I think everyone who read my comment understood what I left unsaid, even if they didn't agree with it. And, as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Just because an argument is logical and has facts doesn't mean it's correct. There are multiple ways to shape, work with, or interpret data.
But, speaking of data, is the guy who's tweets you referenced - Ernie Tedeschi, a reliable source? Better or worse than, say, Alan Greenspan? What are his general biases? Same with the Bloomberg article. That article itself said "A rising but uneven tide - the late '10s weren't equally beneficial to all Americans."
Plus, let's use Occam's razor. Which way does it cut?
- Rent prices in major cities / economic hubs for non-tech workers.
- Cost of healthcare in the US
- Cost of higher education in the US
- Cost of home ownership by major cities in the US.
- Job security and availability of well-paying work for non-tech workers?
- Is the economy benefitting those who need it most?
- How equitably have the fruits of economic growth been distributed?
This is correct, but no matter how you look at it, the data tells largely the same story.
Maybe you think that the median paints an insufficient picture or you want to consider all quintiles including the bottom 2 -> https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser... — there's been a real increase across all 5 quintiles, adjusted for inflation.
Maybe you think that this doesn't account for housing/healthcare/education. But no matter which inflation index you use (each put different weights to housing, medical costs, education, etc), the adjusted median personal income is up. (And YES, this all accounts for all those things -> https://twitter.com/jmhorp/status/1308799186301747200)
Maybe you think this is attributable to dual-income households. But when you ignore those and focus on single-income households, it's still up, and higher than boomer counterparts -> https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1308775197311467520
Maybe you think this is attributable to working more hours instead of actual wage increases. But hours worked is actually decreasing -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
Maybe this is all well and good, but the lower wages have stagnated, and that's what we should be talking about...except that has also not been true in the 2010's -> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/low-wage-workers-are-getting-bi...
After a certain point, it's worth reflecting on whether you're imposing new constraints / explanations on the data for the sake of intellectual curiosity, or just because you really don't want to revisit prior conclusions.
> But, speaking of data, is the guy who's tweets you referenced - Ernie Tedeschi, a reliable source? What are his general biases?
He's a policy economist https://www.linkedin.com/in/ernie-tedeschi-74ba48b/ who's worked for the US Treasury, who's focus is labor markets. His biases are no different from Piketty, Saez, or Zucman, who also have biases. What's more important is what to make of the data they cite.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
Is the article talking about something different? Would you say they're incorrect? Is their data old? Etc.
To me it seems they're arguing real wages haven't increased that much in the last 40 years.
Also I just want to point out, that the very end of your article about wages increasing for low-wage workers, says:
"That's not to say that low-paid workers have it easy. According to the Tax Policy Center, the bottom 20% of households are earning typical annual income of about $13,300. By comparison, the top 20% of U.S. households earn about $221,000 annually, or nearly 17 times more than the lowest quintile."
My interpretation is, who cares if there's a 50% wage increase from $10/hr to $15/hr if neither of those is a decent living wage to begin with, and the folks at the top of the pyramid are just making staggering amounts of money? The top 20% averages $220K, the top 1% ... much much more.
Which is a bit off-topic, but, at the end of the day economics itself is about people, otherwise there'd be no point! : )
It's probably a combination of a couple things.
1) the article's editorializing of the data doesn't match up with the actual raw data -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N. This raw FRED data is basically as close to the "primary source" as you can get with this sort of thing.
2) the article looks at total benefits costs and compares them with total wages and salaries, which should set off a couple alarm bells: in the US total compensation is what we need to look at. Basically, they're double counting healthcare costs by ignoring the fact that employers pay the majority of premium costs (https://www.kff.org/report-section/ehbs-2019-section-6-worke...), while also counting the full cost of those benefits against the after-wage dollar amounts. In other words, we've all been receiving huge phantom raises, and we just don't know it because it doesn't show up in our bank accounts.
3) They don't take into account taxes and transfers, which median earners broadly enjoy. To give you a sense, here's what the median disposable income looks like after taxes & transfers, by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
> My interpretation is, who cares if there's a 50% wage increase from $10/hr to $15/hr if neither of those is a decent living wage to begin with, and the folks at the top of the pyramid are just making staggering amounts of money?
Because that 50% wage increase from $10/hr to $15/hr tells us very little about a single earner's pay history — it presupposes that a single person stays at that level for the entirety of their life (which we know not to be true). Those numbers show us the snapshot-in-time income numbers for everyone currently at that salary level, but does not account for people actually moving income levels as they progress in their career. The data isn't "here's the life of Joe over the last 5 years", it's "here's the life of people without college degrees that are X years old with Y years of experience with X & Y held constant over 5 years". I suppose "the lowest quintile wage has modestly increased over time" has a different ring to it than "the entry level starting salary has modestly increased over time".
Also, this is a bit more debatable, but one can also argue if it really matters if the people at the top are making staggering amounts of money, if people in the middle tier (again, not a static group) are also doing better, despite being of (predominately) lower skill — especially since that staggering increase at the top doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's because our system rewards those who play an outsized role in providing goods & services that increase our collective standards of living.
> The data isn't "here's the life of Joe over the last 5 years", it's "here's the life of people without college degrees that are X years old with Y years of experience with X & Y held constant over 5 years"
That's an excellent point. I think that, for various reasons, I've been generalizing more in our discussion and you have been making much more specific and limited claims. One reason I've been generalizing is that I don't know a lot about this stuff : ).
I guess my natural next question is, why do young people (to generalize) feel screwed over by our current economy?
> I guess my natural next question is, why do young people (to generalize) feel screwed over by our current economy?
If I were to guess, it's probably because young people have experienced now not 1, but 2 major crises in their lifetime (2008, 2020).
Young people also have congregated to some of the most expensive metros in the US, and those localities have done a terrible job building enough housing to keep up with demand.
I think the collective angst is justified, but needs to be contextualized so that we don't prescribe the wrong solutions.
"The data" is not homogeneous or infallible, nor can it fully describe all phenomena it's applied to. At best, data can provide us with a rough approximation of the landscape it attempts to describe. In this particular case, I think that landscape is smaller than the territory established by the OP's linked blog post (which seems to transcend the easily-measurable world of simple economic indicators).
Would you consider it prudent to dismiss one's lived experience offhand, at the mere site of a few quickly-pasted links to tweets containing simple, decontextualized data points? What, then, if another commenter subsequently provides contradictory data? Scrolling through a typical HN thread would turn into a nauseating ride on some sort of intellectual see-saw.
If the commenter you responded to is "not convinced" by some tweeted factoids claiming that Americans are working less and making more than ever, does that imply that they're ideologically motivated?
I don't think so, no more than I think your reply to them implies that your own motivation is ideological. Without additional context, those "facts" don't significantly imperil any specific worldview.
While anecdotes are valuable, the plural of anecdote != data.
Should we help people whose lived experience is worse than ours? Absolutely.
Does the mere existence of people whose lived experience contradicts that of the aggregate majority suggest that we ought to upend our systems? No, and that's the point.
In general, when we see (overwhelming) empirical outcomes that don't confirm our priors, we ought to shift our priors. We do this in the context of climate change, there's no reason we shouldn't also do this in the context of the economy and labor markets.
You ask, “Does the mere existence of people whose lived experience contradicts that of the aggregate majority suggest that we ought to upend our systems?” First of all, I’ve said nothing regarding “upending our systems.” More importantly — just as anecdotes != data, neither can data replace the role of lived experience. If many people feel like they’re struggling today, that doesn’t contradict data saying that they should be making more money in less time - to me, it suggests that there may be more to the “equation” of positive lived experience than income.
In other words, while I don’t think that it’s feasible to precisely compare the “difficulty” of living across different eras, it’s certainly possible that people can be making more money than ever before and also struggling en masse. The whole of life can’t be explained by simple economic data. Scratch that - the whole of economic life can’t even by explained by economic data... I expanded on this concept in a reply to another comment of yours, but you may not have seen it.