Oakland A's team batting average: 13th of 14 teams in AL
Oakland A's total runs scored: 11th of 14
Oakland A's in AL West standings: 1st place, 5.5 games ahead of my home team. Thanks, Paul, the Angels season is looking better already!
pawnking71
· 3 years ago
I'm concerned about data which treats workers as if they had no upward mobility. As I understand the study you refer to, it assumes that a man on a wigit line in 1972 is still making wigits in 2006. Or if he retured, his son is on the line, making wigits. That's obviously nonsense.
The fact is, this grandson of a weilder is now a white collar worker, making quite a bit more in both relative and absolute terms than my grandfather ever did, even if you accept the arguement that weilders make the same as they did, and that accontants do, too.
Also consider what you money buys. Maybe a car costs a lot more in absolute terms today than in 1972, and possibly more in relative terms, as well. But my car just went over the 150,000 marker, which is remarkable because it's so unremarkable. Remember when hitting 100,000 was a big deal? Let's not even discuss the fact that my car is safer, has better gas mileage, is more environmentally friendly, etc.
My point is that by almost any measure, Americans are better off today than they were 30 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5. Only through great effort can we seem to be worse off. Such logic does not hold up to scrutiny.
Chris
· 3 years ago
Doesn't changes in worker wages drive inflation - at least in part? If you increased everyone's wages by 100% wouldn't things like food, housing, energy, etc go up in kind as price sensitivity is decreased?
Being concerned that average wages haven't gone up seems, to me, like a silly argument to be making.
Don Lloyd
· 3 years ago
It seems to me that the lagging minimum wage could be part of the explanation, but as a positive, not a negative.
Assume a continuing supply of sub-entry level workers, both high school dropouts and immigrants.
Assume that they can find something to do for pay, and that they are always paid their marginal revenue product by whoever can make use of their limited skills.
Also assume that their real productivity and skill levels increase at a steady 5% per year rate.
If there were no price inflation and no change in the minimum wage, then each worker would at some at point in time become productive enough to be able to seek work in the official and reported part of the economy that is subject to the minimum wage.
Under these conditions, changes in the minimum wage relative to price inflation change the year in which any individual breaks out into the official economy and, presumably, becomes a part of the statistical workforce.
The more the minimum wage lags price inflation, the earlier each given worker can become part of the official workforce.
The overall statistical result of a lagging minimum wage would tend to be lower statistical wages, but a benefit to individual workers.
Regards, Don
Kevin Nowell
· 3 years ago
Doesn't changes in worker wages drive inflation - at least in part? If you increased everyone's wages by 100% wouldn't things like food, housing, energy, etc go up in kind as price sensitivity is decreased?
I don't think so. Price inflation increases wages but an increase in wages does not cause price inflation. Increased real wages are caused by increased production so they wouldn't necessarily decrease price sensitivity.
I really enjoyed today's post. It literally blows Krugman's argument out of the water.
Its interesting that the assumption made by Krugman et al is that since the 70s we have had less government and if it can be proven (however falliciously) that we are worse off than then then that proves the case for increased government. I really don't think the case can be made that government intervention in the economy has actually diminished since the 70s.
JohnDewey
· 3 years ago
Thanks for the great post, Professor Boudreaux.
I had learned from Virginia Postrel that CPI-W increases transfers to seniors. She explained that political considerations (Seniors vote!) wouldn't allow use of an accurate index. But I didn't realize economic reports presented by the Executive Branch were also distorted.
Don Boudreaux
· 3 years ago
John,
Right you are -- save for your assumption that I, rather than Russ, wrote this superb post!
Don Bx
JohnDewey
· 3 years ago
Oops! Sorry about that.
Offa Rex
· 3 years ago
Reminds me of the quote by Ernest Benn:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
Robert
· 3 years ago
Can someone explain why in Krugman's columns, and many more, that the proportion of the american workforce is the same as it was 30 years ago? Typically I am thinking about the number of factory workers now compared to 30 years ago, and the other part of that is why do guys like Krugman try to insinuate that the number itself of blue collar workers is the same? I guess this goes into the heading of income mobility, but I was curious if anyone else thought of that.
Robert
Marc
· 3 years ago
One thing I would like to see is this data corrected for demographic patterns like average experience of the workforce and women as a percentage of the workforce. We know that the way they calculate the average wage is misleading from the above exposition. After all, every demographer would tell you that the baby boomers entering the workforce in the early 70s would have increased the youth of the workforce. We also know that less experienced workers, especially ones that haven't gone through 27 raise cycles, are going to get paid less than experienced workers in general for the same work. Also, women entering the workforce in the 70s would have also increased supply and depressed wages. I would think these are at least as important as the greater move towards self-employment in the last 25 years.
Also, one thing I would emphasize more, Professor, is that it by design excludes those who got a promotion to management, something that would clearly be an improvement in standard of living in most cases.
Ammonium
· 3 years ago
Its interesting that the assumption made by Krugman et al is that since the 70s we have had less government and if it can be proven (however falliciously) that we are worse off than then then that proves the case for increased government. I really don't think the case can be made that government intervention in the economy has actually diminished since the 70s.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP actually peaked in 1992 (it was only higher during WWII). Real government spending, of course, increases to a new high every year.
It's interesting that in the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s government spending as a percentage of GDP eclipsed the percentages in the 1970s, or any time since WWII. During the Clinton administration these percentages fell to 1970s levels, but they've increased in the 2000s. We're still quite a bit below where we were during the 1980s, however.
I guess we can call the 1980s the Decade of Big Government. However, since real government spending is now over twice what it ever was in the 1980s, maybe we should call 2006 The Year of the Biggest Government Ever (So Far).
If Krugman thinks that too little government spending is the problem, it seems like he ought to be rooting for the Republicans to be in power.
Ammonium
· 3 years ago
Oops... I was looking at nominal government spending. Real spending is now only a bit over 50% more what it ever was in the 1980s.
Slocum
· 3 years ago
There's an interesting tension here. On the one hand, analyses like these (excellent as they are) get very much less publicity than the gloom and doom in the NY Times (news and op-ed).
But on the other hand, there are a lot of American around who are old enough to remember the 1970s and 80s and who realize how much nicer our cars are now and how much bigger our houses are, how much better and cheaper our home entertainment is, how much more able we are to travel by air, and so on. And even our much more expensive medicine is much better. (Would you rather pay today's prices for today's medicine than 1973 prices for 1973 medicine--assuming you'd just torn your ACL, or had a blockage in a heart artery?)
And, because people are aware of all this improvement in living standards, there's a natural skepticism with respect to all the gloom mongering and the claims that the average American was richest in 1973 and has gotten steadily poorer since. You could almost say that the question is, "Who are you going to believe, Paul Krugman or your lyin' eyes?"
Aaron Krowne
· 3 years ago
Russ:
There are at least two major canards in your arguments:
1. You essentially argue that benefits represent compensation "dark matter," where there is lots of hidden, shadow income being collected by the worker.
But I know this to be false from my own experience. The majority of my benefits are in health care, which is provably dramatically over-priced, and systemically inflated (it is certainly not 40% more valuable than it was five years ago, but that's what the prices would have you believe). Thus, most of this "benefit" is not actually redeemable by workers. It doesn't exist.
2. You assume that the inflation series are flawed, which is fine, but conveniently do so only in the *upwards* direction. My own view is that the inflation series were /more/ correct before the 1990s, not less. Geometric averaging and hedonic adjustments are objective errors in the series and philosophically have no place in it, but serve to significantly tweak it downwards. Neither have any sort of empirical grounding.
In general, I don't see how this supposed bounty of "dark matter wealth" squares with the negative savings rate and an increasing reliance on an increasing quantity of consumer credit. You've really got some 'splainin' to do here.
Also, the Wal-Mart effect seems like a distraction to me. Wouldn't this be zero-sum, since it largely relies upon global labor arbitrage? Domestic manufacturers and retailers put out of work have incomes of zero.
JohnDewey
· 3 years ago
Aaron Krowne: "But I know this to be false from my own experience. The majority of my benefits are in health care"
Perhaps your experience is not entirely representative of the population. According to the BLS, private employers pay for these benefits in addition to health care:
retirement - available to 60% of employees
paid holidays - 77%
sick leave - 58%
paid vacations - 77%
disability insurance - 39%
child care - 14%
I don't know how much these have changed since 1979. BLS data do show that availability has increased for all these benefits since 1999.
Aaron Krowne: "health care, which is provably dramatically over-priced"
I don't understand how this can be. Health insurance plans are subject to competitve bidding. If anything, the value of group-negotiated medical insurance should be higher to employees than the amount expensed by the company. I think it is the latter figure that gets included in total compenasation estimates.
JohnDewey
· 3 years ago
Aaron Krowne: "(health care) is certainly not 40% more valuable than it was five years ago"
Perhaps not 40% more valuable to you, but probably to some workers. The quality of health care has sharply increased in my wife's 30 year RN career. Here's a few innovations her patients have benefitted from:
1. minimally invasive surgery - has proven to be far less traumatic to patients initially, with much shorter recovery times;
2. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - has vastly improved diagnostic abilities, and no doubt saved many lives;
3. cochlear implants - have provided the sense of sound to over 100,000 deaf or near-deaf persons worldwide.
We could list a few thousand improvements - in equipment, medicine, and knowledge - that we've gained since 1979. You may not yet have benefitted from them. But you are likely to before you die.
Bill Conerly
· 3 years ago
"How does the BLS adjust the weights in the survey? When a manufacturing plant closes and a graphic arts company opens, how do they re-weight the sample? I'm sure they do re-weight, and I'll try and find out how they do it, but does their method result in any systematic bias?"
The most recent information on wages and hours is based on nearly universal information from large employers and a sample of small employers. The data are annually benchmarked to the unemployment insurance tax forms that all employers file. This is a universal census except for a few scofflaws trying to avoid the tax. As a result, no change in sample is necessary.
The resulting average hourly wage captures the average wage in a year; the change in the hourly wage captures the change in the average, which is not the same as the average of the changes. If we are adding more low-wage workers to the economy (as through immigration), each workers could be receiving a five percent annual raise, while the average wage does not change.
Chuck
· 3 years ago
What is with this reverse-nostalgia?
How many of you guys are, or hang out with, or are related to our "median worker"?
I have a lot of friends from school that I hang out with, and we all like to think we're regular guys. And we are, for our self-selected subset of the population.
But we're all mostly in the top 75%ile for income, with bachelors degrees or better. (We're also handsome and intelligent!) But how could that be? We *feel* perfectly average!
I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever.
kebko
· 3 years ago
"I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever."
If you're assuming that the average person makes $8/hour, then you're kind of answering your own question, I think. You & your pals with bachelor's degrees might actually be closer to average, than the $8/hour worker that you are imagining.
But, for starters, the $8/hour worker today is almost certainly living in a centrally heated & cooled home. The equivalent, barely-over-minimum-wage worker in 1970 would almost certainly have not.
Chuck
· 3 years ago
kebko,
Maybe you are right that me and my buddies are closer to average, but that would be a tribute to how skewed incomes are. The average is meaningfully higher than the median. The median income is probably pretty close to the average labor wage.
The post says that, in 1982 dollars, the average labor wage was $8ish. Maybe it's $9 an hour in 2006 dollars, whatever. The question remains: since we're comparing the life of our average laborer, who here knows one and has some sense of what his life is like?
He has AC today in his home? Great! But I honestly have to say that I have no idea if it is likely that a single person could get a home loan on a $10/hr job that may or may not have benefits. Anyone know someone who's done it? One of your kids maybe? What kind of down payment would I need to save up (while I'm paying rent on an apartment already).
Maybe our average laborer is married, and so the household gets $20/hr. So no problem on the house, right? Wait, maybe there's some medical bills from a car accident in the past?
Who knows? Who among us can say that we hang with our "average laborer" and his friends and know them well?
Finally, even if their standard of living is rising in some ways, why shouldn't their income show benefits of rising productivity in some relative proportion to the rich over the last 30 years?
Kevin Nowell
· 3 years ago
One thing I'd like to see is the difference in black market income between the 1970s and now. I'd bet there is a huge difference.
Slocum
· 3 years ago
"I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever."
I have a sibling in this category. He makes more like $12/hr, which is still well below the median. He owns his own house (a smaller ranch). He also has more than one computer, broadband internet, a digital camera, a large TV, and so on. He drives a late 90s luxury car that he bought used for a few thousand dollars (and that's a lot better than any 1970s car). Occasionally, he flies to Florida for a week's vacation. He has a non-union blue-collar job with basic health insurance. Does he live better than somebody in the equivalent job did in the 1970s? Yes, I'd say that he does.
Stephen
· 3 years ago
One terrible part about the way these statistics are collected is that if a dramatic incrase in the minimum wage happens, it will appear that the average real wage has increased quite a bit. The data wouldn't take into account all the low productivity people who would be completely shut out of the market and earning zero.
It will then be hounded by the leftists that it is "proven" that raising the minimum wage makes the average worker better off.
All Comments
Oakland A's team batting average: 13th of 14 teams in AL
Oakland A's total runs scored: 11th of 14
Oakland A's in AL West standings: 1st place, 5.5 games ahead of my home team. Thanks, Paul, the Angels season is looking better already!
I'm concerned about data which treats workers as if they had no upward mobility. As I understand the study you refer to, it assumes that a man on a wigit line in 1972 is still making wigits in 2006. Or if he retured, his son is on the line, making wigits. That's obviously nonsense.
The fact is, this grandson of a weilder is now a white collar worker, making quite a bit more in both relative and absolute terms than my grandfather ever did, even if you accept the arguement that weilders make the same as they did, and that accontants do, too.
Also consider what you money buys. Maybe a car costs a lot more in absolute terms today than in 1972, and possibly more in relative terms, as well. But my car just went over the 150,000 marker, which is remarkable because it's so unremarkable. Remember when hitting 100,000 was a big deal? Let's not even discuss the fact that my car is safer, has better gas mileage, is more environmentally friendly, etc.
My point is that by almost any measure, Americans are better off today than they were 30 years ago, or 10 years ago, or even 5. Only through great effort can we seem to be worse off. Such logic does not hold up to scrutiny.
Doesn't changes in worker wages drive inflation - at least in part? If you increased everyone's wages by 100% wouldn't things like food, housing, energy, etc go up in kind as price sensitivity is decreased?
Being concerned that average wages haven't gone up seems, to me, like a silly argument to be making.
It seems to me that the lagging minimum wage could be part of the explanation, but as a positive, not a negative.
Assume a continuing supply of sub-entry level workers, both high school dropouts and immigrants.
Assume that they can find something to do for pay, and that they are always paid their marginal revenue product by whoever can make use of their limited skills.
Also assume that their real productivity and skill levels increase at a steady 5% per year rate.
If there were no price inflation and no change in the minimum wage, then each worker would at some at point in time become productive enough to be able to seek work in the official and reported part of the economy that is subject to the minimum wage.
Under these conditions, changes in the minimum wage relative to price inflation change the year in which any individual breaks out into the official economy and, presumably, becomes a part of the statistical workforce.
The more the minimum wage lags price inflation, the earlier each given worker can become part of the official workforce.
The overall statistical result of a lagging minimum wage would tend to be lower statistical wages, but a benefit to individual workers.
Regards, Don
Doesn't changes in worker wages drive inflation - at least in part? If you increased everyone's wages by 100% wouldn't things like food, housing, energy, etc go up in kind as price sensitivity is decreased?
I don't think so. Price inflation increases wages but an increase in wages does not cause price inflation. Increased real wages are caused by increased production so they wouldn't necessarily decrease price sensitivity.
I really enjoyed today's post. It literally blows Krugman's argument out of the water.
Its interesting that the assumption made by Krugman et al is that since the 70s we have had less government and if it can be proven (however falliciously) that we are worse off than then then that proves the case for increased government. I really don't think the case can be made that government intervention in the economy has actually diminished since the 70s.
Thanks for the great post, Professor Boudreaux.
I had learned from Virginia Postrel that CPI-W increases transfers to seniors. She explained that political considerations (Seniors vote!) wouldn't allow use of an accurate index. But I didn't realize economic reports presented by the Executive Branch were also distorted.
John,
Right you are -- save for your assumption that I, rather than Russ, wrote this superb post!
Don Bx
Oops! Sorry about that.
Reminds me of the quote by Ernest Benn:
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
Can someone explain why in Krugman's columns, and many more, that the proportion of the american workforce is the same as it was 30 years ago? Typically I am thinking about the number of factory workers now compared to 30 years ago, and the other part of that is why do guys like Krugman try to insinuate that the number itself of blue collar workers is the same? I guess this goes into the heading of income mobility, but I was curious if anyone else thought of that.
Robert
One thing I would like to see is this data corrected for demographic patterns like average experience of the workforce and women as a percentage of the workforce. We know that the way they calculate the average wage is misleading from the above exposition. After all, every demographer would tell you that the baby boomers entering the workforce in the early 70s would have increased the youth of the workforce. We also know that less experienced workers, especially ones that haven't gone through 27 raise cycles, are going to get paid less than experienced workers in general for the same work. Also, women entering the workforce in the 70s would have also increased supply and depressed wages. I would think these are at least as important as the greater move towards self-employment in the last 25 years.
Also, one thing I would emphasize more, Professor, is that it by design excludes those who got a promotion to management, something that would clearly be an improvement in standard of living in most cases.
Its interesting that the assumption made by Krugman et al is that since the 70s we have had less government and if it can be proven (however falliciously) that we are worse off than then then that proves the case for increased government. I really don't think the case can be made that government intervention in the economy has actually diminished since the 70s.
Government spending as a percentage of GDP actually peaked in 1992 (it was only higher during WWII). Real government spending, of course, increases to a new high every year.
It's interesting that in the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s government spending as a percentage of GDP eclipsed the percentages in the 1970s, or any time since WWII. During the Clinton administration these percentages fell to 1970s levels, but they've increased in the 2000s. We're still quite a bit below where we were during the 1980s, however.
I guess we can call the 1980s the Decade of Big Government. However, since real government spending is now over twice what it ever was in the 1980s, maybe we should call 2006 The Year of the Biggest Government Ever (So Far).
If Krugman thinks that too little government spending is the problem, it seems like he ought to be rooting for the Republicans to be in power.
Oops... I was looking at nominal government spending. Real spending is now only a bit over 50% more what it ever was in the 1980s.
There's an interesting tension here. On the one hand, analyses like these (excellent as they are) get very much less publicity than the gloom and doom in the NY Times (news and op-ed).
But on the other hand, there are a lot of American around who are old enough to remember the 1970s and 80s and who realize how much nicer our cars are now and how much bigger our houses are, how much better and cheaper our home entertainment is, how much more able we are to travel by air, and so on. And even our much more expensive medicine is much better. (Would you rather pay today's prices for today's medicine than 1973 prices for 1973 medicine--assuming you'd just torn your ACL, or had a blockage in a heart artery?)
And, because people are aware of all this improvement in living standards, there's a natural skepticism with respect to all the gloom mongering and the claims that the average American was richest in 1973 and has gotten steadily poorer since. You could almost say that the question is, "Who are you going to believe, Paul Krugman or your lyin' eyes?"
Russ:
There are at least two major canards in your arguments:
1. You essentially argue that benefits represent compensation "dark matter," where there is lots of hidden, shadow income being collected by the worker.
But I know this to be false from my own experience. The majority of my benefits are in health care, which is provably dramatically over-priced, and systemically inflated (it is certainly not 40% more valuable than it was five years ago, but that's what the prices would have you believe). Thus, most of this "benefit" is not actually redeemable by workers. It doesn't exist.
(See http://br.endernet.org/~akrowne/writings/us_hea...>
2. You assume that the inflation series are flawed, which is fine, but conveniently do so only in the *upwards* direction. My own view is that the inflation series were /more/ correct before the 1990s, not less. Geometric averaging and hedonic adjustments are objective errors in the series and philosophically have no place in it, but serve to significantly tweak it downwards. Neither have any sort of empirical grounding.
In general, I don't see how this supposed bounty of "dark matter wealth" squares with the negative savings rate and an increasing reliance on an increasing quantity of consumer credit. You've really got some 'splainin' to do here.
Also, the Wal-Mart effect seems like a distraction to me. Wouldn't this be zero-sum, since it largely relies upon global labor arbitrage? Domestic manufacturers and retailers put out of work have incomes of zero.
Aaron Krowne: "But I know this to be false from my own experience. The majority of my benefits are in health care"
Perhaps your experience is not entirely representative of the population. According to the BLS, private employers pay for these benefits in addition to health care:
retirement - available to 60% of employees
paid holidays - 77%
sick leave - 58%
paid vacations - 77%
disability insurance - 39%
child care - 14%
I don't know how much these have changed since 1979. BLS data do show that availability has increased for all these benefits since 1999.
Aaron Krowne: "health care, which is provably dramatically over-priced"
I don't understand how this can be. Health insurance plans are subject to competitve bidding. If anything, the value of group-negotiated medical insurance should be higher to employees than the amount expensed by the company. I think it is the latter figure that gets included in total compenasation estimates.
Aaron Krowne: "(health care) is certainly not 40% more valuable than it was five years ago"
Perhaps not 40% more valuable to you, but probably to some workers. The quality of health care has sharply increased in my wife's 30 year RN career. Here's a few innovations her patients have benefitted from:
1. minimally invasive surgery - has proven to be far less traumatic to patients initially, with much shorter recovery times;
2. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) - has vastly improved diagnostic abilities, and no doubt saved many lives;
3. cochlear implants - have provided the sense of sound to over 100,000 deaf or near-deaf persons worldwide.
We could list a few thousand improvements - in equipment, medicine, and knowledge - that we've gained since 1979. You may not yet have benefitted from them. But you are likely to before you die.
"How does the BLS adjust the weights in the survey? When a manufacturing plant closes and a graphic arts company opens, how do they re-weight the sample? I'm sure they do re-weight, and I'll try and find out how they do it, but does their method result in any systematic bias?"
The most recent information on wages and hours is based on nearly universal information from large employers and a sample of small employers. The data are annually benchmarked to the unemployment insurance tax forms that all employers file. This is a universal census except for a few scofflaws trying to avoid the tax. As a result, no change in sample is necessary.
The resulting average hourly wage captures the average wage in a year; the change in the hourly wage captures the change in the average, which is not the same as the average of the changes. If we are adding more low-wage workers to the economy (as through immigration), each workers could be receiving a five percent annual raise, while the average wage does not change.
What is with this reverse-nostalgia?
How many of you guys are, or hang out with, or are related to our "median worker"?
I have a lot of friends from school that I hang out with, and we all like to think we're regular guys. And we are, for our self-selected subset of the population.
But we're all mostly in the top 75%ile for income, with bachelors degrees or better. (We're also handsome and intelligent!) But how could that be? We *feel* perfectly average!
I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever.
"I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever."
If you're assuming that the average person makes $8/hour, then you're kind of answering your own question, I think. You & your pals with bachelor's degrees might actually be closer to average, than the $8/hour worker that you are imagining.
But, for starters, the $8/hour worker today is almost certainly living in a centrally heated & cooled home. The equivalent, barely-over-minimum-wage worker in 1970 would almost certainly have not.
kebko,
Maybe you are right that me and my buddies are closer to average, but that would be a tribute to how skewed incomes are. The average is meaningfully higher than the median. The median income is probably pretty close to the average labor wage.
The post says that, in 1982 dollars, the average labor wage was $8ish. Maybe it's $9 an hour in 2006 dollars, whatever. The question remains: since we're comparing the life of our average laborer, who here knows one and has some sense of what his life is like?
He has AC today in his home? Great! But I honestly have to say that I have no idea if it is likely that a single person could get a home loan on a $10/hr job that may or may not have benefits. Anyone know someone who's done it? One of your kids maybe? What kind of down payment would I need to save up (while I'm paying rent on an apartment already).
Maybe our average laborer is married, and so the household gets $20/hr. So no problem on the house, right? Wait, maybe there's some medical bills from a car accident in the past?
Who knows? Who among us can say that we hang with our "average laborer" and his friends and know them well?
Finally, even if their standard of living is rising in some ways, why shouldn't their income show benefits of rising productivity in some relative proportion to the rich over the last 30 years?
One thing I'd like to see is the difference in black market income between the 1970s and now. I'd bet there is a huge difference.
"I'm looking for people who know *well, today* a adult who makes $8 per hour and who thinks that person is better off than they would have been in 1967 or 79 or whatever."
I have a sibling in this category. He makes more like $12/hr, which is still well below the median. He owns his own house (a smaller ranch). He also has more than one computer, broadband internet, a digital camera, a large TV, and so on. He drives a late 90s luxury car that he bought used for a few thousand dollars (and that's a lot better than any 1970s car). Occasionally, he flies to Florida for a week's vacation. He has a non-union blue-collar job with basic health insurance. Does he live better than somebody in the equivalent job did in the 1970s? Yes, I'd say that he does.
One terrible part about the way these statistics are collected is that if a dramatic incrase in the minimum wage happens, it will appear that the average real wage has increased quite a bit. The data wouldn't take into account all the low productivity people who would be completely shut out of the market and earning zero.
It will then be hounded by the leftists that it is "proven" that raising the minimum wage makes the average worker better off.