[joshe]

That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now.

Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so I don't know how to tease this out.

Heath care does go up from 5% of gdp in 1960 to 18.2% today, maybe most compensation gain is going there? Plus retirement benefits.

But... from 1960 to 2000 the civilian labor force increased from 70 million to 141 million [1]. With all those new workers, by your link, compensation didn't actually shrink. That's weird huh? Also real median family income grew from $41K to $72K [2].

And sure 10 million software engineers added to SV tomorrow would lower wages. But maybe not long term? If it was 10 million countrywide? What would an economist or a careful wage survey say? Anyway we're talking about 85,000 jobs all over the country.

The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages. They usually conclude that for specific wage markets too.

Maybe we can't rely on some anecdotes in the media to refute their conclusions?

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf (table 5)

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N

[irrational]

So, it went from one person making $41K to two people making $72K ($36k each)? That doesn't seem like a growth situation.

[joshe]

Not quite.

From 1974 (they don't have data before that) to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1], that's for individuals. The graph is useful to look at.

This is complex, for example there are also more single parent / single person households which tends to lower household incomes.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA672N

[servercobra]

I generally agree with what you say, but the median family income growing seems like it would be due to most households moving from one to two workers. Looking at it that way, it makes wages look even flatter over the time period.

[abakker]

Yes, this is right. Large increases in the workforce have increased the supply, reducing real wage growth, household earning has grown by adding a second earner. More work is getting done to get the same economic outcome. Put one way, this is terrible for wage earners, out another it is excellent for spenders since the thing you can buy have gotten cheaper through plentiful labor.

[roselan]

With children staying with their parents into adulthood and earning a wage, we might even speak of 3 wages per household.

This might be compensated my the raise of monoparental households.

[bradleyjg]

Your third paragraph is it. This is mostly an out of control health care cost growth story. Three areas of cost growth--health care, education, and housing costs--have now eaten the gains of two entire generation of Americans and none of the three look set to stop their cancerous growth rates any time soon.

Way back in the ACA debates, when people talked about bending the cost curve, many people's eyes may have glazed over but that's exactly what we need to figure out a way to do. Not have a debate over immigration.

[hnaccy]

>Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

>Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows... But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...

Unless you're an immigrant or high up in tech business why would you cheer more high-skill immigrants? It will depress your wages and the economic gains will not accrue to you.

[arcticbull]

I don’t believe jobs are finite. I believe skilled immigrants improve competitiveness and create jobs across broad swaths of the economy, some even start very successful businesses. Many Fortune 500 founders were immigrants, and locking them out may have cost the country many hundreds of thousands of jobs.

[conanbatt]

Because there is a moral compass in the human being that takes into account non-economic benefits as well.

Why would you cheer against slavery if you could buy some up?

[ben_w]

Either the work is done in your country, where you:

* control minimum wage laws etc.,

* collect the taxes,

* benefit from most of the money being spent locally,

or it’s done abroad, where a foreign government collects all the benefits.

Import duties don’t do much to fix that. And if you have most or all of the workforce, then you get to lobby against other nations’ import duties.

[arcseco]

You don't really get to control min-wage laws, working standards or environmental regulations over the long term in a tariff free world. US trade deficits are growing and will inevitably have to be normalized. When that happens the US will have to become a lot more competitive with nations that don't have these standards in place. Stagnated wages are just the beginning and are borrowing time before labour standards and environmental standards are forced to equalize with the East.

[tomatotomato37]

This is why we need to start including a tariff with labor or environmental regulations. The point of those regulations is that we as a nation are accepting a decrease in economic efficiency for a (hopeful) net gain in general quality of life; if companies are allowed to just offshore their shit to some place that doesn't care without compensating in some other way than you're stuck the economic disadvantage without the accompanying benefit.

[pauljurczak]

> The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages.

Economists look at the past and extrapolate into future, often with really poor results. With increasing amount of automation, software development is probably safe from paradigm change for a short while. Given that, it is always risky to claim that immigration will increase jobs and wages in the next decade, because it did so in the previous one.

[TylerE]

The population grew from 179M to 281M so the workforce didn’t really double. More like a 50% increase

[joshe]

The workforce grew, look at the link and table 5. Basically woman and minorities joined the workforce. Worker to population ratio went up and the total number of workers went up faster than the growth in population.

[AlexTWithBeard]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd say pretty much all the minorities have always been a part of the workforce.

[joshe]

Women were most of the increase, but minorities increased their participation too.

You can see the tail end (looks like they didn't survey it until 1980) of it here: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf Table 4, look at Black participation rates from 1990 to 2015.

For intuition think of extended families living together, being incarcerated, and being the last hired and the first fired (so out of work longer).

[AlexTWithBeard]

Thank you.

Exactly the answer I was looking for!

[FiveSquared]

Jim Crow laws, blackballing, and redlining. You ant allowed to work in certain jobs, if you speak out (see Kapernick), no job for you! And you can’t even live within reasonable distance of work!

[joshe]

I did find personal income growth from 1974 on. That gets rid of the 2 income household problem. I think maybe they only surveyed households til 1974.

From 1974 to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1]. The graph is useful to look at.

I do think some of the story is that most compensation gains went to benefits, especially our crazy expensive health care (again 5% to 18.2% of gdp). So the hourly wages stayed the same, but benefits went up. I think the original point, that more workers did not lower income, still holds.

Really I can't do an Econ Phd to respond to this thread. So I'll outsource to economists, who say more workers do not lower income.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA672N