and from U Chicago. Pretty sure this is right-wing propaganda.
- eru 29d agoI'm not sure averages are that interesting, because the people at the high end have an extra-ordinary amount of influence on the average. You might want to look at the shape of the distribution?