Which economics are you referring to, Earl?
This economics, from the Pew Research Institute:
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
By Drew DeSilverOn the face of it, these should be heady times for American workers. U.S. unemployment is as low as it’s been in nearly two decades (3.9% as of July) and the nation’s private-sector employers have been adding jobs for 101 straight months – 19.5 million since the Great Recession-related cuts finally abated in early 2010, and 1.5 million just since the beginning of the year.
But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
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Or This Economics?
How much have wages gone up in the last 50 years?
A startling fact is that average real wages have grown by only 0.7 percent over the half century beginning in February 1973. In February 2022 dollars, wages have grown over this period by $0.18.Jun 27, 2022
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OR MAYBE THIS ECONOMICS, from the Economics Policy Institute:
The cost of inequality to middle-class households
The cost of unequal growth to middle-income households
This figure shows that the stakes of rising inequality for the broad American middle class are enormous. The figure compares the income growth of the middle three-fifths of American households since 1979 to their income growth had there been no growth in inequality. In 2007, the last year before the Great Recession, the average income of the middle 60 percent of American households was $76,443. It would have been $94,310, roughly 23 percent (nearly $18,000) higher had inequality not widened (i.e., had their incomes grown at the overall average rate—an overall average buoyed by stratospheric growth at the very top). The temporary dip in top incomes during the Great Recession did little to shrink that inequality tax, which stood at 16 percent (nearly $12,000) in 2011.
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Or How About This Economics, from the World Economic Forum:
50 years of US wages, in one chart | World Economic Forum
www.weforum.org
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Or How About this Economics Nugget, also from the non-partisan Pew Research Institute:
The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades. The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
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OR MAYBE YOU ARE THINKING OF WAL-MART ECONOMICS: YOU KNOW, THE ECONOMICS OF A COMPANY THAT GREW HUGE SELLING CHEAP, CHINESE-MADE MERCHANDISE TO AMERICANS WHO /NEEDED/ TO BUY CHEAP PRODUCTS BECAUSE THEIR WAGES WERE CRAP, AND WHOSE OWNERS BECAME BILLIONAIRES ON THE BACKS OF NOTORIOUSLY BADLY PAID WORKERS WITH LOUSY BENEFITS. The Wal-Mart Economy.
IF YOU /ACTUALLY/ KNEW ANYTHING, EARL, YOU'D KNOW THAT WAGES IN AMERICA BARELY GREW FOR ABOUT 30 YEARS, STARTING IN THE MID/LATE 1980s, when cutthroat/stock-price capitalism began to emerge. which is precisely why the U.S. middle class has shrunk and why American are poorer, in terms of purchasing power, than they were 40 years ago.
Thanks for playing, Earl.
