I did not ask “how many points below inflation.” That was a different poster. I’m trying to nudge the conversation towards a larger and more relevant context.

I did not ask “how many points below inflation.” That was a different poster. I’m trying to nudge the conversation towards a larger and more relevant context. Standard of living is what we ultimately care about; everything else is just a proxy for measuring it. To that point, the premise is sound. We should expect real wages to increase faster than inflation because labor productivity has also increased faster than inflation. But productivity and wages have been decoupled for the last 50 years, meaning those productivity gains are disproportionately allocated. In other words, productivity gains haven’t led to a proportional increase in wage-earner standard of living.