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RAND has produced some very high quality research over the course of its existence. Unfortunately this study, if Fast Company's clickbait article bears at all

RAND has produced some very high quality research over the course of its existence. Unfortunately this study, if Fast Company's clickbait article bears at all on the actual research, is not part of that canon. The phenomenon that the study talks about, rising productivity with stagnating wages for the great majority of people since about 1975, has been discussed at length in academic economics for at least the past decade. In the early days, of course, there were the usual attempts to say "nothing to see here": faulty methodology (no), confounders (yes, mainly a bigger percentage of women in the workforce, but adjusted for), it's a business cycle effect and will correct itself, there's no such thing as income/it's too hard to measure precisely, but-but-but "stable income shares" is one of the great Kaldor's stylized facts, blah blah blah. The objections got increasingly more feeble and desperate as time went on, you will note. TLDR: RAND has discovered something everyone else has known for decades.

fuzzfactor 6y ago
I think it's good to see them bringing it to light in as dramatic a way to get as much attention as possible, especially among those who are not too aware. It's just fine for people to think the trend is newly discovered, it would acually help if it got viral attention. I think a good effort was made to only include solid representative figures for comparison, nothing nebulous or significantly questionable. At least these are some new good baseline numbers and qualified experts even if they had originally underestimated the magnitude of the cascading wealth removal. Since the mid 1970's this has been forseen. You could sketch it out on the chalkboard with mathematically minded associates. America was never going to be the same. 21st Century wasn't going to be pretty. This was across the board. >RAND crunched the data in all sorts of ways, and the basic pattern held true for part-time workers, entire families, men and women, Blacks and whites, urban dwellers and rural residents, and those with high school degrees and those with college diplomas. “There is no way of slicing the numbers where people come out ahead,” The damage is much worse than it looks numerically. It had to be for them to even do a study. In hind sight they are now _adjusting_ for inflation as usual, but there is no accurate accounting for currency devaluation, internationalization, commodity flow, and resulting after-tax purchasing power. These are more nebulous, but if they were factored in it would look way worse not better. That's what we found shocking.

fuzzfactor 6y ago

I think it's good to see them bringing it to light in as dramatic a way to get as much attention as possible, especially among those who are not too aware. It's just fine for people to think the trend is newly discovered, it would acually help if it got viral attention. I think a good effort was made to only include solid representative figures for comparison, nothing nebulous or significantly questionable. At least these are some new good baseline numbers and qualified experts even if they had originally underestimated the magnitude of the cascading wealth removal. Since the mid 1970's this has been forseen. You could sketch it out on the chalkboard with mathematically minded associates. America was never going to be the same. 21st Century wasn't going to be pretty. This was across the board. >RAND crunched the data in all sorts of ways, and the basic pattern held true for part-time workers, entire families, men and women, Blacks and whites, urban dwellers and rural residents, and those with high school degrees and those with college diplomas. “There is no way of slicing the numbers where people come out ahead,” The damage is much worse than it looks numerically. It had to be for them to even do a study. In hind sight they are now _adjusting_ for inflation as usual, but there is no accurate accounting for currency devaluation, internationalization, commodity flow, and resulting after-tax purchasing power. These are more nebulous, but if they were factored in it would look way worse not better. That's what we found shocking.