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.
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.
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.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
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.
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".
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
I don't know how available this is to folks who aren't Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent, but it's there.
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:
Interactive brief: https://bfidatastudio.org/project/sticky-wage-norms-and-the-...
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.