See above
mozz
joined 2 years ago
That's real wages (inflation adjusted dollars). I.e. Wages at the bottom end have outpaced inflation by 12.1%. That's why I quoted that sentence in my message...
To get current dollars you would do 1.121 * 1.18 - 1 = 32% growth in current-dollar wages (where 1.121 comes from 12.1% cumulative constant-dollar wage gain, and 1.18 comes from 18% cumulative inflation). I saw 35% somewhere else instead of 32%; like I said there are small differences, but that overall broad picture is the same from all sources I've seen.
So, you're not clear on the difference between current dollar wages and constant dollar wages, but you're lecturing me on what is the real economic picture is that I'm not understanding? Okay, so tell me. What are you saying is happening? Have I understood you correctly that you claim current dollar wages have risen by only 12%?
And yes, lower income people in this country are still fucked. If anything I was saying made it sound like I thought they were not, that was not the intent. My point was that Biden has been helping them get out of it, to a certain degree, in a way that's actually very unusual for an American president (they generally don't give a shit about the working class). And that happened even during a historic level of economic challenge to tackle his way out of. And therefore that attacking him by pretending that the opposite is happening is erroneous at best and openly dishonest at worst.
That is the TL;DR of Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It is almost universal that when a new way of looking at the world comes along, very few people are persuaded to adopt it on an individual level. The consensus view generally stays the same until enough scientists who grew up with the old model die, that the ones remaining are outnumbered by new scientists who grew up with the new model.
It is bleakly comic, and there is surely some sort of productive lesson there, but I don't know what it is.
inflation has far outpaced them
This actually isn't fully true -- inflation hasn't outpaced wages at the bottom end, and the only place it's "far" outpaced them is at the top. (The Vox article talks about more details about how and why)
- Cumulative inflation from 2019 to 2023 is about 18% (which is fuckin massive, mostly due to the 2022 spike)
But then:
- Wages at the bottom (10th percentile) in that time went up by about 35% in current dollars, well outpacing inflation
- Median wages basically held steady with inflation, I think they're a couple percent behind it but basically the same as they were just with people unhappier when they look at their grocery bills
- Wages at the top (90th percentile) actually didn't hold pace with that historic inflation; for those people their constant dollar wages have been falling, yes
Hm - I interpreted "recent" as one way, but yeah, that's fair, you could interpret "recent" as him meaning the last year or something. Here's a summary, then, of how wages at the bottom end have kept pace with inflation over the last few years. "Real wages of low-wage workers grew 12.1% between 2019 and 2023." Cumulative inflation over that time span has been about 18% (which is massive), but low-end wages in current dollars also grew by 35% cumulatively in that time, well outpacing inflation.
What numbers are you looking at that say low income wages haven't kept pace with inflation? Like what kind of cumulative current-dollar wages, and what cumulative inflation, are you claiming? If my stuff is propaganda numbers, then what are the real numbers?
Inflation-adjusted wages have ticked very slightly down at the median (like a few percent), gone down a bit at the top end, and gone up significantly both at the bottom end and in the average. It's a complex topic and you can find a variety of numbers both on the income and inflation sides, but they generally all paint that same story (which is, itself, complex enough that you can paint a bunch of different narratives from it, by putting up the numbers for average vs. median vs. lowest-quartile or etc).
wages never caught up with the giant price jumps from the pandemic
I’m gonna have to go ahead and sorta disagree with you there
I was gonna link you to wage numbers or find something in my post, but it’s actually right there in your link, in the quote from Mark Hamrick. “ Will consumers suddenly feel relieved from the burden of elevated prices? No. But they are supported by a still robust job market that supports employment and wage gains rising above the recent pace of inflation.”
Exceeding it
It actually makes it a lot more remarkable - short summary is that wages at the bottom end have gone up by like 35% un adjusted, with some but not all of that gain being eaten up by inflation. Wages at the middle and the top have kept pace with inflation or fallen slightly relative to it.
Basically, wages have gone up hugely (especially at the bottom which I suspect is invisible to a lot of the Lemmy-reading and news-article-writing class since they’re in relatively okay tech savvy types of jobs), which was Biden’s doing, even in the face of huge inflation which wasn’t Biden’s doing. If it wasn’t for having to dig out from COVID we’d be in a historic economic boom right now.
(The Vox article I linked goes into some additional detail which I hadn’t been aware of about the inflation piece - TL;DR is that after Covid, Biden had to accept either inflation or unemployment, and he chose inflation where most of the neoliberal garbage that is our political class would have chosen unemployment.)
If there’s one thing that screams “the sanctions aren’t making a difference,” it is
(I mean US soldiers have done the same thing with armoring up their humvees and gun trucks in the field in various US wars because they weren’t suited to the reality on the ground, so maybe I shouldn’t talk)
Boy do I have some good news for you
The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result.
Honestly it makes about as much sense as calling people on the phone, barking a long series of questions at the ones who answer, taking the numbers you get from that and multiplying them out by a big set of coefficients to “correct” for how badly off the numbers you got last time were compared to the reality, and then reporting what comes out of that with a margin for error of 2.5% (and reporting it as news anyway if someone’s ahead within even that purely fantastical error bar).
When I dug into a bunch of recent elections and the polls that attempted to predict them, the polls wound up being off by an average of 16 percentage points.
His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and they threw him in a mental institution. He was trying to get doctors to wash their hands in between handling corpses and doing surgery, and they got super offended about it.
Edit: I AM LYING! Partly. Semmelweis discovered illnesses caused by bacteria, but he didn't understand that they were caused by microbes, or the mechanism at work. He just was able to piece enough of it together to test empirically that if the doctors washed their hands, then people didn't get sick in the same way that they did if the hands had corpse-goo on them. Linking him to specifically understanding that tiny little creatures were everywhere was a little bit misleading thing for me to do.
Also, they were usually delivering babies, not doing "surgery" in the modern sense of opening people up and poking around in them.
The rest of what I said is true.
I mean, sure. 🙂 I was trying to consolidate comments into a single stream of conversation since it's already sort of turning into a bickering sprawl, but if you'd like to reply to it here instead of there, then I'm fine with that too:
Yes, lower income people in this country are still fucked. If anything I was saying made it sound like I thought they were not, that was not the intent. My point was that Biden has been helping them get out of it, to a certain degree, in a way that's actually very unusual for an American president (they generally don't give a shit about the working class). And that happened even during a historic level of economic challenge to tackle his way out of. And therefore that attacking him by pretending that the opposite is happening is erroneous at best and openly dishonest at worst.