Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by db-interface 974 days ago
This is simply false. Median wages after adjusting for inflation are above Q4 2019 and have grown substantially over the last 30 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Have you talked to low-wage workers? They switch jobs a lot. Long-term job stability is actually more of a corporate white-collar phenomenon.
1 comments
deltarholamda 974 days ago
You're missing the point. Look at wages compared to home prices, for example. You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.

In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

edit to add: switching jobs does not mean higher wages, especially for low-wage jobs.

link
db-interface 973 days ago
> You've adjusted wages for inflation, great, but that's meaningless unless you compare wages to what it costs to live.

That's literally the point of adjusting for inflation. You can of course pick the fastest growing components of the CPI (housing is already a huge component) and complain that we're not outpacing the fastest growing component, but that's arbitrary.

> In any event, others disagree with your chart: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

That chart looks at wages rather than income, e.g. excluding healthcare contributions. You can argue that we shouldn't count healthcare because it's gotten way more expensive for no real increase in quality (which is true!). But healthcare is a huge and rapidly growing component of CPI which we are using to deflate wages -- you can't have your cake and eat it too by excluding healthcare payments from compensation but including it in your deflator.

Also that chart just seems to be wrong (they don't actually show the source or data). You can do the comparison yourself easily enough -- take the average hourly wages (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003) and use FRED's graph editor to compare to a deflator (e.g. CPI -- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL). This is up ~10% since 2008. It's not massive but it's not nothing -- and remember the caveat above that this is an underestimate.

And re: switching jobs for low-wage workers -- either they are getting big raises or getting big pay increases from switching jobs, or the BLS is massively wrong. Which is it?

link