
The State of American Wages 2017 - mcone
http://www.epi.org/publication/the-state-of-american-wages-2017-wages-have-finally-recovered-from-the-blow-of-the-great-recession-but-are-still-growing-too-slowly-and-unequally/
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bfrog
Housing went up 6.8% since last january alone. I didn't see any news about
wages matching so yeah, I think there's a hidden layer of inflation on certain
goods/services (housing, healthcare) that just aren't being weighted heavy
enough for.

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CompelTechnic
Are there any good sources of information for a different aggregate inflation
figure than CPI? I have read up on the CPI weightings before and I agree that
they are inaccurate, but trying to find alternative weightings quickly leads
into crank territory.

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JamesBarney
The MIT billion prices project. They basically wrote a program to go out and
index a bunch of prices on the internet and see how they change.

The results are pretty similar to the CPI.

Do you have any specific complaints against the CPI? It's actually a pretty
well thought out measure.

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wyldfire
If housing is excluded from CPI, why is it excluded? I'll agree that people
make housing decisions infrequently, but it still seems like it should be
reflected somehow with some weight into the index.

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JamesBarney
Buying a house is excluded, but renting is included.

This is because buying a house is an investment, and CPI is meant to track
consumption.

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maxerickson
It factors in the rental value of owner occupied housing, they attempt to
exclude the investment value of the property and recognize the shelter value.

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analyst74
It's funny Asians are left out of the racial section. hello, we exist!

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EggsOnToast
I enjoyed my sociology classes when I had to take them but I still haven't
been able to get over the premise that asians sort've get hand-waved out of a
lot of statistics and it's okay because "they're a model minority in this
country". I've got to assume that the theory which justifies it goes deeper
than my intro level courses covered but it just seemed lazy and a bit racist
when I learned it.

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emodendroket
Often Asian immigrants are starting off well educated; you can't just hire a
coyote and cross the land border.

Also, it'd be instructive, I think, to compare Korean immigrants to the US
(who generally have high educational achievement, income, etc.) with Zainichi
Koreans in Japan (who show poor scores on these metrics). Surely something
more is going on than just ethnicity.

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em500
> Often Asian immigrants are starting off well educated;

Do you have any data on this?

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emodendroket
[https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/college-educated-
imm...](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/college-educated-immigrants-
united-states#Age), Race and Ethnicity, Country Origin

> Asians accounted for 46 percent of the total college-educated immigrant
> population, followed by whites (28 percent) and Latinos (17 percent). In
> contrast, an overwhelming majority of native college-educated individuals
> were white (85 percent), while minorities, particularly Asians and Latinos,
> were underrepresented (see Figure 2).

> In 2014, the top three countries of origin for college-educated immigrants
> were India (14 percent), China (including Hong Kong, about 8 percent), and
> the Philippines (8 percent, see Figure 3). The top ten countries of birth
> accounted for 52 percent of all college-educated immigrants.

Given the greater difficulty it makes intuitive sense.

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malvosenior
> a typical woman now paid 84 cents on the male dollar

How can they claim this if they're not breaking out pay by job title?
Comparing all women to all men then saying that women get paid 84 cents on the
"male dollar" implies that women are paid less for doing the same job but that
data is not included in the report.

Edit: If you disagree with this please tell me what I'm missing. I'd really
like to understand what this is saying.

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adventured
They're also intentionally ignoring the disparity in hours worked, which wipes
out a large portion of the 0.26 they're quoting. If you actually equalized
that pay figure without equalizing the hours worked, women will be earning
quite a lot more than men per hour worked.

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arcanus
Remarkable that $59 an hour puts one in top-5 percent of wages. That
corresponds roughly to 120k a year, which is certainly accessible to many
software folks.

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RubenSandwich
Not that remarkable. Software Engineers, like most people, like to think of
themselves as Middle Class, but we are actually Upper Middle Class.

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humanrebar
...or software engineers are still middle class and the bottom fell out of the
middle class at some point. A lot of this depends on what "middle class"
means. You'll have a really hard time buying a family home in SF or NYC on
$120k a year.

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refurb
Why would one assume that a middle class person should be able to afford a
home in the two most expensive cities in the US?

That's like saying "I earn $400k per year but I'm middle class because I can
afford a home in Beverley Hills"

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dv_dt
One would assume that to continue to exist, cities should pay a broad range of
people in them enough to live in the city...

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refurb
True, but housing prices reflect actual prices paid, so there are obviously
enough people in that city who can afford those prices.

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emodendroket
Not in a world where foreign investors park their money in real estate.

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humanrebar
With a growing gig economy, are we seeing greater variance in wages? Are
people getting consistent work or are some months or years better than others?

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bfrog
The "gig" economy as some people are calling it appear to be closer that of
subsidized serfdom by the wealthy. What else do you call it when you pay
people to feed you, shop for you, and drive you aruond?

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malvosenior
> What else do you call it when you pay people to feed you, shop for you, and
> drive you aruond?

The regular economy? Are you suggesting people do these tasks for free, or
that we should eliminate service roles from our society?

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tachyoff
Not eliminate, but we should compensate service workers fairly to the point
that they have basic health coverage and aren’t one paycheck away from being
homeless.

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malvosenior
They are compensated fairly based on market rates. If we artificially raise
their pay above what the market will bear then no one will purchase their
services and they'll have no job at all.

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dsfyu404ed
I'd really love to see this broken down by location (more precisely than just
state) and adjusted for CoL (e.g using the GS table).

Knowing how supply/input of money has changed over the years is cool and all
but you need to know demand/output to reason about the actual impact on
quality of life.

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SubiculumCode
"In both comparison periods, both men and women at the 10th percentile saw
greater wage growth in states with minimum wage changes versus those without."

This is encouraging, but a more useful baseline might be to compare similar
state economies that did and did NOT adopt minimum wage increases.

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frgtpsswrdlame
Looking at section two I'm struck by just how much better it is to be at the
top, not only are you at the top but you're accelerating upward faster than
everybody else too. This is as good a place as any, do you guys have any
readings on 'winner take all'-ification and/or how to reverse it?

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refurb
One key think to remember is that the people at the top or bottom aren't
necessarily the same people year over year.

Not sure where to find the data, but I'd love to see the churn rate by
different income quintiles.

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amdavidson
The answer is not much churn[0], rich stay rich and poor stay poor. Though the
situation is not much different than it was a generation prior[1].

0: [http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-
mobil...](http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobility/)

1: [https://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21595437-americ...](https://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21595437-america-no-less-socially-mobile-it-was-generation-ago-
mobility-measured)

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ancap
These "wage decoupling" studies generally make two methodological mistakes.

1) They do not include fringe benefits in their calculation of wages 2) They
use one inflation measure to adjust for cost changes in productivity over time
and a different inflation measure to adjust for cost changes in wages over
time.

Doing a quick search over their methodology [1], to their credit, I believe
EPI avoids mistake #1, but it appears they make mistake #2.

Studies which include the complete value of benefits in their calculation of
wages and use the same method to deflate both wages and productivity show that
there is no "wage decoupling" from productivity.

[1]
[http://www.epi.org/data/methodology/](http://www.epi.org/data/methodology/)

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frgtpsswrdlame
>Studies which include the complete value of benefits in their calculation of
wages and use the same method to deflate both wages and productivity show that
there is no "wage decoupling" from productivity.

Do you have an example?

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ancap
[https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07...](https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf)

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953.pdf)

[http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf](http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1246.pdf)

The last one they muddy the waters quite a big where they talk about a "net
decoupling" and "gross decoupling". The first they use the same deflator and
the second they use a different deflator. Using different deflators for wages
and productivity means you're comparing apples to oranges.

Economists Donald Boudreaux and Liya Plagashvili discuss the topic in greater
detail in this WSG op-ed [https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-boudreaux-and-
liya-palag...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-boudreaux-and-liya-
palagashvili-the-myth-of-the-great-wages-decoupling-1394151793)

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frgtpsswrdlame
Cool, thanks for the follow up!

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mrfusion
Speaking of inflation. Does anyone else get amazon inflation? Every time I go
to reorder something the price has gone up by several dollars. (Almost without
fail)

