Where’s Your Raise? It Should Be Coming
Pressures for bigger pay increases are building, but have yet to show up in the data.
Bloomberg, July 11, 2018
I have been having an ongoing debate with some economist friends about whether or not we are going to see an increase in wages anytime soon. If you are a regular reader you know this is an area I have been banging away on for a long while.
I am fascinated by what people consider more (or less) important int his argument. Hold aside my usual bias discussions about people seeing what they want. When asked to come up with my own list, this is what I thought of as the issues aside for the moment and consider what really matters:
Positives:
No. 1. Job openings to job seekers
No. 2. Quit rates
No. 3. Unemployment rate
Negatives:
No. 1. Tax cuts
No. 2. Productivity gains
No. 3. Profits
No. 4. Demographics
No. 5. Real Wages
Here is the kicker (or more bias) — the negatives are mostly older, longer-term trends, while the positives are all fairly recent developments. And, they might even get stronger as the economy improves.
Full column here
