Comment by astrange
10 months ago
> In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents.
This graph is going up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
The reason you believe otherwise is that people on social media think they're only allowed to say untrue negative things about the economy, because if they ever say anything positive it'd be disrespectful to poor people.
> We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies
Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it.
> We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down
They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
> Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it
You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?
> They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.
The reason it is positive for (almost) every group is because it isn't measuring anything meaningful
Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
> You think service workers at a fast food restaurant or working the till at Walmart are higher paid than Factory workers?
Fast food workers aren't service-economy workers, they're making burgers back there.
More importantly, factory work destroys your body and email jobs don't, so whether or not it's high earning at the start… it isn't forever.
> Salaries may have nominally gone up but this is clearly not weighing the cost of living into the equation
That's not a salary chart. The income chart I did post is adjusted for cost of living (that's what "real" means).
Also see https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-growth-since-1979-has-not-been...
> Fast food workers aren't service-economy workers, they're making burgers back there.
What exactly do you consider the "service industry" if you don't consider food services (like restaurants and fast food) as part of it?
I suspect we have very different ideas of what "service industry" means
> Also see https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-growth-since-1979-has-not-been..
Did you even read the whole thing?
```Dropping “wage stagnation” as a descriptive term for the full post-1979 period doesn’t mean we think the wage problem for American workers has been solved. Wage growth in the post-1979 period has been slow and unequal, largely as a result of intentional policy decisions. This policy-induced wage suppression has stifled growth in living standards and generated inequality. The last five years saw rapid and welcome progress reversing some of these trends—but it will take a long time to heal the previous damage, even if the post-2019 momentum can be sustained, which looks very unlikely at the moment.```
Admitting there is a problem but saying "it isn't stagnation" is just splitting hairs.
"Wage growth has been slow and unequal, but it isn't stagnation!"
"policy-induced wage suppression has stifled growth in living standards and generated inequality" there was wage suppression but it's not stagnation!
What a stupid article.