That doesn't contradict the actual article, whose full title is:

> If Worker Pay Had Kept Pace With Productivity Gains Since 1968, Today's Minimum Wage Would Be $24 an Hour

It looks like when it was shortened one of its most important words were dropped.

That makes more sense. But keep in mind that only 2.3% of hourly workers make minimum wage.[1] It's not really fair to compare productivity (a mean) or even median output to wages at the second percentile.

It's an interesting question in its own right. Do the very lowest paid people in the economy have it better or worse than 50 years ago. I don't know the full answer to that question, but I do know that in 1968 about 5% of American households didn't have full indoor plumbing.[2] Just based on that datum, I'd much rather trade places with a very poor American in 2020 than 1968.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm [2] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS0...

When I was in the US, I saw someone offering free phones to the unemployed (Obama phone). Food stamps being used. FEMA given new houses to people left homeless by hurricane Michael.

I even met people whose diet consisted mainly of expired food. They had to fish it out of dumpsters, which wasn't nice. But they had free food!

That makes sense, but why would productivity gains be equally applied across all wage levels? You'd naturally expect it to be unequal based on the productivity gains in specific job functions.

Sorry, I was trying to make it fit the character limit :(

Title-smithing is an art. Email the mods if you're stuck; [email protected]

(I have, with some shorter suggestions.)

"Average" anything in populations with large ranges is a terrible, terrible measure. As the joke goes, Bill Gates walks into a bar, and on average everyone in the bar is a millionaire.

Median is the appropriate statistic for such cases.

Yeah, I actually agree. But the article is directly citing productivity, which by definition is the average economic output per hour worked.

It's fine if you want to focus on median wages, but at the same time you need to compare against the median worker's economic output- not aggregate productivity. Otherwise you're just comparing apples to oranges.

Along these lines, here's a graph from the Federal Reserve's data service which plots median household income in contrast to GDP per household over time.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK

Note the increasing spread between GDP/household and median income. That's the US's entire socioeconomic problem--from rising consumer debt levels, rising deaths of despair, and the rise of reactionary politics--shown in one chart. The median person is falling behind.

As noted in your first link, average wage is misleading because the high end is incomprehensibly large (and is where most growth has taken place) and that skews the result.

>The wage distribution is right-skewed; the majority of people earn less than the average wage. For an alternative measure, the median household income uses median instead of average.

Yup, you're right. The real median personal income in the US, today is $35,977 -> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the median number of annual hours worked. But using the average hours worked, that puts the median worker at $20/hr.

Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked.

Also, like other commenters have said, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the bulk of productivity gains will go equally to the minimum wage as the median wage, since the latter is usually pretty low leverage work in general.

> Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked.

Even then, the median annual wage divided by the median annual number of hours worked won't necessarily be equal to the median hourly wage.

Is that net or gross? And assuming 30 days of vacation at 7,5 hours each, are those 225 hours part of the equation?

Interesting to see how those numbers aren’t as drastically different from my country as I’d assumed.

Someone making $35k isn't getting 30 days of vacation in the US. Maybe 10 days of combined sick days and vacation.

Agreed, a comparison of the median is better. Although, it’d be nice if the mean and median weren’t too far apart.

A good chuck of that average is all the workers that are structurally unemployed and will only accelerate https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-big-structural-...