Thing is in a closed system that is steady in other ways, wages should keep up with inflation.
It would be interesting to graph inflation adjusted wages per capita ignoring employment rates to test whether increased women or minority participation in the workforce explains the lag of wages behind inflation.
Once again I have to point out that supply and demand economics are as amoral and apolitical as physics. Don't read any opinion commentary into that.
There is talk of labor shortages now and employers are being forced to increase wages. If workforce equality is a major explanation then maybe the change in employment demographics has played itself out and now wages will start keeping up a little better. Maybe. Or maybe more jobs will get replaced by robots and industry in other countries.
Any remaining gap is probably attributable to outsourcing.
What I do wonder is whether the decoupling of the dollar from gold and consequent monetary inflation masked the effects of all the other things I mentioned enough that we could impoverish the middle class without people rioting in the streets. If we'd stayed on gold people would have seen their paychecks decline in both nominal and real terms.
It would be interesting to graph inflation adjusted wages per capita ignoring employment rates to test whether increased women or minority participation in the workforce explains the lag of wages behind inflation.
Once again I have to point out that supply and demand economics are as amoral and apolitical as physics. Don't read any opinion commentary into that.
There is talk of labor shortages now and employers are being forced to increase wages. If workforce equality is a major explanation then maybe the change in employment demographics has played itself out and now wages will start keeping up a little better. Maybe. Or maybe more jobs will get replaced by robots and industry in other countries.
Any remaining gap is probably attributable to outsourcing.
What I do wonder is whether the decoupling of the dollar from gold and consequent monetary inflation masked the effects of all the other things I mentioned enough that we could impoverish the middle class without people rioting in the streets. If we'd stayed on gold people would have seen their paychecks decline in both nominal and real terms.