[BaconPackets]

I'll need to look at the underlying data, but it seems that the job "classification/category" should be more important than the raw number. A boost in lower paid/service industry jobs does not mean that there wasn't a loss in a category where AI can be more easily dropped into existing businesses.

Data : https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

[JumpCrisscross]

Average weekly and hourly earnings were up in May [1], though “real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [2].

Nominal wages being up rejects the hypothesis that folks are being downsized into lower-paying roles.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

[throwaway27448]

It's quite frustrating that they track average rather than median wages. As wealth inequality increases, average will be less and less representative of worker health.

[bwestergard]

They do track median and 25th/75th percentiles.

[throwaway27448]

Do you have a link? There's no obvious place to look for this. All I can find is "Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by sex, quarterly averages, seasonally adjusted". Which is not trivial to extrapolate into a real annual wage. And it's not clear how "quarterly averages" and "median usual weekly earnings" compose....

[wombatpm]

Old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average everyone there is a millionaire

[alexsmirnov]

I more like my high school math teacher explanation: "Put your one hand on dry ice, another in the boiling water. On average, you feel warm and cozy"

[lesuorac]

Except dry ice is -100 and boiling water is 200 so you feel hot and not cozy.

[akirkland2]

You're just adding the temperatures, you then need to divide by 2 to get the average - so it's actually 51.35 fahrenheit (10.75 celsius).

[throwwwll]

American education

[hackboyfly]

Gold

[actionfromafar]

That's a really old joke. :)

Here's a new one. Musk goes to a concert. On average everyone there is a billionaire.

[markstos]

The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.

[WillPostForFood]

Median is also up:

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.0 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,235 in the first quarter of 2026 (not seasonally adjusted), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. This was 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

[nobodyandproud]

What is the employment rate between the two quarters?

Edit: 4.2% (2025) vs 4.3% (2026).

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/UNRATE

[5701652400]

wonder how much of it is K-shaped. if is payouts for execs, capital gains and alike are boosting aggregate.

[munificent]

Median specifically avoids outliers at both ends of the continuum like that.

[emp17344]

Always an excuse, huh? Both mean and median wages are up. Sorry this doesn’t suit your narrative.

[rich_sasha]

In absolute terms AI is nibbling on a fairly small slice of the global pie of jobs - junior coders, lawyers, accountants, bankers.

The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.

[5701652400]

key point, those 6 figures SWEs earn, they would spend to "local non SWE" economy.

your local datacenter does not care about local chickens or eggs, or private tutor, or pretty much anything at all. not even energy, it is has its own nucleaer reactor nearby. it is one-way economy from now on. you are only a consumer, not a producer. there is virtually nothing you (nor average joe) can provide that "datacenter" needs.

[zardo]

It doesn't have a nuclear reactor, it has two dozen natural gas turbines.

[emp17344]

This is - quite literally - the fixed-pie fallacy, which has been thoroughly debunked by now. Read up on basic economics before commenting on this topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

[heathrow83829]

be careful with "real" hourly earnings. if they're using the CPI then it can be very misleading. One need only compare nominal wages vs nominal rents per square foot for the last 50 years to see that actual wages have dropped by 30% and yet the "real" hourly average wage calculated via the CPI is flat, falsly implying that actual wages have not dropped.

[gruez]

> if they're using the CPI then it can be very misleading. One need only compare nominal wages vs nominal rents per square foot for the last 50 years to see that actual wages have dropped by 30% and yet the "real" hourly average wage calculated via the CPI is flat, falsly implying that actual wages have not dropped.

Yes, if you get to pick prices of arbitrary items to compare against, it's easy to come to whatever conclusion you want[1]. That's why CPI uses a basket of goods, specifically to avoid cherry picking shenanigans.

[1] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cpi2022junea-...

[elektronika]

CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity. It's as much a choice to to use CPI to come to the conclusion things are fine, as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.

[gruez]

>CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity.

Right, because it's not "essentials price index" or whatever.

>as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.

The BLS makes the constituent price indices available as well as their weights, so you can easily vibecode an "essentials" index.

[heathrow83829]

shelter isn't just a cherry picked item. It's by an far the largest spending category, that and healthcare. I couldn't care less about all the other categories, personally.

[gruez]

>shelter isn't just a cherry picked item. It's by an far the largest spending category, that and healthcare.

The BLS agrees. That's why "shelter" is weighted 35.6% in the CPI basket, by far the biggest item.

> I couldn't care less about all the other categories, personally.

If we're going by what people "care" about (whatever that means), the basket would probably be like 70% gas prices, 20% grocery prices, and 10% for everything else. Empirically speaking, those two are far more salient politically than housing.

[heathrow83829]

yeah, staggering. it's utterly amazing how much people care about gas prices. i can't wrap my mind around it. I mean, would people really rather be out on the street rather than get an EV or god forbid a hybrid?

[9rx]

Remember, CPI exists to attempt to figure out how the value of a currency has changed over time. It's not a cost of living index, a housing cost index, a wellness index, or anything of the sort. It is not trying to measure how you are doing in life. It is not there to determine the value of labour, the value of housing, the value of food, or the value of anything other than currency. It is simply compiled to determine the difference in value between $1 yesterday and $1 today, so to speak. As you can see, you cannot use the currency itself to provide that measurement. $1 and $1 are visibly the same; except we know that $1 and $1 aren't the same over time. That is where CPI steps in.

If you want to understand something else, use the measures and data that are focused on that something else. Right tool for the job and all that.

[GJim]

> that and healthcare

Careful.

Much of the western world has healthcare that is free at the point of use and paid for by taxation; one cannot extrapolate consumer inflationary healthcare costs in quite the manner the USA does.

[9rx]

Huh? Housing becoming significantly more valuable than in the past[1] does not imply that wages have dropped.

[1] Mostly thanks to computers/software making housing a more compelling proposition. Historically, people couldn't wait to get outside or over to the pub and would allocate their spending to support that, but now that they prefer to stay in to look at screens, they deem that place where they spend time worthy of greater spending instead.

[lesuorac]

IIUC, it's too early to taking "0.5%" as fact. Need to wait a few more months to see if any revisions occur.

[Ancapistani]

What would cause an increase in the number of open lower paid and/or service industry jobs while simultaneously reducing the number of openings in tech?

[10xDev]

World Cup / Summer.

[gruez]

typically unemployment rates are seasonally adjusted.

[queenkjuul]

That annual US world cup season?

[Ancapistani]

Seasonality needn't be regular, only predictable.

[MoonWalk]

Exactly. Without any specificity of job categories, this chart and conclusion are unsubstantiated garbage.

[themafia]

AI can't flip burgers?