| >Given the stark change, I don't think it was necessarily due to increased global competition. First, there's no reason wages should track productivity. If the reason for productivity was capital investments for equipment (computers, machines, etc), then the return for labor makes little sense. Those gains should and would return to capital since that was the source of the gains. Next, incomes are not the proper measure of benefit. What you should track is called total remuneration which includes benefits and cost to employ, which BLS tracks, and which have tracked much closer than the pop graph. Also, most of those graphs I have seen use a different deflator for income versus productivity. When this is fixed, they again are much closer. If you link such a graph with proper sources I can show you. Here's a post working through some of these issues for a commonly posted graph [1]. There's also papers at NBER claiming the pop graphs are wrong for similar reasons. >Having incomes flat line for the middle class for the last 40 years is not a good sign. Why not? Given that that it is not flat for women or minorities over that period, and there was increased global competition, automation and computers replacing lots of old jobs, I think it's great that wages haven't dropped overall. It also hides that there have been incredible benefits given to workers that are not in wages. You need to look at BLS cost to employ as the metric. Starting around 1970 all sorts of federal regulation has been passed making workers safer and shifting a lot of benefits to employers. Also median wage hides the fact workers have gotten younger as boomer retire. Younger workers earn less since they're earlier in their career. It is a fact that for each point in a career median wage has increased. [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d... |