4 ms·

Real wages are falling and are below what they were pre-pandemic, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES125288

• MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  This can still be the case if wage growth went disproportionately to low earners who produce widely consumed goods/services, whose prices were deflated due to low wages. As an extreme example, suppose all farmers were unpaid slaves. Slavery gets outlawed, and farmers now get paid. Food prices rise dramatically, resulting in massive inflation overall (and thus a fall in real wages for everyone except farmers).
• bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  The labor participation rate is also still down 2% from pre covid levels.
  • bryanlarsen 4y ago
    Looks like 0.5% to me. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... Notably the rate for the under 50 crowd is up substantially, it's the retirees bringing the rate down.
    • lumost 4y ago
      If you have the means to retire, slogging through a few last bad years doesn’t sound great. It’s no surprise that some opted for early retirement since 2020, even if they are retiring at lower income levels then they wanted.
      • rufus_foreman 4y ago
        Depends on what your job was. I got fired at the end of 2019 and was thinking about retiring. Covid made it an easy decision to take another job, I was going to be sitting at home in front of a computer for a year or two anyway. For near retirees who had to go to work in person, it made much more sense to retire rather than to risk death in order to put a few more years worth of money in the 401k.