U.S. Paychecks Grow at Record-Slow Pace

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/31/us/politics/ap-us-employments-costs.html

by enraged_camel • 11 years ago

99 79 11 years ago

hew• 11 years ago

Global labor arbitrage marches ever onward.

joelrunyon• 11 years ago

I'm not sure why more people don't bring this up. People love to talk about people outsourcing jobs as if it's "unfair", when it's a growing reality that we really need to face & look at the consequences (as the global pool of talent get bigger & more competitive).

davesque3• 11 years ago

True, though there need to be controls on this sort of change. That's why we have things like tariffs. If you just open the flood gates on cheap imported labor, you'll decimate the domestic economy and then everyone loses. It's like over-cutting wood for fuel. If you impose restrictions, then forests have time to recover and you have more wood in the long run. If you don't, then forests die out and no one gets any wood. The "wood", in this case, is the money large companies are taking from domestic workers and giving to foreign workers (which they then go and spend in foreign economies i.e. the money is not spent in the economy that supports the large company and said arbitrage bites them in the butt).

crdoconnor7• 11 years ago

If this specific attack on the power of labor were matched with a corresponding attack on the power of capital, it wouldn't be such a problem.

Unfortunately, intellectual property rights are only getting stronger. Land rights are only getting stronger. Taxes on wealth and unearned income are only getting lower. Employee and union rights are only getting weaker.

Thus the effect of immigration on the downward pressure on wages is magnified.

wfo• 11 years ago

Because it is unfair -- we require companies to treat their workers like human beings and ban certain forms of exploitation, abuse, etc. Facing reality and accepting that if workers can be abused, they will be abused so we might as well be the abusers is one way to deal with this fact. Another would be, for example, to ban all imports made under conditions which don't meet U.S. human rights standards and remove the economic inventive, but instead we go the opposite direction, the direction of "free trade" which is great for people who can afford to spend capital and move operations to countries where they can abuse workers, but not so great for American workers -- we aren't even allowed the opportunity to be abused and exploited.

stalcottsmith• 11 years ago

More attention to production and productive activity rather than consumption would help. Industry and thrift is what lifts people's fortunes. Not consumption and debt.

The U.S. has many factors contributing to economic competitiveness but also some serious drags: difficulty accumulating capital savings among the middle and lower classes, inefficient cities and suburbs, housing that is too extravagant and expensive for people of modest means, mortgages still underwater, high cost education and a very expensive health care system riddled with fraud. Most of these are due to unwise policies anchored on the public and private accumulation of debt. All of them are solvable with a proper understanding of the issues.

The complaints about the 1% or 0.1 or 0.01% largely can be traced to the architecture of this system which is anything but a free market. It guarantees large cash flows for favored groups who naturally support it.

Refactoring all this will require a great deal of capital spending, internal migration and a shift in incomes away from sectors that have been supported by policy such as finance, gov, education, entitlements, war, retail and healthcare in favor of redesigning the American lifestyle along leaner, more competitive lines. Think smaller homes closer to work and more sharing. Yes it will look more like other more competitive parts of the world do today. It may be called a depression 20-30 years from now but it's better to think of it as cleanup and refactoring-- a clearing out and reckoning of all the bad decisions and policy driven malinvestments of decades.

The biggest thing many people really have control over is their own lifestyle expectations and location. Naturally young people sense this and are cutting back accordingly. Not sure how many are willing to relocate for opportunity.

For average joes in the U.S. the high water mark was probably the 70s and 80s. The stuff that led to America #1 occurred between 1870 and 1960. We've been coasting for a while pretending we still have a beast under the hood and gas in the tank. It's just now becoming ever more difficult to paper over the situation with more debt.

The U.S. still has amazing positive attributes and strengths. Labor force mobility, the most efficient system for consumer goods distribution in the world, generally high quality building and housing stock (albeit inefficiently spread out), generally high knowledge and expectations of service and quality, etc. The list is actually long and the cultures ability to adapt and reinvent itself is a strong reason not to bet against the U.S.

We could opt for a basic income but not at anywhere near the levels of currently expected individual prosperity. We'd have to redefine poverty to something more along the lines of what the rest of the world considers poverty and say, we can help you avoid that. America is not presently designed to support a "middle class" life at $10-20 a day. Some other counties are.

yummyfajitas4• 11 years ago

The consequences are a massive drop in poverty.

http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

Also a massive drop in inequality, if that's the sort of thing you care about.

http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/

crdoconnor7• 11 years ago

Harvard School of Economics kindly requests that you blame it on robots rather than trade pacts made by their friends.

FD3SA3• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be either/or?

jpatokal• 11 years ago

Good. Every $1 paid to an Indian worker instead of an American one reduces global income equality and goes a much longer way there (3x or so, according to most PPP measures of India vs US).

davesque3• 11 years ago

That may be true in the short run, but it's a more complex question in the long run. What if uncapped arbitrage has an adverse effect on the American economy? Then there won't be as much money left to export to India.

jimmaswell• 11 years ago

Did you mean inequality?

daodedickinson3• 11 years ago

With all the mandated economic inefficiency increases, I don't know how / if any growth is happening? Why should we want it to?

ArkyBeagle• 11 years ago

Because otherwise debt doesn't make any sense and people hoard cash. Then the general economy slows.

daodedickinson3• 11 years ago

I'm not sure debt makes sense to many people today. A friend of mine was well into at least 5 figures of debt for pre-law and law schooling. He told me he wasn't worried about such a huge debt because he could just declare bankruptcy (this is premeditated theft). I told him that student loan debt isn't allowed to be discharged by bankruptcy. This was news to the legal scholar.

I got into the #1 ranked (by US News and World Report) graduate school in my major. I decided I did not want $180,000 of debt. My parents thought I should go and, in a mistake, I accepted their offer to pay for the first semester so I could try it. The quality of instruction was a bizarre joke. The buildings were beautiful but the equipment students were allowed to access was so out of date as to be useless, so I had to procure my own. Many things that were free or cheaper at cheaper schools were more expensive. One professor flat out told us that he did not read the papers he assigned us to write. As long as we sent him an email with a Word doc attached, we got full credit (and no feedback). What was of very high quality? A few famous professors, but mostly the other students, who had also come because of that advertisement in US News and World Report.

One of my fellow students was heavily involved in the local Occupy group. He is full-on and consciously Cloward-Piven. With no intention of ever paying back his six figures in loans (if he had the money, he might not pay it back because of his principles, and the lack of sufficiently fearsome use of force) he lives off of taxpayer money and channels it into activism against the interests of those taxpayers forced to let him suckle. What's was his real, stated, conscious plan for dealing with his student loan debt? To get Elizabeth Warren elected president. He believed she would discharge it all in a Ecclesiazusaen jubilee and thereby further fuck over people like me who were price responsive and avoided debt, attending less prestigious institutions that already have to deal with unmerited and statistically documented discrimination. I don't know what he's doing now that Warren isn't running. Probably supporting Sanders. And probably supporting loan forgiveness, but also, simultaneously, and outrageously, continuing to support these loan programs because it redistributes wealth to his favorites.

His university program provided no information about student outcomes in terms of employment or income. If the school even cared to gather the information, it was kept secret.

My parents' retirement plan is to never retire. They had some savings, but, after the stock market crash, the Affordable Care Act has tripled the cost of their insurance. I am worried about ever getting a job with the Masters in CS I am pursuing at a school I can afford with savings from the three years I worked after leaving that disaster of a school after the single semester trial. I am so worried about helping my parents, who have paid for other peoples' kids to go to more prestigious schools even as the government seems to be taking no steps against school prestige discrimination.

Sorry for blabbering on.

littletimmy• 11 years ago

Without growth, inequality will become a lot less tolerable. The economy must grow or collapse.

daodedickinson3• 11 years ago

On the whole, this may be true but there are available diverse methods of making inequality more tolerable, many rather independent of growth. If growth soothes covetousness, it is only in a way subject to hedonic treadmill effects. But, education, meditation, medication, censorship and many other tactics could lessen such effects in ways not necessarily subject to diminishing returns.

For example, one can look at these photos in many different ways:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/income-inequality-los-an...

From such a distance, a trailer like the one I was born in does not seem much smaller than a mansion. None of this was around in the year 1491. If I had the only building, say, a trailer, in the state of Wyoming, and then someone builds a mansion that I can see, it does NOT necessarily follow that I suffer more. Besides, never forget, growth is always what creates inequality in the first place. Before the seeds sprout, bean plants are of equal height, and it is nigh impossible to keep them equal in height, although with sophisticated bioengineering or grafting techniques it may be possible.

Cognitive processes, possibly exacerbated by the consumption of deleterious media, can induce suffering in humans at any level of wealth; many are brought to deepest anguish because they cannot live forever, they can believe that "reality is broken" because they maladapt their motivation systems to video games (I'm talking about me here), etc.

Income is becoming more and more equal; some people are upset because this is happening across national borders and think they deserve more pay for the same work because of their birthplace, but I think this is ultimately untenable—it is natural that we are in anguish because our cost-of-living is higher, but it is getting harder and harder to starve. Once we have our daily bread, toleration of life is somewhat up to us.

I think the starkest problem with inequality is the often subconscious worry about attracting a mate, even in those with no intention of procreation. Perhaps this downward pressure on birth rates is unavoidable as carrying capacity is met or exceeded.

As for the fear that the economy must grow or collapse, many economies have shrunk before. Surely, I must admit one could define collapse so as to make "The economy must grow or collapse" a true statement.

stuaxo• 11 years ago

I'm sure it's growing at a record rate for the 0.1% though.

LunateSigma• 11 years ago

The 0.1% don't need paychecks.

davesque3• 11 years ago

Paychecks are for chumps when you're pulling in returns on a large stock portfolio.

roymurdock6• 11 years ago

What really worries me about the terribly slow income growth is its inevitable effect on the housing market. There is a huge disparity between median income growth and median house prices.

Check out this FRED graph comparing median income growth and new housing price growth: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1yY7 We see that median income growth is flat at 1.8% while price growth of new housing has picked up dramatically from 1.3% in 2011 to 9.9% YoY growth in 2013.

In nominal terms median income has grown $6,000 over the past decade while the price of a new house has jumped up by approximately $70,000. In real terms (adjusted for inflation) real median income has dropped -$4,000 while new house prices have increased by $2,000. [1] I'll leave the calculation of the 10-year % change of real median values as an exercise for the reader.

As a recent grad with a decent job, there is still no way in hell I'm going to be able to afford a mortgage on any decent, middle-class house in a semi-urban area for a very, very long time, unless I want to move to Detroit or a similarly bankrupt/developing part of the US. I'm also speaking from a debt-free perspective: if I had come out of school with $100k+ in student loans, forget about it.

The only kind of jobs that are going to pay for good houses in the future are banking/tech/fortune 500, which have median salaries of ~60k right out of school and a well-compensated track to climb. These jobs are becoming increasingly scarce and hard to obtain, especially with competition from out of country talent.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see my generation (I'm 22) having an extremely low & delayed demand for purchasing housing, and to eventually see what is happening in Detroit (houses abandoned, rotting away [2]) happen on a smaller scale across the country where there is too much housing supply for too little demand.

And no, prices will not equalize to accommodate lower salaries because real estate always appreciates in the long run...right? The Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans, Indians, and British seem to think so: foreign investments in US real estate totaled $108bn over the past year, or 8% of total existing home-sales dollar volume. Unsurprisingly, they are "spending more money on fewer homes," aka they are driving real estate bubbles in major cities such as NYC and SF. [3]

So we'll see a bunch of late 20, early 30 something's living together, splitting the rent in what would have once been a 4-6 person family house in order to make ends meet/be close to work. Maybe they'll even drive for Uber on the weekends. Welcome to the sharing economy.

[1] The median sales price of a new house in June 2005 was $226,100, which would be $279,000 in 2015 dollars. As of June 2015 the median sales price is $281,800. I used this inflation calculator because FRED didn't have an inflation-adjusted real median sales price graph: http://www.saving.org/inflation/inflation.php?amount=226,100...

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2010/10/detroit-house...

[3] http://realtormag.realtor.org/daily-news/2015/06/18/foreign-...

crdoconnor7• 11 years ago

The ironic thing is that the insane price of housing was partly a direct policy decision, supposedly intended to make you feel wealthier so that you would spend more and stimulate the economy.

The Fed calls it the 'wealth effect'. In private it was known as "foaming the runway" (making sure to spread out the foreclosures post-2008, so as not to bankrupt any major banks).

To this day they're still scratching their head about why QE might be causing people to spend less on consumables (saving for an apartment, perhaps? paying rent?).

ChuckMcM2• 11 years ago

On the one hand there isn't any arguing with the numbers, but the if the foreclosure crisis has shown us anything, it is that house prices don't "only" go up. When there is no one to buy them, or people who are living in them can't afford them any more, the price goes down. Sometimes significantly.

So it is impossible for house prices to rise so high that "nobody" can afford them, although the job categories that can afford them might change.

The question I ask is, what is the next transition? Do programmers buy all the future houses?

CamperBob2• 11 years ago

So it is impossible for house prices to rise so high that "nobody" can afford them, although the job categories that can afford them might change.

500 million not-so-Red Chinese looking for a place to park their new money beg to differ...

roymurdock6• 11 years ago

Hey ChuckMcM. Good to see you around HN again.

Check this out: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...

Specifically p.18 Figure 8.

Figure 8 shows that since 1980, real income has grown 174% for the top 1 percentile of earners, 56% for the 81st-99th percentile, and 16% for anyone earning below the 81st percentile. Also note that these are 2011 numbers, and that inequality has gotten worse in the past 4 years.

This is probably the most succinct and alarming graph that shows the degree to which inequality is growing and wealth is being transferred to the top 10% of earners in the US.

Historically, a strong middle class has driven housing which in turn powers consumption, the engine that powers America's economy. [1] Housing construction was heavily subsidized on both the supply (construction) and demand (purchasing) front by the government after WWII - in 1940 only 44% of Americans owned a home whereas in 1960 62% could make this claim. Along with this spike in ownership came increased consumption of all goods that owning a new home implies - a car, a dishwasher, utilities, spending on children, etc.

Owning a home also reflects well on an family's balance sheet: After paying off the mortgage in 10, 20, 30 years, the property is usually a middle class family's most valuable asset by far.

With the decline of the middle class, less and less working class people will be able to afford to own a home. Instead, they will be forced to rent. [2]

The rich will invest in real estate as they have since the beginning of time, and will seek rent as a generally reliable form of earning a return on their capital. With employment numbers improving, but income staying relatively the same, we can foresee a picture of more people working just to pay the rent, and not having enough left over to afford a mortgage, kids, etc.

So to answer your question: the people with money will own the property, and the people without money will work to afford rent. Unless the government take serious steps towards reversing the rapid accretion of wealth to the upper quintile of earners, the future of housing for my generation looks very bleak in my opinion.

[1] http://jcr.oxfordjournals.org/content/jcr/31/1/236.full.pdf

[2] http://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

igravious• 11 years ago

That first graph is a terrible graph. Median income doesn't start at zero. That they overlap suggests a connection. What is it? I get that the less you earn the less you'll be able to afford (housing-wise). But I doubt that the relation is linear, especially as the purchase is "lumpy".

Other than that I agree with you. The trends aren't encouraging, certainly not.

roymurdock6• 11 years ago

I agree that the graph was bad. I also made the rookie mistake of comparing a real value with a non-inflation adjusted value. I've updated the graph so that both datasets are in the same units and described the data with more accuracy/depth. Thank you for pointing this out.

Here is the original (bad) graph for reference: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=1yYi

adevine• 11 years ago

Mortgage rates are much lower than they were 10 years ago, though, meaning overall affordability of a 30 year mortgage hasn't changed that much. The tough part is that rates are so low now, prices are on very shaky ground of rates start to rise, even a little bit.

tracker1• 11 years ago

Things need to shake up a little bit... 5+ years of >20% inflation even with the dip 5-6 years ago it's starting to get silly again... At least here in the phx area...

lemevi• 11 years ago

These jobs are becoming increasingly scarce and hard to obtain, especially with competition from out of country talent.

I doubt the accuracy of this statement. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts 8% growth in the near term for Computer Programming jobs[1].

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c...

learc83• 11 years ago

You want to look at the BLS page for software developers. There are 3 times as many as computer programmers.

Income is much higher and job growth is predicted to be 22%.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/s...

pmorici• 11 years ago

If I was in your position I would save like mad for the first couple years to get a down payment and then buy a modest 2-3 bedroom house and rent out the spare rooms it's a great way to get financial independence early on if you have the discipline to make it work.

roymurdock6• 11 years ago

While owning real estate would be nice, I'm not too interested in becoming a landlord.

I see the wisdom in your advice (this country was founded and continues to thrive on strong property rights) I just don't think the tradeoff of my time and energy managing a household would justify whatever rent I could pull in from a 2-3 bedroom in Somerville MA, Silverlake CA, Austin TX, Oakland CA, or Queens NY.

trhway• 11 years ago

well, one doesn't pay for the house itself, one mostly pays for the right to live at that location. Very limited number of good locations and large number of locations where housing is affordable and nobody wants to live - we, the People, make some locations good and others bad.

mistermann• 11 years ago

As of June 2015 the median sales price is $281,800

As a Canadian, I'd love to have that problem, our average is $453,560.

http://crea.ca/content/national-average-price-map

refurb• 11 years ago

Yet another measure of pay, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, shows wages are accelerating. Hourly pay for a typical employee rose 3.2 percent in June from 12 months earlier, according to the Atlanta Fed.

Wow, this is what passes for journalism? Write an article about slow wage grow (notably only this last quarter, it grew the quarters before that). Then, finish up the article with another wage growth metric that is actually looking pretty good.

Ugh.....

fweespeech• 11 years ago

Yet another measure of pay, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, shows wages are accelerating. Hourly pay for a typical employee rose 3.2 percent in June from 12 months earlier, according to the Atlanta Fed. While that is double the annual pace of 1.6 percent in February 2010, it is still below the pre-recession levels of about 4 percent.

Eh. Its still below the norm.

verelo• 11 years ago

But we have good unemployment numbers right? I cant help but think that right now might not be the best time to expect everything to line up perfectly.

wavefunction• 11 years ago

best time to expect everything to line up perfectly

When is, if not today. Certainly not... tomorrow.

codecamper• 11 years ago

I think it is as simple as... we used to make stuff & the economy was great. Then the rest of the world made stuff. And there are way more of them living with way less money. So the balance shifted & now they make stuff. We don't make anything. Which was nice for a while, but after a while, if you aren't making stuff then you aren't getting paid.

deciplex• 11 years ago

If that were true then you'd expect GDP to lag as well, which it isn't. It's not that more wealth isn't being created by the nation, it's that the wealth that is being created is mostly being hoarded by capitalists.

jvm• 11 years ago

And interestingly the capitalists in question appear to be homeowners:

http://www.newgeography.com/content/004888-pikettys-wealth-d...

platz• 11 years ago

I enjoyed this video in which Yanis Varoufakis explains some geopolitical macro economics during the post WWII and cold war era, why the crash/recovery of 2008 is mutating into different forms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEUWxNifJJ8

The U.S. had to be very creative in order maintain power when they no longer had any economic surpluses (surpluses which greatly diminished from wars like Vietnam).

yummyfajitas4• 11 years ago

We make more stuff than ever before.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO/

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IPMAN

The rest of the world also makes more stuff than ever before, which just means that we all have more stuff.

hiou2• 11 years ago

You do realize you can't buy food or housing with "stuff" that is cheaper or more advanced than it was 10-20 years ago, right?

benhamner• 11 years ago

The surprising thing here is that the NYTimes left out a graph and a direct link to source data in this article.

carsongross2• 11 years ago

Despite a tighter labor market

Laughable. Any reasonably intelligent person who makes this claim is either willfully ignorant or dissembling for political reasons. The population employment ratio is below 60%:

http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...

The labor market is not tight and hasn't been this over-supplied since the early 80s.

rtpg• 11 years ago

that graph's axes can make that graph extremely misleading.

Isn't the reasoning backwards though? An employment ratio of 50% means more people are looking for work than if the employment ratio is at 60%, right?

I mean if the employment ratio is 100% surely the labor market would be tight right?

roymurdock6• 11 years ago

Labor Force Participation = Labor Force / Working-age Non-institutionalized Population =

(Unemployed + Employed) / Working-age Non-institutionalized Population =

(People looking for work + People working) / (Anyone who is physically and legally able to work)

Decline in LFP means that the labor force (people employed and/or looking for jobs vs. discouraged but otherwise able-bodied workers) is shrinking relative to overall population.

This is caused by at least 1 of 2 things. (1) A decrease in the numerator: workers becoming discouraged and leaving the labor force - note that if workers simply shift from being employed to unemployed, the LFP ratio doesn't change. (2) An increase in in the denominator: more working-age, non-institutionalized workers in the overall population.

If the LFP is 100% then everyone who is able to work is either employed or actively seeking employment.

If the LFP is 50% then 50% of the total population is not actively seeking employment. With the current unemployment rate of 5.3%, this would mean that 44.7% of the total labor force is employed, 5.3% is unemployed but searching, and 50% is content to not work/discouraged.

Confusing to say the least, but in the end it's a proxy for the amount of discouraged workers in the total labor force.

adventured• 11 years ago

The labor force participation rate was 62.6% as of June.

That's the same rate as what we had in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before women were more fully into the work force. It's about 2.5% to 3% lower than what was considered healthy for about 25 years. Half of that drop can easily be explained by boomers rapidly exiting the work force.

The U6 has dropped dramatically, from 18% to 10.x%, and there has been seven million full-time jobs created in about 3.5 years.

We clearly have a tighter labor market - just not tight enough yet.

carsongross2• 11 years ago

We clearly have a tighter labor market

(lol) Asserting something doesn't make it so. If you want to goalpost-move and switch to labor participation rate, lets have a look at that long-term graph, shall we?

http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...

Does that look like a tightening trend to you?

(lol) Whatever, man.

rebootthesystem• 11 years ago

Just wait until minimum wage reaches the $15 per hour utopia. That huge sucking sound you'll hear are more jobs leaving the country.

The cynic in me thinks some politicians actually want more disparity, poverty and suffering. Why? Because those are the people who vote for them and keep them in office.

The only people who are nearly always OK despite wars, recessions, poverty and national disasters are the political class. They exist in virtual isolation from reality.

It's a really sick feedback loop: In order to stay in power you need people who are UNHAPPY with their lives, not happy. The unhappy masses will vote for whoever promises to improve their standing. Their "champion", if you will. Therefore, as a politician, you talk about doing things for them and after elections you drop them on their heads, pretend to do a few things when, in reality, you didn't make it better for anyone except yourself.

There are great examples of this in South American politics. They've been suffering from this problem for decades on end. This is like a virus that is hard to eradicate. Why? Because it is hard to make the masses vote for anyone but the person who tells them they are going to solve their problems and give them things. In other words, people don't make logical long-term decisions and continue in an endless loop despite the fact that things never get better for them.

I mean, pick a country and look at their "war on poverty". Not just the US. Everyone has a version of this. And the poor never get richer. It's pure pandering and manipulation. It's sick, really.

FD3SA3• 11 years ago

Democracy has been gamed since its invention. Unfortunately, the poor were extremely valuable as a servant class for the rich throughout our pre-industrial history.

Nowadays however, with automation, the rich are becoming quite independent of serfs as capital increasingly substitutes for labor at a rapid pace.

This does not bode well for the majority of the world's population of non-wealthy laborers.

randomname2• 11 years ago

According to BLS statistics wage growth has actually been quite good for "supervisory" employees, it's "non supervisory and production employees" (82% of the labor force) who have seen pitiful wage growth.

U.S. Paychecks Grow at Record-Slow Pace

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