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"It suggests you're going to have a gigantic productivity boom. Isn't that the world we want to live in?" Depends. If the future is like the last 30 years, we'
by al2o3cr 12y ago
"It suggests you're going to have a gigantic productivity boom. Isn't that the world we want to live in?"
Depends. If the future is like the last 30 years, we'll see another "productivity boom" but zero rise in real wages.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoThere were rises in real wages from 1980 until 2000 - but they weren't in all the places they were looked for. You had large populations of high-wage earners wiped out - steel, autos, that sort of thing. In 1980, being an IT worker was basically a $10 an hour job.
- frandroid 12y agoYeah, that person was talking about the sum total of real wages, and you're talking about a sector by sector comparison...
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoHow would you go about even comparing them, really?
- _delirium 12y agoOften what people quote is the median real wage, across the whole economy. There are other measures as well, but it's one fairly simple one that gives a trend for whether the middle portion of the workforce is seeing wage growth. Rather than looking at wage changes within sectors, shifts between sectors, etc., it just looks at the aggregate end result: do all these changes add up to the the 50th-percentile American wage earner getting more or less money?
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoThat is indeed one way. I am just unsure it's all that meaningful.