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simianwords 2 days ago

Wages have _not_ stagnated since the 70's. Nor has it stagnated since the 2000's.

Can you provide a source to backup your claim?

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

I investigated the first link with ChatGPT. All the percentiles have increased except 10th percentile. But they do not account for after tax wages and other benefits and transfers.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 shows this. Bottom 20% wages after accounting for benefits and taxes have significantly increased. If you want to answer the question: are the bottom 20% materially more well off at 1960's than now - this is your answer. Hourly wages without accounting for benefits is missing a crucial element so not really indicative of reality.

Caveat: this shows the bottom quintile (20th percentile) and after looking at the data it appears to be a change of ~60% of real disposable income from 1978 to 2020. 10th percentile would be similar.

TL;DR: if you use real disposable income that accounts for taxes and benefits (what really matters) the wages have not stagnated for anyone but increased a lot - by almost 60%.

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

you're putting in a lot of work (well, i guess you're farming out the work to a third party service) to prove a portion of your argument with a metric that ignores inflation (including whatever you want to call what's happening right now). why? why is it so important to you to try to dispel a notion that is nearly-universally shared among scholars, experts and those actually experiencing ill effects due to the rise in costs of living compared to their income?

	▲	simianwords 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not excluding inflation which means you didn’t put any effort into actual investigation. You just googled for what you wanted and posted three links without reading it. It’s very telling that instead of refuting my point you instead choose to derail the discussions into a personal attack. Were you discussing in good faith you would try to understand what I said and reply to it. It’s not universal at all that people are less prosperous now. Why don’t you do good faith research and try to answer whether the bottom earners are actually better off now than before? You will come to the same conclusion.