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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I think the heart of the complaints is best shown with this graph. CPI is up about 15% in the last roughly 2 years (Jan 2021 to the present) while Employment Cost Index for all workers is only up about 10% in the last two years. I think ECI is a better measure of most peoples actual wages, as it adjusts for changes in the composition of the labor force so it's a better measure of wages real households are getting from period to period without retraining.

Why would we want to adjust for that with ECI? Is workers retraining into better roles not part of an improving economy?

It looks more like what most people's finances currently are, not could be next year. A measure that tracks change is better for a short forward time horizon.

How is it different in this respect than just ordinary real wages?

Let's say we have a village economy with three workers. At the beginning:

  • Alice makes $8/hr
  • Bob makes $10/hr
  • Charlie makes $12/hr

A year later Dan enters and times have gotten a little tight (in beginning year dollars):

  • Alice makes $7/hr
  • Bob makes $9/hr
  • Charlie makes $11/hr
  • But Dan moved to town and makes $13.

The average real wage remains $10 but the ECI would be $9. I think ECI better reflects what more people are experiencing in the economy (3 of the 4 people's wages aligns with the change in the ECI).

It's not that one measure is always better than another, but they have different purposes.

Longer term, especially if Alice or Bob retrains into Dan's industry a measure that follows the shifts from industry to industry makes sense. For a short term comparison it's tough to respond to shifts in the market that require training fast enough to see their benefits and a measure that controls for that is going to show what more household budgets look like.

Ok but a situation resembling the one you show seems unlikely. The American economy is a sufficiently closed system (plenty of immigration, but how much of that is high skill, enough to make a difference?) that any change in composition is principally not a question of movement by new people into the statistics, one would imagine. Which is to say that compositional changes are helping mostly incumbents rather than new arrivals as in your example.

Why would we want to adjust for that with ECI?

Because it provides relevant, if less flattering, data that provides a another framework for understanding views besides 'public discontent over the economy is a result of Republican lies.'

Is workers retraining into better roles not part of an improving economy?

Given the failures of 'learn to code' neoliberalism that simultaneously had oversights in critical areas like regional disparate impacts, the emerging implications of AI technologies in many service/digital economic areas which might be more resilient to distance dynamics, American economic categorization that systemically ignores unemployed persons not actively seeking jobs, and the state of the American (re)education system given it's advancing degrees of political capture that have already affected various fields, whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute.

relevant

It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?

whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute

We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages. Which are currently rising.

It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?

Because there are many, many more things that are used to assess how people are doing besides real wages, particularly in the context of not-terribly-distant economic history which considerably disrupted things like savings, regional economic systems, physical and mental health, and that's not even touching ongoing macroeconomic challenges.

We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages.

We could avoid a whole lot of questions if we ignored most things to focus on the favored economic statistics of the people who want to push a particular point.

This is not a particularly compelling reason to avoid questions, even if it would be much simpler to do so.

I was never suggesting that real wages are the only measure of a healthy society and contended citizenry. Only that it's superior than ECI is making the general assessment of whether Americans are doing better or worse than they were X months/years ago.

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