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The other interesting finding here is that only 57% of these "job stayers" beat or matched inflation, while 43% suffered a real wage cut. A huge chunk of the people who's wages beat inflation only did so due to job hopping
Saw a theory somewhere that, instead of raising the minimum wage, a policy that enables and incentivizes job hopping is what actually works for increasing the median wage level. The inverse implication of the theory is also interesting: any policy that makes job hopping harder than staying would suppress the wage level.
A policy that requires job hopping to get good wages discriminates against people who are less mobile: workers with families, elderly parents, older workers with more ties to their neighborhood, people who don’t have enough savings to move, people who can't afford transportation...
I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
As a tangent, poverty line definitions vary by country, in Australia, for example, earning less than half the median wage is considered below the Australian poverty line.
Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.
As I understand it, that's a fairly common definition for relative poverty (either that or 60%) though of course you're still right that it's best to confirm both the threshold the methodology is the same (or use an explicitly international comparison that covers both/all compared countries in the same work, such as those produced by the OECD or similar bodies).
Why does it have to be a choice? Raise the median, raise the minimum, use wealth created through higher productivity and a healthier labour market to redistribute to some degree, everyone wins?
The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
Higher productivity and other such benefits are a leap. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that people who work at a company longer end up more capable of contributing to that company.
In some ways this could even be an argument for the cause of enshittification of everything. When everything is liminal, it somewhat directly leads to a 'get mine and go' type mindset, which in turn leads directly to enshittification, no longer term than next quarter thinking, and so on. I've always assumed the cause of this all was MBAs, and I still think it's the primary cause, but perhaps we're creating this certain from multiple directions all at once.
This is the standard in the Scandinavian social democracies. They have no minimum wage laws (though unions supplement that greatly) and a competitive labor market pushes wages up.
Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
They also have a much better safety net. Healthcare not being tied to employment is already massive.
I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
Healthcare being tired to employment and related lacks of safety net are the only reason the most abusive companies (call centers, common retail experiences) have employees.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
Flat tax is only ever flat when you hold down deductions. That’s way harder than it seems.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass. Not because of how good or bad the idea is, but because of how effective voting blocks + donors are.
Yes to a stronger welfare state, including untying healthcare and employment, and a UBI (more specifically a negative income tax).
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
To clarify, that's the demand for labour in farming has shrunk while crop yields per acre have increased.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
And yet, within the last couple years, the unemployment rate has remained stable within its usual 3-5% healthy band, and the total amount of people employed has increased overall.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
Jobs are created by desire, and the labor required to fulfill the market's desires. People won't ever stop wanting things.
Our wants today are vastly different from our wants a hundred years ago, and thus the labor pool looks vastly different. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that there is a limited lump of labor.
Desire is not an external entity or being that manipulates us. Our biology generates desire, since it has been selected for by evolution through natural selection.
People create jobs.
But unlike the conventional picture people have in their head, it is a unidirectional creation process (i.e. by the "job giver"). The job is created through the dynamic of the "giver" and the "seeker".
I don't think I'll ever understand this perspective. To my ears, all the AI hype and profoundly ignorant economic fantasies sound exactly like the bidet hype of the 2010s.
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
You mention unions, but what you're leaving out is they have a huge advantage in those countries compared to the US. One big one is that, Union A can boycott a Company B over a dispute with Union C. That is illegal in the US, and it's a very powerful thumbscrew against the powerful.
It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.
The US has had many very successful tech companies. Those attract talented engineers that want to work there. Partly this is about supply and demand but the other part is that engineers who work for the successful companies see their compensation go way up due to stock options or RSUs (which are/were offered to attract said top talent and motivate them to work hard). If you have a new AI startup (for example) and you want to hire top talent away from Google or Microsoft or Apple of nVidia you're going to need to offer a competitive pay.
So competition over a limited talent pool in combination with a vibrant economy and many successful companies that make a lot of money. At least historically.
High salaries isn't limited to tech. Bankers, lawyers, doctors e.g. tend to earn more in the US.
Another aspect is that you get paid more but you potentially have higher expenses. So some of the delta is related to cost of living. But not all.
Americans are individualists and value their own career higher than any "loyalty" to an employer. So employers in fast moving sectors have to compete for talent with the money they offer.
When everyone is the same (genetics, background, culture, etc) there is very little structural inequality in a competitive market. In an empire like the US, so many groups exist in a hierarchy that government support is required. In such an environment bare competition simply reveals and highlights fundamental difference, which is not conducive to social cohesion or harmony.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
4 years seems like a long time, but I'd easily say that's true for a year. I suppose it's relative to your definition of good.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
For sure there is a downside. To develop real expertise in a domain takes time. We have people hopping between jobs before they've even learnt how to do one job right.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
It's not about being uneasy. I've had six jobs in my career that are all over the lot with respect to software engineering. How to work with specific influential personalities like the C-suite, picking up and gaining some expertise with the company's stack, establishing the proper processes and engineering discipline for mentoring and growth. Over time I see the decisions that the company has made and what has worked and what hasn't, and also the reasoning behind those decisions, and I can bring that knowledge forward when the company tries to iterate on their current processes. That is immensely valuable in maintaining continuity in the business and making good decisions that don't repeat past mistakes.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
I think it's bimodal for me, lots in the first six months bringing fresh eyes and outside ideas followed by a lull of a couple years before the benefits of realy knowing the company sets in.
But greater turnover only occurs when people don’t want to stay.
It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side
Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
I was thinking the time it takes to find a job is good indicator of how hard it is to switch jobs, if that was tracked and reduced that would be good for workers.
Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
The way to benefit from irrational hiring practices is by starting your own company that's less irrational, and thus can scoop up good workers for relatively cheap (while still paying them more than they get in the rest of the market.)
Worked for Alan Greenspan and his consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan.
If you run your own company like that, then the longer the market stays irrational the bigger your gain.
Your job hopping comment is interesting and is generalisable: reduce monopsony in the labour market, and you get more competition for labour that actually bites.
The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.
Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
I'd like to see a world where the government provided a job for anybody who wanted one. If you're not enjoying your corporate job you can go back to planting trees to offset carbon emissions. Getting to old to plant trees? Go work in the library. Want to develop it skills? get a job helping the government transition to Libre Office
This doesn't work though. The government needs to pay you. Where does the money come from? People working for the government tend to not really work that hard because what's their incentive to work hard? Are you getting paid per tree?
If the government wants trees planed it's better for everyone that they hire a company that plants trees. Even that isn't always that great but it's less worse. The government doesn't want that and doesn't have the money for that. They could get that money by raising taxes which increases cost of living for everyone that works and that tends to be not popular.
Anyways- that's what the USSR looked like or maybe China before they switched to their version of a free market. Due to human nature and other factors it doesn't work.
I agree with the work sucks bullet point. So nobody should work. We can all just sit at home, get our UBI money, and pay our rent, get our groceries, buy a car, get fuel, go on vacation. That sounds perfect to me. But.. who makes the car? who grows the fruit and veggies? Who works in the store? Who builds houses? Who repairs and cleans those houses. Hm. maybe somebody has to work after all.
Seriously I support having a decent social net so that nobody is starving on the street without healthcare etc. but the preference is always that if work is available someone should work (assuming it's reasonably suitable, they're not taken advantage of, they are able to work etc.).
UBI has to be significantly lower than the average taxes paid. If it isn't the books don't balance and eventually inflation kicks in hard and eventually it reaches that equilibrium. If nobody works then taxes are $0 and UBI is $0.
So if you do the math using fairly roughly you'll find that the US can support a UBI of about $1500/month without significant inflationary pressure. That'll pay your rent (if you're sharing an apartment) and cover groceries (if you mostly live on rice and beans). If you want a car, vacations or the latest iPhone you have to work. So most would work and build those cars et al.
You are indulging in a Black And White Fallacy here.
UBI doesn't mean no one works. It means no one has to work just to live.
And even if you want to ignore the actual scholarly research on the subject (which is ample), we have plenty of examples of people who would never have to work a day in their lives, and yet they still do so, sometimes even despite millions of people actively hating them for it: the very wealthy, particularly those who inherited generational wealth.
Scott Alexander uses a lot of words to argue his points, but I don't think he makes them very successfully. Almost every point in the linked essay can be easily refuted without thinking too much. Perhaps he is arguing for a spercific implementation, but if we are dreaming about utopia, why not be generous in our interpretation for how the jobs for all might work. We are comparing it to the dream of UBI after all.
1. We could provide jobs for disabled people that makes feel better about themselves. Also remember this is jobs for all who _want_ to work. There is still disability for those that need it.
2 & 3 Government provided jobs could help caretakers and parents because they could be more flexible with hours and shifts. Work while your kids are at school.
4. Jobs causing poverty because you have to drive somewhere and eat out because there is no break room is ridiculous. I laughed out loud when he argued that if you work you are too tired to drive to the shop where the cheap groceries are sold.
5. Yep, some people need to be fired. I'm not sure what he is trying to say here. I think these government jobs need to be run well, and employees need to be paid bonus if they do good work. (Compared to other teams that do the same work)
And yet that has terrible implications. Job hopping is both extremely unsatisfying on an individual level (no place to belong; you're just an interchangeable cog in the machine being swapped around, giving you no sense of purpose in your work) and on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).
A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though. You get choose which job you go to, and if you have better options available, and choose your optimal fit, that can give you more purpose, not less.
And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy.
Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).
> A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though.
Maybe "a competitive labor market" doesn't, but "job hopping" does. That is, in fact, the definitional meaning of job hopping. They specifically made the claim about "job hopping" as pertains to a mechanism for achieving wages. This is incompatible with finding an optimal fit -- even if you found your optimal fit, you would essentially be taking a massive wage cut to stay at your optimal fit job for more than a couple of years, if job hopping is the chosen mechanism for society-wide wage growth. I was responding to the claim that was made about job hopping, not some other claim about competitive labor markets.
The reason for all of [job hopping, fluid labor markets, bankruptcy, startup formation, inflation] is because the world doesn't stay the same. Desires change. New technologies are invented. Resources get depleted, and substitutes need to be found. Bottlenecks emerge. Old people die, and young people are born.
Changing wages and periodic layoffs are ways of adapting the jobs that people do to the new realities of which jobs need to be done.
You're right, and I should've addressed you more directly.
Job hopping is the result of competition in the labor market, and while some may find it unfulfilling, that is usually the exception, and macroeconomically speaking, more job hopping can be really good for the overall market. That's all I was saying, though I forgot to mention how competition in the labor market relates.
My definition of job hopping is to switch jobs continually until you find the right fit, the right fit including wages as a factor among many others. I suspect that your definition means jumping jobs arbitrarily for the highest wage. In that case you are right that job hopping is bad, and it's my fault for confusing job hopping as wage increasing mechanism vs job hopping in general.
If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."
If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.
Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.
Competitive labor markets are FAR more efficient in terms of labor productivity, allocation, skill development, and spreading ideas around. One of the reasons the Industrial Revolution happened in England was because labor was more mobile than on the continent.
> [...] on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).
A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.
Job-hopping doesn't seem to have those downsides in Silicon Valley though? I think the "feeling like a cog" aspect has more to do with company size. Can you get a meeting with the CEO?
I don't know why you think SV doesn't have those downsides. In fact the entire world suffers the price of SV driving away their own employees with institutional knowledge and massively diminishing the quality of their software as a result.
I worked at a series of startups and I think having lunch every day with the other employees was an excellent way to get to know them. These jobs didn't last long because the startups weren't all that successful, but I remember them well.
Or maybe it was because I was younger then?
Stayed at Google over a decade and it wasn't quite the same, particular when working with people in distant offices.
Yeah no thanks, I rather have the government regulate some actual floors rather than hoping that the better angels of American corporations eventually do the right thing.
Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
You're not simply hoping that corporations do the right thing though. Rather, you're making it economically unfeasible for them to pay workers less.
That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it. It also just works better than adding a price floor, if done right.
And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.
NC teacher salaries are terrible on their own but they are also outpaced by inflation.
The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.
So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.
Theoretically jobs reward loyalty and wish to maintain institutional knowledge.
For some reason right now everyone thinks they can get away without those. And I can't say they're precisely wrong. But as someone working on dumpster fire fighting, holy hell is a lot lost when you lose someone who's done nothing but X for 15 years. Now you've got someone with no experience with our processes, overworked, also underpaid, with nobody left with any experience of their own to train them. That can cost an awful lot of money.
Employers are optimizing for labor cost control. As long as the enterprise continues to function and is profitable, the behavior continues. We cannot say it doesn’t work as long as it continues to work.
Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Workers have become ~90% more productive over the last forty years, and received very little of that value, while the US throws off ~$5T in profits per year to shareholders. There is a reason socialism has become palatable politically recently to the electorate, and will continue to be until the labor situation changes.
> The top 10% of households by wealth had $8.1 million on average. As a group, they held 67.2% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $60,000 on average. As a group, they held 2.5% of total household wealth.
> The top 20% of households by income had $4.3 million in wealth on average. As a group, they held 71.1% of total household wealth.
The bottom 20% of households by income had $180,000 in wealth on average. As a group, they held 3% of total household wealth.
Top 10% owns 93% of equities. Middle class wealth is primary residence real estate, representing roughly 60% to 80% of total household wealth.
> In any event, stock market booms have traditionally produced the largest rewards for those who are already wealthy. That's because the wealthiest US households have most of their assets tied up in equities, while most middle-class families have their assets tied up in housing, researchers said in a 2020 study. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks in the third quarter of 2023.
> The latest data show that 42.0 percent of full-time working Americans do not have access to retirement plans, 44.1 percent do not participate, and 50.5 percent do not receive an employer match. (Note that these figures are for employed workers between the ages of 18 and 65, excluding government and self-employed workers.)
> Even for those who do have access, traditional defined benefit pensions have become much less common as defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, have become the primary type of retirement plan. This shift has increased the risks and responsibilities for individuals in planning and managing their retirement. Yet research shows that many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings. As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
I'm sorry—vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption? You've just named three vacuous toys, whereas GPS and e-commerce deliver real value to working people.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
The whole point is that it is not to the "working people" that the "real value" is "delivered". The real people got the crumbs and were told to appreciate it.
Almost all of the value went to those who one might call "unreal" people.
it absolutely did. Those were the crumbs I was referring to.
It enrages me, because "they" took all the value, and told us "my god, how immoral and vulgar it would be of you to covet the vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption! Instead, how wonderful it is that you can drive your car from your house to our offices in the morning, and our businesses in the evenings, avoiding traffic in service of shareholder value, while teaching our systems everything about yourself, so that we can market even more goods and services to you, even more insidiously, all thanks to GPS!"
They told us this while driving the Ferraris and flying the private airplanes.
And so many of us now come and say "oh, how immoral -- desiring an object of desire! Isn't it so nice that we can now build shareholder value more productively using GPS?"
I don't know, friend. I am not a moral absolutist.
There's nothing that makes my heart tremble like starting the propeller of a small GA airplane. On that moment I reconnect with my nine year old self. You may call me evil, vulgar, stupid, shallow, vicious even. I know what I feel inside. The rest of the world can disappear on that moment.
My friend, the 2026 Cessna 182 is basically the same airplane as it was in 1975, with digital screens instead of analog gauges, except now it costs about $750,000.
That's a whopping $735,000 increase over its base price of ~$15,000 USD back in 1975 for a brand-new airplane.
I promise, those avionics aren't worth $735,000. We've just gotten much, much poorer.
EDIT: Heck, if this doesn't convince you, here's another set of numbers:
1. $15,000 of 1975 dollars is about ~$95,000 of 2026 dollars
2. A heavily used 1975 Cessna 182 today costs about $150,000
What improvements in GA since 1975? They are very slow to change from what I understand. There are a ton of airframes from that era still flying today.
I mean, yeah at the top end things have gotten nicer.
Would love to see this calculated in high cost of living areas (NY, CA), pretty sure some people have seen 20% wage declines since covid (in terms of how far your income goes)
I guess RSUs aren't really "real wages" but mine vested over four years to the extent that by the time I left they were worth barely 25% of what they had been when I signed the offer. Happened over time, too, so quarterly vests took a decent hit in that timeframe.
RSUs are great for workers because if the value dips 75% you can just leave and get a new job and get new RSUs at a reasonable price. Of course it's not trivial to switch jobs but at a 75% cut it's surely worth at least looking around. I don't think you can really consider it a fault of the economy if you didn't.
I did that once. The company doubled rsus the next quarter (still didn't make up for it), then the stock price 5xed over the next 3 years. By the end of it, if I had stayed, I would have cleared 1.2M per year.
Although I heard they also fired some of those people with high rsus! So it goes both ways.
This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.
>In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation at all. In the absence of economic growth I would expect the average individual's earnings to be flat.
The only way for wages to go up across the board is if productivity increases. If you're not creating more wealth than last year, the only way for one person's wages to go up is if someone else's goes down.
I read it as 3% retire, 3% enter the workforce, and everyone else is slightly better / more senior than the year before. So the average wage could be flat.
> The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career.
> and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
This is an extremely unrealistic expectation. There are a multitude of reasons for people's incomes to fluctuate other than retirement. People make career changes that result in lower income for many reasons, like taking a better job, changing careers, transitioning to a lower demand job when they have children, or moving to a new city with lower wages for personal preference.
For many jobs the earnings are also dependent on the company's earnings. Incentive structures, bonuses, RSUs. Even low paying companies scale their staff up and down based on demand. They can't hold a monotonically growing set of staff and also monotonically increase their wages when the incoming demand for their product is not monotonically growing.
The only way to come close to an "idealized society" like you're proposing is a totally self-sustaining, command and control economy where a central authority determines not only everyone's income, but their expenditures too. It's not possible to keep the entire economy and everyone in it moving in the same direction unless you're dictating where all of the money goes in society to a fine degree. Variations of this have been tried. The members of that society do not find themselves more well off.
Its interesting, I thought it was pretty well established that COVID era stimulus helped lower earners make real gains, even adjusted for inflation, while higher earners who did not get stimulus checks lost ground?
From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
I’m pretty confused where you’re coming from. Stimulus checks were a one or two time payment of a couple thousand dollars, but stocks and corporate profits went absolutely parabolic.
Unemployment almost by definition means they’re not getting as much money as they were before.
We can focus strictly on wages, but for higher earners, it doesn’t tell the entire story, especially if we’re focusing on my new detail details like a couple thousand dollars per person.
Many people were making more money on unemployment than their standard wage due to the covid increased pay. The fed paid $600 on top of state benefits for a few months and then $300 for more than a year after that meaning people were seeing 16 -> 24 dollars an hour in wages for not working in my state of Georgia for instance. It was often smarter to stay unemployed until that ran out compared to local wages.
My cousin and many others I knew were getting more money from unemployment than when they had their jobs during covid. Though I don’t believe that caused inflation. Inflation was an international phenomenon and countries experiencing inflation had very diverse stimulus responses to COVID. It seems the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a pivot to a goods based rather than services based economy, coupled with climate changed caused shortages and retiring boomers caused it.
Yeah agree, share of wealth definitely went up for folks who had the money to be invested in the stock market.
My recollection is that some combination of stimulus checks / COVID dynamics made it much harder to hire low wage workers, so employers were "forced" to raise wages in response. At the same time, higher wage workers who got "normal" raises were not keeping up with inflation.
I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.
I'm not sure averages are that interesting, because the people at the high end have an extra-ordinary amount of influence on the average. You might want to look at the shape of the distribution?
> This compression accelerated in 2021: real wage growth in the bottom two deciles remained positive and close to its pre-period pace, while all other deciles experienced declines of about 2 percent, roughly four percentage points below their pre-period growth
That’s true, and you could even use any measure you’d like. Perhaps the Gini coefficient. I should specify that I’m not trying to make direct claim about inequality.
Only that, for anyone against the ails of inequality, the bottom wage earners getting more (and even outpacing other deciles) is a win.
Maybe it's very bad. Or maybe it's negligible. And which third of americans is it, the poor the middle or the rich or a mix of everyone? These factors are important before we can draw more than the most shallow of conclusions.
There's a chart of the average that looks pretty bad. But also I don't have time to read 78 pages right now.
One could make the point that in a society that is primarily driven by capital, it is wise to keep an eye on the health of it from those that are within said system.
> Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates.
Count me in the unlucky 37%. I job hopped for more stability in 2022. I got more comp but then proceeded to get 2% raises. I'm making less now adjusted for inflation than I did in 2022.
For the Tech sector, inflation speeds up companies crashes as staff leave for startups due to wages being extraordinarily "sticky-up" in large companies.
The paper only mentions total compensation as: "total compensation (base wages plus bonuses)"
Total compensation includes stock options, stock grants, health insurance premiums, 401k contributions, so-called "employer social security contributions", retirement contributions, time off with pay, etc. Total compensation averages 146% of wages.
This is not a triviality.
The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
Employment ain't guaranteed either, so I'm not sure that guarantee is worth much.
And you can be pretty sure that many workers would walk if the extra goodies they are accustomed to but which ain't guaranteed were to be withdrawn. Assuming the competition still provides them.
There are good reasons for companies to provide those benefits. And they most definitely are part of their total compensation. When a study does not take this into account, their results are not valid.
Not so. I'm part of a religious community for whom FICA is something we can opt out of via IRS Form 4029, and I can avoid contributions to FICA more broadly (not just SS taxes!) by handing HR the approved 4029 that I receive in response to filing.
I don't know how available this is to folks who aren't Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent, but it's there.
About 0.14% of the population is Mennonite. By filing 4029, you assert that your community is going to provide the equivalent of SS and Medicare, so it amounts to about the same thing.
My remark was a rebuttal to the assertion that these contributions were guaranteed. That notwithstanding, I'm unsure that I agree that it amounts to about the same thing; we tend to take care of each other as a matter of due course and not as a transaction.
The mainstream Anglo-American attitude around this kind of support leaves me scratching my head a lot of the time.
It is a kind of transaction. While I don't know the details, isn't it some form of you support the community, and the community supports you when you're in need?
Why would that make any difference? What an employer spends on an employee is what the employee gets. If the employer spends less, the employee gets less, and hence is a pay decrease, even if not in nominal terms but in real terms.
Premiums for a silver plan can easily be $30k per year for a family of 4. If an employer decides to cover 70% of it instead of 80%, that is literally a pay decrease of $3k, not to mention possible changes in coverage, deductible, and oop max.
For example, the employer could keep the 80% subsidy, but increase deductible from $1k to $10k. Unless premiums go down a lot that is basically a huge pay decrease too.
There are also some fairly interesting trends in labor productivity.
Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)
"in the long run, its really really hard to cut nominal wages. [without] inflation, a significant number of workers take wage cuts"
basically, inflation is a way to cheat all laborers out of their earned wealth so that the management class doesn't have to make hard decisions about who to keep.
The working class doesn't hold that much in cash, do they? Competition in the labour market means nominal wages go up when inflation goes up. Many working class people have mortgages (though I'm not sure whether they have fixed rate mortgages?)
No big surprise- were making mess money and terrified of losing our jobs, afraid of losing healthcare and can’t afford our homes, less social because of doom scrolling
Welcome to the progress and “better world” that Tech Bros promised while they reaped billions of the VC/PE economy
Why was that bound to happen? Inflation also raises nominal wages. It's not clear what impact inflation has on the relative price of labour vs goods and services.
How much of inflation during Biden years was from Trump? For instance, Trump agreements to restrict oil production after covid lasted deep into Biden's term. The US still did better on inflation than most comparable peers in the aftermath of covid.
We let Trump print $4T in an election year and Biden print $2T in four years. Trump was going 40mph in the parking lot, Biden slowed down to 5mph, and while there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether or not the latter was too fast when someone is spazzing out about the 5mph and ignoring the 40mph, it's because they have an agenda.
A big part of it was like $5T in covid stimulus, most of which happened under Trump. Biden piled some more on, probably unnecessarily. It felt like we were balancing on a razor's edge and maybe starting to come out of it by the end of 2024. A lot of inflationary policies since then.
The biggest problems were various supply shocks associated with the pandemic and its aftermath and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintaining full employment and avoiding a recession. The US economy during that period significantly outperformed most other wealthy countries. (As one indicative example, the cover story of The Economist from October 2024 was titled The American economy: The envy of the world.)
Since then we've had a wide range of completely self-inflicted policy faceplants, including notably several rounds of illegal tariffs and a war with Iran.
Biden's ARP independently caused inflation according to multiple central bank analyses.
However, you are also correct that Trump pressuring OPEC to cut oil production at the end of his first term did cause additional inflation in Biden's term.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." =- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Submitters: If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.
* AU: https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/
* UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom
* US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_Sta...
The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
In some ways this could even be an argument for the cause of enshittification of everything. When everything is liminal, it somewhat directly leads to a 'get mine and go' type mindset, which in turn leads directly to enshittification, no longer term than next quarter thinking, and so on. I've always assumed the cause of this all was MBAs, and I still think it's the primary cause, but perhaps we're creating this certain from multiple directions all at once.
Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass. Not because of how good or bad the idea is, but because of how effective voting blocks + donors are.
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
Where do all jobs come from? Ultimately they’re created by people, so I wouldn’t worry about there being a demand but no supply.
Our wants today are vastly different from our wants a hundred years ago, and thus the labor pool looks vastly different. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that there is a limited lump of labor.
This made me pause and think for a moment.
Desire is not an external entity or being that manipulates us. Our biology generates desire, since it has been selected for by evolution through natural selection.
People create jobs.
But unlike the conventional picture people have in their head, it is a unidirectional creation process (i.e. by the "job giver"). The job is created through the dynamic of the "giver" and the "seeker".
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.
So competition over a limited talent pool in combination with a vibrant economy and many successful companies that make a lot of money. At least historically.
High salaries isn't limited to tech. Bankers, lawyers, doctors e.g. tend to earn more in the US.
Another aspect is that you get paid more but you potentially have higher expenses. So some of the delta is related to cost of living. But not all.
Now days, companies offer top dollar for Junior-level AI talent. And you see where that's going.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers
It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s
Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy.
And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know.
GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...
I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side
Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
Like healthcare being tied to employment?
Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
Worked for Alan Greenspan and his consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan.
If you run your own company like that, then the longer the market stays irrational the bigger your gain.
The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.
Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
[citation needed]
By measures such as own-wage elasticity [DUBE & ZIPPERER] increases to the minimum wage evidently increase wages more than they decrease employment.
[DUBE & ZIPPERER]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925
If the government wants trees planed it's better for everyone that they hire a company that plants trees. Even that isn't always that great but it's less worse. The government doesn't want that and doesn't have the money for that. They could get that money by raising taxes which increases cost of living for everyone that works and that tends to be not popular.
Anyways- that's what the USSR looked like or maybe China before they switched to their version of a free market. Due to human nature and other factors it doesn't work.
Seriously I support having a decent social net so that nobody is starving on the street without healthcare etc. but the preference is always that if work is available someone should work (assuming it's reasonably suitable, they're not taken advantage of, they are able to work etc.).
So if you do the math using fairly roughly you'll find that the US can support a UBI of about $1500/month without significant inflationary pressure. That'll pay your rent (if you're sharing an apartment) and cover groceries (if you mostly live on rice and beans). If you want a car, vacations or the latest iPhone you have to work. So most would work and build those cars et al.
UBI doesn't mean no one works. It means no one has to work just to live.
And even if you want to ignore the actual scholarly research on the subject (which is ample), we have plenty of examples of people who would never have to work a day in their lives, and yet they still do so, sometimes even despite millions of people actively hating them for it: the very wealthy, particularly those who inherited generational wealth.
1. We could provide jobs for disabled people that makes feel better about themselves. Also remember this is jobs for all who _want_ to work. There is still disability for those that need it.
2 & 3 Government provided jobs could help caretakers and parents because they could be more flexible with hours and shifts. Work while your kids are at school.
4. Jobs causing poverty because you have to drive somewhere and eat out because there is no break room is ridiculous. I laughed out loud when he argued that if you work you are too tired to drive to the shop where the cheap groceries are sold.
5. Yep, some people need to be fired. I'm not sure what he is trying to say here. I think these government jobs need to be run well, and employees need to be paid bonus if they do good work. (Compared to other teams that do the same work)
I could go on.. but seems a little pointless.
And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy.
Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).
Maybe "a competitive labor market" doesn't, but "job hopping" does. That is, in fact, the definitional meaning of job hopping. They specifically made the claim about "job hopping" as pertains to a mechanism for achieving wages. This is incompatible with finding an optimal fit -- even if you found your optimal fit, you would essentially be taking a massive wage cut to stay at your optimal fit job for more than a couple of years, if job hopping is the chosen mechanism for society-wide wage growth. I was responding to the claim that was made about job hopping, not some other claim about competitive labor markets.
The reason for all of [job hopping, fluid labor markets, bankruptcy, startup formation, inflation] is because the world doesn't stay the same. Desires change. New technologies are invented. Resources get depleted, and substitutes need to be found. Bottlenecks emerge. Old people die, and young people are born.
Changing wages and periodic layoffs are ways of adapting the jobs that people do to the new realities of which jobs need to be done.
Job hopping is the result of competition in the labor market, and while some may find it unfulfilling, that is usually the exception, and macroeconomically speaking, more job hopping can be really good for the overall market. That's all I was saying, though I forgot to mention how competition in the labor market relates.
My definition of job hopping is to switch jobs continually until you find the right fit, the right fit including wages as a factor among many others. I suspect that your definition means jumping jobs arbitrarily for the highest wage. In that case you are right that job hopping is bad, and it's my fault for confusing job hopping as wage increasing mechanism vs job hopping in general.
If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."
If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.
Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.
[1] https://jebkinnison.com/2016/04/29/jane-jacobs-monstrous-hyb...
[2] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-min...
A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.
Or maybe it was because I was younger then?
Stayed at Google over a decade and it wasn't quite the same, particular when working with people in distant offices.
Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it. It also just works better than adding a price floor, if done right.
And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.
So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.
so job hop
the market is trying to tell you something
For some reason right now everyone thinks they can get away without those. And I can't say they're precisely wrong. But as someone working on dumpster fire fighting, holy hell is a lot lost when you lose someone who's done nothing but X for 15 years. Now you've got someone with no experience with our processes, overworked, also underpaid, with nobody left with any experience of their own to train them. That can cost an awful lot of money.
Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Thanks, I'd rather take the Cessna.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
> The top 10% of households by wealth had $8.1 million on average. As a group, they held 67.2% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $60,000 on average. As a group, they held 2.5% of total household wealth.
> The top 20% of households by income had $4.3 million in wealth on average. As a group, they held 71.1% of total household wealth. The bottom 20% of households by income had $180,000 in wealth on average. As a group, they held 3% of total household wealth.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wealthiest-10-americans-own-9...
Top 10% owns 93% of equities. Middle class wealth is primary residence real estate, representing roughly 60% to 80% of total household wealth.
> In any event, stock market booms have traditionally produced the largest rewards for those who are already wealthy. That's because the wealthiest US households have most of their assets tied up in equities, while most middle-class families have their assets tied up in housing, researchers said in a 2020 study. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of Americans held just 1% of all stocks in the third quarter of 2023.
https://eig.org/whos-left-out-of-americas-retirement-savings...
> The latest data show that 42.0 percent of full-time working Americans do not have access to retirement plans, 44.1 percent do not participate, and 50.5 percent do not receive an employer match. (Note that these figures are for employed workers between the ages of 18 and 65, excluding government and self-employed workers.)
https://www.gao.gov/financial-security-older-americans
> Even for those who do have access, traditional defined benefit pensions have become much less common as defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, have become the primary type of retirement plan. This shift has increased the risks and responsibilities for individuals in planning and managing their retirement. Yet research shows that many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings. As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
Almost all of the value went to those who one might call "unreal" people.
It enrages me, because "they" took all the value, and told us "my god, how immoral and vulgar it would be of you to covet the vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption! Instead, how wonderful it is that you can drive your car from your house to our offices in the morning, and our businesses in the evenings, avoiding traffic in service of shareholder value, while teaching our systems everything about yourself, so that we can market even more goods and services to you, even more insidiously, all thanks to GPS!"
They told us this while driving the Ferraris and flying the private airplanes.
And so many of us now come and say "oh, how immoral -- desiring an object of desire! Isn't it so nice that we can now build shareholder value more productively using GPS?"
Sorry, but no. It isn't nice.
...and I only ever commuted by bicycle or train.
There's nothing that makes my heart tremble like starting the propeller of a small GA airplane. On that moment I reconnect with my nine year old self. You may call me evil, vulgar, stupid, shallow, vicious even. I know what I feel inside. The rest of the world can disappear on that moment.
Sorry.
Because of safety improvement they aren't comparable goods.
That's a whopping $735,000 increase over its base price of ~$15,000 USD back in 1975 for a brand-new airplane.
I promise, those avionics aren't worth $735,000. We've just gotten much, much poorer.
EDIT: Heck, if this doesn't convince you, here's another set of numbers:
1. $15,000 of 1975 dollars is about ~$95,000 of 2026 dollars
2. A heavily used 1975 Cessna 182 today costs about $150,000
Tell me you're not a pilot without telling me...
I mean, yeah at the top end things have gotten nicer.
Although I heard they also fired some of those people with high rsus! So it goes both ways.
Either way, definitely not "might as well round to zero". I have never worked anywhere where that was the case.
The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation at all. In the absence of economic growth I would expect the average individual's earnings to be flat.
The only way for wages to go up across the board is if productivity increases. If you're not creating more wealth than last year, the only way for one person's wages to go up is if someone else's goes down.
In that scenario, each individual worker sees increases over their lifetime, even though the average stays flat.
> and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
This is an extremely unrealistic expectation. There are a multitude of reasons for people's incomes to fluctuate other than retirement. People make career changes that result in lower income for many reasons, like taking a better job, changing careers, transitioning to a lower demand job when they have children, or moving to a new city with lower wages for personal preference.
For many jobs the earnings are also dependent on the company's earnings. Incentive structures, bonuses, RSUs. Even low paying companies scale their staff up and down based on demand. They can't hold a monotonically growing set of staff and also monotonically increase their wages when the incoming demand for their product is not monotonically growing.
The only way to come close to an "idealized society" like you're proposing is a totally self-sustaining, command and control economy where a central authority determines not only everyone's income, but their expenditures too. It's not possible to keep the entire economy and everyone in it moving in the same direction unless you're dictating where all of the money goes in society to a fine degree. Variations of this have been tried. The members of that society do not find themselves more well off.
From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
The share of wealth owned by the richest people went up far more than the bottom 90 (or even 99) percent. The data absolutely supports this perspective as well: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
We can focus strictly on wages, but for higher earners, it doesn’t tell the entire story, especially if we’re focusing on my new detail details like a couple thousand dollars per person.
My recollection is that some combination of stimulus checks / COVID dynamics made it much harder to hire low wage workers, so employers were "forced" to raise wages in response. At the same time, higher wage workers who got "normal" raises were not keeping up with inflation.
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-job-growth-picks-up-may-...
> This compression accelerated in 2021: real wage growth in the bottom two deciles remained positive and close to its pre-period pace, while all other deciles experienced declines of about 2 percent, roughly four percentage points below their pre-period growth
Only that, for anyone against the ails of inequality, the bottom wage earners getting more (and even outpacing other deciles) is a win.
However, it does says that 58% of all workers failed to keep up with the real wage growth trend we saw in the years leading up to the pandemic.
>So 63% didn't.
But more than a third of Americans did. You can't "glass two-thirds full" tens of millions of people seeing their actual purchasing power decrease.
There's a chart of the average that looks pretty bad. But also I don't have time to read 78 pages right now.
> Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
> 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted
> Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates.
Total compensation includes stock options, stock grants, health insurance premiums, 401k contributions, so-called "employer social security contributions", retirement contributions, time off with pay, etc. Total compensation averages 146% of wages.
This is not a triviality.
The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
And you can be pretty sure that many workers would walk if the extra goodies they are accustomed to but which ain't guaranteed were to be withdrawn. Assuming the competition still provides them.
I don't know how available this is to folks who aren't Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent, but it's there.
The mainstream Anglo-American attitude around this kind of support leaves me scratching my head a lot of the time.
Premiums for a silver plan can easily be $30k per year for a family of 4. If an employer decides to cover 70% of it instead of 80%, that is literally a pay decrease of $3k, not to mention possible changes in coverage, deductible, and oop max.
For example, the employer could keep the 80% subsidy, but increase deductible from $1k to $10k. Unless premiums go down a lot that is basically a huge pay decrease too.
Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3371L000000000
Construction has been DOWN for decades (and is 7 percent of the labor force).
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
Food Manufacturing is in decline as well:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN311L000000000
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...
"in the long run, its really really hard to cut nominal wages. [without] inflation, a significant number of workers take wage cuts"
basically, inflation is a way to cheat all laborers out of their earned wealth so that the management class doesn't have to make hard decisions about who to keep.
The main cause as I understand it is that the govt prints money to offset the gap between what it collects in taxes and what it spends.
Interactive brief: https://bfidatastudio.org/project/sticky-wage-norms-and-the-...
These youngsters talking about 2020s have no idea!
Welcome to the progress and “better world” that Tech Bros promised while they reaped billions of the VC/PE economy
LOL
https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintaining full employment and avoiding a recession. The US economy during that period significantly outperformed most other wealthy countries. (As one indicative example, the cover story of The Economist from October 2024 was titled The American economy: The envy of the world.)
Since then we've had a wide range of completely self-inflicted policy faceplants, including notably several rounds of illegal tariffs and a war with Iran.
However, you are also correct that Trump pressuring OPEC to cut oil production at the end of his first term did cause additional inflation in Biden's term.