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Real compensation has been growing. It's just now a larger portion of 'compensation' is benefits rather than just wages. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COM
by faet 9y ago
Real compensation has been growing. It's just now a larger portion of 'compensation' is benefits rather than just wages.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
edit:
in the 60s/70s wages were 80% of compensation.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/compensation-in-the-1970s.pdf https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/compensation-in-the-1970s.p...
wages are now 70% of compensation and 63% for public employees.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf
- tyingq 9y agoI wonder if there's some skew there where pensions aren't counted as benefits, but 401k company contributions are.
- majormajor 9y agoThe employee side contributions seem relevant, too (though neither side exists at all when it comes to lower paging jobs). Those are counted as wages, I'm assuming, so if wages as a proportion has been decreasing and defined-benefit pensions have been lost, so an increasing part of wages goes to retirement savings, that seems like a double-whammy.
- dv_dt 9y agoSo if healthcare costs are benefits, some portion of the compensation is growing just because healthcare costs are growing. But that doesn't really provide any net gain in positive economic effects (such as through added disposable income).
- prostoalex 9y agoUnless one is employed in healthcare.
- YeOakAye 9y agoOne is usually not employed in healthcare......
- prostoalex 9y ago"In recent years, the proportion of workers employed in private-sector health services has exceeded 11 percent." says BLS in 2009 https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/ https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/
- YeOakAye 9y agoThanks for supporting my point, in that 89% of the working population is "usually not employed in healthcare".
- prostoalex 9y agoSo back to the grandparent conclusion, employing 11+% of the workforce is not beneficial to the US economy?
- dv_dt 9y agoIt's not beneficial if the same or better output could be had with half of the inputs. I'm mostly comparing cost of healthcare in other first-world nations with universal healthcare here with the industry as a whole (as opposed to just the workforce). If you know the efficiency can be higher and you choose to operate less efficiently it's some form of the broken window fallacy - maybe the drafty window fallacy? You're basically paying people to move dirt from one place to another - with the excess of insurance claim/billing transactions as the new digital dirt. Now if you're worried about the more immediate effects on the people displaced by moving to a possibly higher efficiency way of doing things - we'll that's a bigger general problem we have to solve as the displacement rate is seemingly already moving higher than the re-employment rate, and it threatens to accelerate for more areas than just better healthcare practices...
- Clubber 9y agoHealthcare is flush with cash with so many middlemen it's almost inconceivable. It is also recession proof.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoUhh no. Those costs are transfered (at least in part) to the employee every year when they reup.
- gertef 9y agoThis is one of the problems with GDP/econometrics in general: It tries to measure value but actually measures prices. If I lower my prices (maybe as a charitable act, or due to competition), I haven't decreased my value, but econometrics thinks I did. If you and I pay each other to waste fuel, pollution and time to drive to each other's homes to do the laundry, that's consider "better" than if we stayed home and did our own, according to econometrics.
- ntsplnkv2 9y agoThese statistics are only in the U.S. whereas wages have been relatively stagnant across the whole globe with much better healthcare systems that aren't dependent on work. What benefits are Europeans getting instead of wages?
- prostoalex 9y agoMost European countries have aging populations, so it seems fair to assume that healthcare costs there are rising as well.
- joelthelion 9y agoWe're handling that mostly by increasing the age of retirement, not increasing labor costs.
- prostoalex 9y agoWho's handling the healthcare costs of the middle-aged workers not old enough to retire?
- walshemj 9y agoThey are in terms of NI (social security taxes) increases
- prostoalex 9y agoOk, so instead of money coming from the retirement system it comes from NI (social security taxes). How does it result in a drop in healthcare costs while the general population is aging? If a person has health issues at 68, and the retirement age has been just moved to 70, that person won't magically get a clean bill of health.
- Clubber 9y agoAnd immigration. The US would naturally be in population decline without that. Immigration is a two edged sword. On one hand, it removes jobs from existing citizens. On the other hand it funds social security (among other things) and negates problems with population decline.
- crdoconnor 9y agoIt's not exactly a benefit if you're just paying more is it? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/26/21-graphs-that-show-americas-health-care-prices-are-ludicrous/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/26/21-gr...
- metaphorm 9y agokind of a bogus measure. if the nominal cost of health insurance coverage rises, and your employer continues to pay for it, your total compensation went up, but you didn't benefit from it at all. it just became more expensive for your employer and the health insurer effectively raised their "tax" rate.
- kevinsprong23 9y agoyou would benefit as much as health outcomes were improving, but I don't have detailed data here.
- metaphorm 9y agothat isn't what compensation means, and the amount of money it costs to improve your health outcomes is not much how much those improved outcomes are worth, it's how much you were billed