Why is wage growth so high? Neil Irwin, NY Times

May 30, 2017 by Jim Colburn Leave a Comment

Neil Irwin of the New York Times suggests we are asking the wrong question about wages:

“Over the last 24 months through March, inflation has come in at 1.4 percent a year, and productivity growth at 0.6 percent. Those are very low numbers. And in our supersimple model, you may expect average worker wages to have risen only 2 percent.

In fact, the average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial private sector workers rose 2.4 percent a year in that period. You may not feel like cheering about that, but it’s more than we might have expected, with inflation and productivity so weak. The real mystery, then, isn’t why wages are rising so slowly, but why they’re rising so fast.”

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