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A. The time period you mention is post 2008 recession; you would expect the number to go up after such a catastrophic event. B. Median simply means the middle

A. The time period you mention is post 2008 recession; you would expect the number to go up after such a catastrophic event. B. Median simply means the middle of the frequency distribution, so you could have a glut of people earning significantly lower than the median, while the upper tail is more or less smooth out to the top end. C. It's not as easy to find data going back to mid-century, but the trend since the eighties has been largely upward in real terms. Again though, we know that the top 1% has had outsize gains, and it's reasonable to assume that the distribution was more Gaussian in the preceding years.

zaroth 7y ago
Yes, absolutely. But in terms of a labor market being “healthy” or not, what are the labor market conditions today if not healthy? Decades of policy created the environment we are in now, where the bottom 3 quintiles lost out entirely on any gains to globalization. Now, perhaps more than any time in the last 50 years, we have conditions which could lead to gains for those lower quintiles. I don’t expect to see decades of losses reversed overnight, but for the last 10 years things have gotten better not worse, which is something new. Hopefully we are at a point which will start seeing accelerating gains accumulating toward the lower quintiles. IMO, for that to happen, we need to reduce the supply of unskilled labor to drive increased wages at that point on the curve.