41 ms·

Real wages have been flat since the 1970s (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ https

• throwawaycities 5y ago
  Glad this was the top comment. Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US. We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.
  • fuzzfactor 5y ago
    >Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation If this wasn't a predictable outcome when inflation is triggered, it would be imposed by design.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    We also need to stop pretending that flat (i.e. depreciating) wages are normal
    • gruez 5y ago
      but wages aren't flat? In gp's post it's only "flat" when adjusting for inflation, which means it's not depreciating.
  • barney54 5y ago
    Inflation at the levels we are seeing it is certainly a problem caused by the pandemic and the reactions to the pandemic.
    • throwawaycities 5y ago
      Markets and corporate profits were at record highs pre-pandemic, and even with any supply chain issues the market and corporate profits are at new all time highs now. The pandemic is just a convenient scapegoat and excuse for decades of congressional over spending and bad policy ultimately responsible for the current inflation. Since Clinton the national debt doubled under every administration (Trump was on track if he won a 2nd term). Each administration also had trillion $ bailouts/stimulus bills. Biden already has a trillion $ stimulus ($1.9T), and that is blamed/justified on the pandemic. However, we can already predict the next administration will also have its own trillion $+ bailout/stimulus its just a question of what that will be “blamed” on to justify it.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    I don't get why minimum wage isn't tied to the CPI by default. I supposed there's a risk of it creating a positive feedback loop, but only a small portion of the workforce is paid at minimum wage. It seems capricious for minimum wage to only be increased when the legislative branch decides it's popular enough to fight for.
• toyg 5y ago
  > As a non-American, it's heartbreaking to see efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war. Yeah, well, it's not like things are much better in Europe. Far-right parties are now mainstream in most major EU countries, and their n.1 priority is exactly the same. Signed, a Brexit victim.
  • hectord 5y ago
    Please don't generalize. Far-right parties are not mainstream everywhere. Europe is complex, as much as the US. The issue with this way of thinking is that you look away from countries which might have good policies. These policies could be used in the US.
    • diordiderot 5y ago
      > not mainstream everywhere FR: Front national IT: lega Nord DL: AFD ES: Vox They're taking over Europe because neoliberals are full of shit, and the left wing has their hands tied. Normal people have nowhere else to go.
      • herbstein 5y ago
        DK: Dansk Folkeparti Well, they lost of a lot of their voters... because most of the middle-seeking parties adopted their hostile foreign policy and made them irrelevant.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    The far-right parties in Europe are usually focused on immigration rather than race. Look at the Brexit parties in the UK, the big enemies were the Poles. And the FN/RN in France has always taken pains to show that it is "pro-black" (and anti-brown..)
    • smilespray 5y ago
      Meh, it's always about those terrible "others", no matter what the actual term is. Who's in that group varies on what gains the political players.
• dan-robertson 5y ago
  > most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment. There are many pitfalls with measuring long-term inflation. How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone? These modern technologies make peoples lives much better and were somewhere between impossible and impossibly expensive in the 1970s so an inflation metric can’t really take their price changes (from infinity to cheap) into account. Another is quality. Compared to the 70s, a new car is faster, safer, more comfortable, and more fuel efficient. Similarly, most houses are bigger and better in America today. I think it is important to note that talking about long term inflation is different, and perhaps harder, than talking about short-term inflation which is what the OP is about.
  • hvidgaard 5y ago
    What good is new tech if you cannot afford to buy a house or a new'ish car for the minimum wage, even if you live frugal and save?
    • passerby1 5y ago
      Are metaverse gonna replace lack of owning a house (and travel) soon? /s
      • me_me_me 5y ago
        Don't even jest, I heard something similar told at work without the /s part.
        • erwincoumans 5y ago
          That sounds similar to The Matrix.
      • helpfulmandrill 5y ago
        Maybe you could just live in a coffin and jack into a more spacious metaverse simulation of an apartment /s
• abbassi 5y ago
  Very interesting points; there is a scientific clarity in your analysis. But, I would like to add a point: the reality is that the production is in global scale now, the production has no borders, races, nationalities, but the capital has its local interests. The working class is a global class, while bourgeoisie is a local class. But since the bourgeoisie is the dominant class, it makes the working class divided. Like the role of black bourgeoisie in the disguising class struggle under the hood of racial issues. I think this small piece of text helps make my point a little bit clear: http://www.theinternationalism.org/2020/07/return-to-marx.html http://www.theinternationalism.org/2020/07/return-to-marx.ht...
  • Retric 5y ago
    Imports are only ~15% of the US GDP, they really don’t explain wage stagnation.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      A lot of work is moving abroad without becoming imports. US companies own significant chunks of the services and R&D workforce the world over. Even in production, it's not uncommon for a US company to buy a factory rather than importing goods produced in that factory.
      • abbassi 5y ago
        That is exactly "export of capital". We also see "import of labor force" since the developed countries struggling with demographic winter.
    • abbassi 5y ago
      I didn't mean the point is the imports. The fact is that US is loosing his share of world GDP for decades, and new powers like China are rising. It is just like the decline of British empire at the late 19th and early 20th century and rise of new powers like US, Germany, Japan. We are witnessing the same phenomenon that Lenin called unequal development of capitalism in the imperialist stage. We would also see the same tensions and wars that we saw in the first half of 20th century.
• nickpp 5y ago
  Things with massive government involvement and heavily regulated like are incredibly more expensive: health care, housing and education. Meanwhile, things provided by the free market have become incredibly less expensive and more powerful: technology, communication, entertainment. Nothing to do with your rich vs poor class wars.
  • rocgf 5y ago
    Gonna leave out housing and education, but for healthcare, you are painfully incorrect. European countries has vastly more regulated healthcare and yet pay about an order of magnitude less for it.
    • nickpp 5y ago
      You have a good point, USA healthcare has the worst kind of regulation: it did lots of damage and helped very little. But Western European countries (which you probably compare to) had an immense, unspoken advantage: an incredible supply of highly educated, unexpensive health care work force - the Eastern Europe. If you want to truly compare the healthcare of USA with Europe's please include countries like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Moldova and so on. Yes, it's cheap. But you truly get what you pay for.
      • oblio 5y ago
        You can't compare Eastern Europe like that, though. Romania has a GDP per capita of 1/6th the US one and it spends a pitiful percentage of its GDP on healthcare, about 5%. The US spends 18%. So the US has 18 times more money (!) for healthcare. The other ones are even worse, Moldova's GDP per capita is 1/20th the US one. So probably 30 times more money spent by the US on healthcare. It's like comparing a maglev train to the original steam locomotive :-)
        • nickpp 5y ago
          You are ignoring what EE countries spend on training countless health care workers who then emigrate and work as cheap and highly educated in the West. And health care cost increase exponentially with quality, not linearly. Bleeding edge research and medical advances appear in the USA mostly. And mostly everybody enjoys the fruits.
• Quindecillion 5y ago
  http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
• oDot 5y ago
  Yep. "Peter Schiff vs Warren Buffett; The Middle Class in the 50's, and Now" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byxd7dTnlXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byxd7dTnlXU
  • nly 5y ago
    While Peters point of view may be seen as dated and chauvinistic, I do feel like the absolute necessity of dual income living today, especially in the city, has had a huge negative impact on quality of family life. I don't even have kids and I recognize what he's talking about. By the time me and my partner are home (7pm) and have prepped, cooked and cleaned up from dinner, there's no time or energy left to do anything productive or thoughtful. People mock millennials for eating out or ordering in too much, but the temptation to just eat at work and then claw back precious time in the evening is very high - i'd do it in a heartbeat if my partner let me. It's just market forces at work of course. Once couples become DINKs, and bid up the cost of housing, the single income families simply can't compete and become extinct. Median house prices are 10x median income. Banks will lend you <5x income. For most here now (the UK), buying a property on a single income is a mathematical impossibility without first saving for a decade, living with your parents until you're 30, and then taking out a 30 year variable rate mortgage.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This is why no one is having replacement rate numbers of kids in cities.
    • gravypod 5y ago
      > While Peters point of view may be seen as dated and chauvinistic A way to un-chauvinistic this point: I'm a male and I'd love it if I could get married to a women and have their income alone support a lifestyle with a house, kids, car, etc and leave me to do house work + cooking. Sprinkle in access to a computer which would let me do some programming and potentially generate extra income and it I'd be extremely happy.
• kilroy123 5y ago
  I think they have the correct answer as to 'why' this has happened and what the root cause is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY&t=33s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY&t=33s
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    Can you summarize? I don't want to watch this entire video right now even though it seems interesting.
    • kilroy123 5y ago
      Democracy relies on people being able to vote for what they think is right; with privacy. We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich. See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com https://wtfhappenedin1971.com All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where they voted and had committees in private, to out in the open.
      • guerrilla 5y ago
        Interesting but I don't think that privacy would help since those buying the legislation would know they're not getting what they're paying for and deal with that fact in some other way.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • rla3rd 5y ago
        fiscal policy changed forever in 1971 when nixon took us off the gold standard
• WalterBright 5y ago
  > why are real wages flat? Good question. One answer is the government consumes ever more of the GDP. This is going to negatively impact real wages.
  • avgcorrection 5y ago
    One answer? Or an answer that happened to fit the predetermined conclusion “government’s fault”? More of the share of productivity has gone to the owners and CEOs compared to the workers over the last 40 years. That’s the fact base that we are working from. Your supposed answer fits like a square in a round hole.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Where do you think all the trillions the government spends comes from? You could give all the CEO pay to the workers and it won't make any difference, except you won't have a competent CEO anymore. Any worker can become an owner by buying stock.
      • avgcorrection 5y ago
        > Any worker can become an owner by buying stock. That’s some real “just stop being poor” advice.
• helpfulmandrill 5y ago
  > Okay, so TVs and cellphones are cheaper, but necessities like college, childcare, and healthcare are up significantly. It feels like it would be better if the basics were cheaper and the trinkets were more expensive...
• gizmo 5y ago
  You state govt keeps inflation low by manipulating how it's calculated in order to keep the fed rate low, which insidiously keeps stocks up. And this happens, apparently, because the Fed really cares about news headlines? Does the ECB and BOJ enact the exact same policy but for unrelated (but equally conspiratorial) reasons? Are all the central banks and politicians around the world in cohorts, or is there something else going on here? Long term interest rates have been going down for decades. This is a long term trend, caused by low GDP growth expectations. The labor force participation rate keeps trending down. Healthcare costs keep trending up. Population is aging. These are fundamental problems for which there is no great solution, and interest rates are low (along the curve) as a consequence. The Fed is ultimately only a minor player in this. They can provide excess liquidity, but only for so long. Ultimately rising inflation forces the Fed to withdraw liquidity and the market will inevitably deflate. Fed policy postponed a market crash by a couple of years so it wouldn't hit at the same time as covid, and that's a good thing. But who benefits from a steady stock market? Regular people. Pension funds. Who benefits from crashes and wild gyrations? The wealthy. Hedge funds. This makes perfect sense, because a treacherous market is best navigated by the most experienced and wealthiest parties. You seem to argue the opposite: that a market that has steadily gone up and up and up because of Fed/inflation manipulation has somehow benefited the wealthy elites at the expense of regular people? Yes, workers get paid too little and much in the world is unfair. But your analysis is mostly conspiratorial silliness. I don't know what you mean by "ridiculous race war", but Black people in the US are 20x poorer (by net worth, on average) compared to whites so a race/color blind analysis of the economy doesn't work.
  • spencerflem 5y ago
    Yes, wealthy people own the vast majority of stocks. It's hard to invest a significant amount when 50% of your income goes to housing.
  • VirusNewbie 5y ago
    This is just factually incorrect that the stock market rising benefits 'regular people', the majority of stocks are held by the upper class. Your whole argument fails because of that.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  So , the frog has been boiling slowly for the past 40 years, but this year it burnt quite a bit, right? Either way the frog has been boiled
• trizuz 5y ago
  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
• birdyrooster 5y ago
  When the federal government can dilute the value of money while giving tons of it to banks and mega corps as near free loans, it becomes inevitable that there is a transfer of wealth up from the bottom.
  • frankfrankfrank 5y ago
    Something that needs to be at least pointed out is that there is a significant difference between money and currency. Currency is a kind of instrument, mostly to enable current, flow of money in an efficient, productive, and low cost manner to facilitate smooth economy of activities. The problem that we are now facing though is that the governments of the world have committed to defrauding the people, whether to cover up other frauds or to plunder wealth/value. What we are facing right now with the "money printing" in all its different forms or manifestations, is nothing less and nothing more than just plain fraud. It's really no different than if you were told the painting you are buying is a renaissance masterwork, when it's just a sophisticated fake. It's a bit more nuanced than that because the ruling clan used to understand that they can't get too greedy, but that seems to have changed now since they have just gotten away with ever more brazen frauds over the decades and have not been held accountable in at least a very long time, if at all really ever fully. It used to be "… one for you, two for me, one for you, three for me", we seem to be up to "one for you, 5 billion for me … wow, look how successful and smart I am". It's the biggest problem I have with people who make excuses for "taxing the rich", because frankly, they didn't earn it at all when the government is essentially defrauding the lower classes and pumping trillions into the upper classes. Unfortunately the well has been polluted and the only way to fix it would be to rescind all the fraudulently earned "money", e.g., seize all wealth over $5 million, but that won't happen for several reasons, so we will get the tune we paid the piper for by drinking from the poisoned well. Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. History tells us though, likely it will end very poorly for some group of people. Abuse begets abuse, and the ruling clan has been abusing hard again for a very long time.
    • bronzeage 5y ago
      [dead]
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Housing supply (NIMBYism by landlords) has not kept up with population growth and immigration in most dense cities. There is also the massive increase in multiple houses bought and left empty by the rich which are ghost houses. Healthcare will go up because that is regulated by politicians who do their best to raise prices for vested interests. The 2003 law passed by Republicans to prevent the government from even negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma is an example. You can’t even do parallel imports of drugs from say Europe. The number of doctors is restricted by the AMA and they even do the guidelines on how well they should be compensated. Educatlon is a third party payment “scam” where there is no incentive to restrict your costs, and there is every incentive to spend money on non-academic activities like massively bloated football programs and bureaucracies. We reap what we sow.
• throw__away7391 5y ago
  I think life is better today than it was in 1970. You must consider that the 1970s started about 25 years after the United States bombed the bejeezus out of every single major industrial center in the world. America made "the best cars in the world" at a time when factories in Stuttgart, Munich, and Ingolstadt were lying in ruble--and with the world's top scientists, engineers, artists, designers, and architects pouring into the country. The American middle class saw a rapid rise in their wealth and standard of living during this time. An inexperienced worker could walk into a factory job in the US and enjoy a very high level of affluence relative both to their skill and the rest of the world. This state of affairs completely broke down in the 1970s and economic progress in the US after this time has been of an entirely different flavor. To take 1950-1970 as an example of "the way things ought to be" is highly unrealistic. Workers in the US are still making more, much much more in most cases, than their counterparts in other countries.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > were lying in ruble Ironic typo.
• oneoff786 5y ago
  > And then we come to the other elephant in the room: why are real wages flat? A lot of it is because workers are doing less. They may be working just as hard, or maybe even harder. They are doing tasks that enable more production. But they are doing less. And many fewer people are required to do it. More people do the last mile of work that can’t be automated, requiring 0 skill, and little thought. Low end jobs still used to require a fair bit of expertise, but are now dead ends. Performance in many of these jobs is upper bounded at just showing up and doing it. It’s not even a rat race. tl;dr low skill labor supply outstrips low skill labor demand.
• specialist 5y ago
  Yes and: Corporate profits soared while wages flat-lined. Coincidence? Would a little bit of profit sharing be so terrible?
• mrkentutbabi 5y ago
  Introduce them to identity politics.
• temp8964 5y ago
  I think the most recent experience on inflation is very clear on this. The government reported number is 6%. But for people who spend most of their money on daily items, like rent and grocery, 6% is like lying to my face telling me red is blue.
  • evergrande 5y ago
    The number is way low. Housing/rental costs are the largest expense and that's up 20% in many places. Used cars are up 40%.
    • temp8964 5y ago
      Many food items like milk, eggs, meat are almost 50%~100% more expensive.
• fundad 5y ago
  Exactly this. The same people setting wages are setting prices.
• abeppu 5y ago
  A number of responses to this are arguing over whether real wages were really flat since the 1970s or how one would judge given the differences in the things we spend money on (larger houses, new tech, etc). But for any choice of how to calculate inflation which makes worker's wages go up over time, doesn't that imply that the total growth since the 1970s is also larger, and the absolute value captured by the capital-owning class is even larger? You can skew the picture to make the situation for workers less crappy, but not without making the success of the capital owners even more extreme. Piketty frames stuff in terms of the share of growth that goes to labor vs capital-owners, and I can't stop viewing the situation in those terms. My understanding is that recent data shows that in general, companies selling a lot of consumer goods have improved their margins -- they're raising prices faster than their costs are increasing -- meaning effectively we're shifting money from consumers to shareholders. Every crisis is an opportunity to argue for the richest to enrich themselves further.
  • SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    I'm having trouble parsing your last sentence, 'an opportunity to argue for'? I suspect the rich often got that way by being able to capitalise on crises, but I'm not sure how that relates to arguing for such opportunity. It might be relevant that Picketty also points out how severe crises are about the only times in recent history that wealth inequality decreased. I generally like Picketty's analysis, but I wonder whether it might be worthwhile to do a similar analysis and include the portion that goes to co-ordination costs. It might be irrelevant in france for cultural reasons but I suspect it's an important piece of the puzzle in the Americas.
    • abeppu 5y ago
      Perhaps I phrased that poorly. Every crisis is used to lobby (argue) for policies which further enrich the rich. So much of the money that was spent during the covid response was shoveled at businesses and capital owners.
• dionidium 5y ago
  > Except, that doesn't tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low. I think this is basically wrong in that it's only true for a minority of Americans -- the kind that are overrepresented on this forum. If you're in tech or finance or law, then there are big payoffs to moving to San Francisco or New York, but this actually isn't the case for the typical American. When you compare cost of living it's clear pretty quickly that the median American is still doing just fine in the vast middle of the country. The median household income in the NYC metro is $83,160 and the typical home costs $571,556. In St. Louis, say, the median household income is $66,417 and the typical home is $222,076. For the average American, the second option is a much better deal. Sure, you make $16k more in NYC, but does anybody believe that the entire cost difference between the two metros is $16k per year? It's not even close. The median American is much better off in St. Louis. A lot of people reading this are in households that make many times the median household income and they have understandably concluded that their best options are in a few costal cities. But it simply isn't true for the typical American. There's kind of a dual (seemingly contradictory) error here in that people both under- and over-estimate how wealthy the U.S. is. They overestimate in that they forget that the majority of Americans are living on much less than the average software engineer, but they underestimate in that they forget that our poorest states are still much wealthier than than the average European country. See here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs-european-countries-and-japan-korea-mexico-and-china-and-some-lessons-for-the-donald/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...
• jl6 5y ago
  > most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s I wasn’t around in the 1970s, so can someone explain to me how great it was with some examples that would make me want to go and live in the 1970s?
  • ttymck 5y ago
    I'm sorry I don't have sources, but anecdotally, home ownership is so far out of reach for most Americans today. The common rhetoric is that "a store clerk could afford a [desirable] home for their entire family" in 1970 while today they often need double income to rent a 1 bedroom apartment. Hoping someone comes along with a more evidence based continuation of this point.
  • Workaccount2 5y ago
    There is a whole website for this, but it's more the 1960's that were golden. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
    • jl6 5y ago
      That’s just a bunch of [highly motivated] financial metrics. I was hoping someone might tell me some real-world benefits like “I used to be able to do X, now I can only do Y”. Of course I don’t expect to hear much because as far as I can tell, 2020s USA is better than 1970s USA in every way I can think of.
      • sfoley 5y ago
        You can’t think of healthcare costs?
        • jl6 5y ago
          Yeah that sucks, but there are many, many more treatments available today than in 1970, so I’d almost certainly prefer to pay 6x the cost of 1970s healthcare to get 2020s-quality treatment.
• snarf21 5y ago
  Well said. The truth is that the greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that their woes are the fault of the poor.
• jkingsbery 5y ago
  As Russ Roberts details in https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRZf05zFBLXIKLD3blbnnFIv85OesJaKc https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRZf05zFBLXIKLD3blbnn... things are more complicated. A lot of the analysis about things being flat since 1970 makes assumptions about things being the same which aren't true.
• MichaelRazum 5y ago
  I agree on the inflation measurement. Regarding your question there is a simple explenation. YES we are much much productive then before. BUT wages are decided by markets. No one is paying you your "fair" share if it is possible to hire someone cheaper. Its like a commodity in the end. Good devs or spezialized doctors get a very very good sallary, so it just depends on your "market value".
  • rsj_hn 5y ago
    FYI, (non-farm) Labor productivity declined by 5.2% year over year: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.t02.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.t02.htm If you break these numbers down, you see that total production increased by 1.2%, but it required 7.4% more labor to produce that extra 1.2%. Compensation went up around 3% but of course in real terms it declined -- it pretty much has to decline if you need more labor to produce the same amount of stuff. Whether or not this is a trend or some weird pandemic related thing will be seen over time.
    • MichaelRazum 5y ago
      Sounds strange. What about this graph https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB I would argue that just based on the technological progress total average productivity per person should go up.
      • rsj_hn 5y ago
        Yes, just based on that it should go up, but there's a huge difference about it increasing at 0.5% per annum and 1.5% per annum, and it's not going to go up monotonically, which is the difference between your long run graph and the latest BLS announcement. In certain situations, when an economy is mismanaged, it will go down for prolonged periods of time, but again one year changes are not a significant trend. But this article about worker pay and inflation is not about long term trends, but recent (since 2020) trends.
• subsubzero 5y ago
  Honestly I do not know how people are getting by given the cost of everything has gotten dramatically more expensive the past few years. In southern California gas is $5 a gallon, groceries usually are $200-300 a week for three people. Housing is beyond insane, every single family house in our city is now above $1M(you could find dozens of houses in the $800k-900k range a year and a half ago). This is not sustainable and I don't know what the final outcome will be but it won't be pretty.
  • novaRom 5y ago
    It will be more expensive because other places are. Germany: currently a gallon of gas is €7.65 ($8.63). A kWh of electricity is €0.40($0.45).
• nradov 5y ago
  There's more to employee compensation than just wages. Real total employee compensation has risen significantly since the 1970s when you factor in employer contributions to health insurance premiums. While some of that money is wasted, employees are getting tangible benefits in the form of new medical treatments that weren't even available 50 years ago. What we need to do is decouple health insurance from employment.
  • NoGravitas 5y ago
    > What we need to do is decouple health insurance from employment. The easiest way to do that would be with a national single payer health care system, which would also help lower total healthcare spending. But both mainstream political parties are dead set against doing such a thing.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  I honestly think simply raising the minimum wage gradually to inflation-adjusted $20/hour and then adjusting for productivity increases over time would permanently address these issues. Another option is to adjust based on local cost of housing, ie 4 times the average two bedroom apartment rent.
• tcmart14 5y ago
  Something else to add context as far as the complexities of inflation and buying power. Yea TVs are cheaper, but the production of TVs have been shifted more and more to overseas locations where various costs are cheaper such as waste management, labor, etc. So while Americans have better buying power over computers, lets say, a lot of the computers are no longer made in the US.