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That's not entirely true. Consider the metric "Yearly Income" which has been consistently measured for decades. It is a proxy for "Total Compensation" but isn't
by trendia 10y ago
That's not entirely true. Consider the metric "Yearly Income" which has been consistently measured for decades. It is a proxy for "Total Compensation" but isn't exactly the same because the latter includes health benefits, vacation pay, etc.
In the last decade, total compensation has risen drastically while income has not. If you only measure income, then it will appear as though the lowest paid fulltime workers did not see as great of gains as the highest-paid workers, when in fact the difference is much smaller when you include health benefits.
So, income is an example of a consistently-measured metric that does not really corelate with the attribute that most people would care about (total compensation) and thus does not act as a good proxy for the measured attribute.
- vannevar 10y agoBut in the employment case, the proposed 'improved' metric tracks very closely, with some divergence around the recession. Obviously, if that divergence continued indefinitely so that the metrics didn't track together anymore, your argument would hold. As a side note, the increase in income inequality is not "much smaller" when benefits are included. See for example https://ourworldindata.org/incomes-across-the-distribution/ https://ourworldindata.org/incomes-across-the-distribution/. The gap is almost entirely due to soaring executive compensation, and since there is no correlation between performance and executive compensation (some studies even show an inverse correlation: https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-correlation-between-ceo-pay-and-performance-over-the-long-term/ https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...), any natural brake on the spiraling salaries seems to have failed.