I’m not arguing for/against the points being made, but: > Update: Some people have been asking me if the wage stagnation of 1973-1994 might have been caused by

I’m not arguing for/against the points being made, but: > Update: Some people have been asking me if the wage stagnation of 1973-1994 might have been caused by the mass entry of women into the U.S. workforce. Here’s the employment rate (also called the “employment-population ratio”) for American women: [see article for graph] You can see that the first part of the timing doesn’t line up here. When the wage stagnation began, American women had already been entering the workforce at a steady clip for 25 years. (The labor force participation rate for women looks much the same). Also, empirical evidence suggests at most a small effect of female labor supply on male wages — and if you look at the breakdown for men and women, you see that the stagnation for men was worse than for women over 1973-1994. And theoretically speaking, women’s mass entry into the workforce shouldn’t produce an overall decline in wages. Just like immigration or a baby boom, women’s entry into the workforce is both a positive labor supply shock and also a positive labor demand shock at the same time — when women earn more, they spend most of what they earn, on things that require labor to produce.1 So we shouldn’t expect the addition of women to the workforce to hold down wages. Thus, this theory also doesn’t line up with the timing of the stagnation, and it’s not clear why we would expect it to be a major factor in the first place. EOF