Maybe it's possible to find some off-the-wall wage classification that's actually gone down --say, 8-track tape salesmen. Back on planet earth, real average disposable income's been soaring for decades.
This is becoming quite a popular refrain from the chorus of doom and gloomer's on FR. On one hand you've got people like this guy telling us that he doesn't need any statistics, since they all lie, to tell him things are bad. All he needs to do is look around.
On the other hand we've got quakeroats linking us to sites like the Labor Research Association who tell us that real wages have contracted since 1973. This is not surprising since the LRA was founded in 1927 by Robert Dunn, a researcher and advocate for labor, who, after graduating from Yale in 1918, worked in New England for the Amalgamated Textile Workers Unions as an organizer and economic researcher.
In 1920 Dunn helped established the New England Civil Liberties Union. A close friend of Roger Baldwin,he also served on the national American Civil Liberties Union Executive Committee from 1923-1941. Nope. No agenda here.
It's a wonder that anyone can look around themselves today, compare that to what surrounded them in 1975, and think that real incomes have contracted. None of these pundits of pessimism can manage to explain how, if real wages have shrunk since 1973, real per capita consumption has increased at an average annual rate of 2.3% during that same 30 year period.
Let's look at what some Conservative sources have to say on the subject. From Alan Reynolds: Unreal Wages:
Attempting to compare today's price index with one from 1973 would require comparing computers with typewriters, digital TiVo with rooftop antennas, and contemporary cars with Chevy Vegas and Ford Pintos.
Despite the problems price indexes have in coping with new and better products, measured real consumption per capita has nonetheless doubled since 1973. Unless the rich could somehow consume unlimited numbers of houses, cars, shirts and steaks, it is difficult to imagine how each American's real consumption could have doubled if real salaries had actually been unchanged
Real compensation per hour, for example, has risen 43.6 percent since 1973. So how could the real wages of 80 percent of the workforce have "fallen in most years" since then? They didn't. Wage stagnation is an old statistical hoax whose time is coming to an end.
From Stephen Moore. Wages of Prosperity
...a large share of worker compensation is in the form of non-wage income....The real cost-driver is, of course, health care. Over the past 20 years, employer medical insurance costs have doubled relative to the average wage.
Another reason that workers today have made substantially greater economic gains than the wage data may suggest is that more Americans than ever derive income and wealth not purely from labor, but from ownership. Between 1980 and 2005 the share of Americans who are workers/stock owners has doubled from 25% to 52%. Since 1980, shareholder wealth has increased by about $15 trillion. Those wealth gains used to be hoarded by the wealthy, but thanks to innovations like 401(k) plans and IRAs, the wealth gains from the American bull market have been further democratized and the dividends have been spread more widely to middle-class America.
...one of the most significant boosts in take-home pay over the past five years has come from the very Bush tax cut that the left so abhors. For the median family of four the Bush tax cut has increased take-home pay after taxes by about $1,450 a year.
If quakeroats can be this misguided about wages, why should we buy into anything he has to say about deflation or gold?