I don't disagree with this article. I think they lay out some concerning trends, and possible reasons why they might be occurring. The New York Times published

I don't disagree with this article. I think they lay out some concerning trends, and possible reasons why they might be occurring. The New York Times published a similar analysis in February [1], and I've played armchair economist with these points for a while. But it's remarkable how different two pieces of reporting can be around the same basic metrics. For most of the past year, the story as read on mainstream outlets has been that unemployment in the US (the U-3 metric) is historically low, and outlets contextualized this as "the economy is strong", which people are left to interpret to their own devices. And the complicated interdependence of factors, like how tight labor markets drive wage growth, how we're simultaneously showing signs of a tight and slack labor market, and how wage growth drives price-inflation or the other way around, makes the impact of a "strong economy" difficult for the average person to conceptualize. The reductionist view is that for large segments of the society in the US and Europe, rising cost of living are interacting adversely with their low gains in real wages. There's broad overlap between the people whose budgets are most crunched, and the people whose anxieties caused them to bring into power anti-globalization, domestically-focused administrations. It's ironic, then, when metrics whose correspondence to real workers' observed conditions are being touted as measures of success. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/01/business/economy/wages-salaries-job-market.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/01/business/econ...