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- Hacker News
- For the Tech sector, inflation speeds up companies crashes as staff leave for startups due to wages being extraordinarily "sticky-up" in large companies.by bjt12345
- https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
> 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, Seasonally Adjusted
> Data measure usual weekly earnings of wage and salary workers. Wage and salary workers are workers who receive wages, salaries, commissions, tips, payment in kind, or piece rates.
by cyb_ - Count me in the unlucky 37%. I job hopped for more stability in 2022. I got more comp but then proceeded to get 2% raises. I'm making less now adjusted for inflation than I did in 2022.by Yhippa
- Sounds like it’s time to hop again thenby dozerly
- Title is: Sticky Wage Norms and the Real Wage Cost of Unexpected Inflation
Interactive brief: https://bfidatastudio.org/project/sticky-wage-norms-and-the-...
- I haven't had a pay raise since about 2021 so yes, that makes sense. Purchasing power is definitely down.
- The paper only mentions total compensation as: "total compensation (base wages plus bonuses)"
Total compensation includes stock options, stock grants, health insurance premiums, 401k contributions, so-called "employer social security contributions", retirement contributions, time off with pay, etc. Total compensation averages 146% of wages.
This is not a triviality.
The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
by WalterBright - >The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
Fairly weak criticism. These benefits you're mentioning don't help people pay for groceries, pay their mortgage/rent, pay for gas, etc.
by jplusequalt - Nothing you include in "total compensation" is guaranteed by employment.by castwide
- Health insurance premium subsidies being the big one. 90% of US workers probably are not getting any or any increase in the other ones.by lotsofpulp
- Riding the boom times doesn't have merit either.by kraken_cult
- There are also some fairly interesting trends in labor productivity.
Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3371L000000000
Construction has been DOWN for decades (and is 7 percent of the labor force).
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
Food Manufacturing is in decline as well:
by zer00eyz - Inflation is not just an increase in prices, it's basically a money pump. Under weakened labor it is redistribution from workers to the parasite class.by kilna
- > from workers to the parasite class
I hope to retire some day - to do that, I'm going to have to save up enough money in a brokerage account that it generates enough money for me to live off of. Will that make me a member of the parasite class? I'm willing to be a worker for as long as I can, but at some point I will be too physically old to keep doing it (plus which, nobody really wants to hire old people).
- So 63% didn't. I wonder what the average netted out to. Increase or decrease and how much?by missedthecue
- Anything below 100% seems like a potential warning sign in a growing economy.by tokai
- What does that have to do with anything?by cyansands
- I'm not sure averages are that interesting, because the people at the high end have an extra-ordinary amount of influence on the average. You might want to look at the shape of the distribution?by eru
- That's indicative of a growing economic inequality though, which in any orthodox economic book is badby gchamonlive
- I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.by lr4444lr
- The median worker saw a small wage growth, on the scale of ~.5% a year.
However, it does says that 58% of all workers failed to keep up with the real wage growth trend we saw in the years leading up to the pandemic.
>So 63% didn't.
But more than a third of Americans did. You can't "glass two-thirds full" tens of millions of people seeing their actual purchasing power decrease.
by jplusequalt - Its interesting, I thought it was pretty well established that COVID era stimulus helped lower earners make real gains, even adjusted for inflation, while higher earners who did not get stimulus checks lost ground?
From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
by tqi - This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.by hatthew
- I guess RSUs aren't really "real wages" but mine vested over four years to the extent that by the time I left they were worth barely 25% of what they had been when I signed the offer. Happened over time, too, so quarterly vests took a decent hit in that timeframe.by spike021
- I'm sure you know this but RSUs are such a fraction of a percent of real world compensation that they might as well round to zero.by jknoepfler
- RSUs are great for workers because if the value dips 75% you can just leave and get a new job and get new RSUs at a reasonable price. Of course it's not trivial to switch jobs but at a 75% cut it's surely worth at least looking around. I don't think you can really consider it a fault of the economy if you didn't.by Anon1096
- What 2021-2024?
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Thanks, I'd rather take the Cessna.
by sssilver - with a much higher chance of dying in 1975 Cessna 182? I suspect most rational consumers won't.
Because of safety improvement they aren't comparable goods.
by saxenaabhi - I'm sorry—vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption? You've just named three vacuous toys, whereas GPS and e-commerce deliver real value to working people.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
by rexpop - The most jarring effect is to look at incomes in ounces of gold before and after 1971. Explains a lot of things.by infofarmer