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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

One key factor that is crucial to understanding the current systems: over a number of decades, the American worker's general experience and compensation has been ratcheted down, one bit at a time. Each year brought less pay (adjusted for economic growth), less autonomy. More efficiencies, more consultants. While pay stagnated.

Quarantine has given people a chance to decide if that's what they want to do, at the previous wages.

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“Adjusted for economic growth” is doing a lot of work here. Economic growth is happening for reasons like the growing addressable market for smartphones and the development of clever algorithms that make cheap sensors take good photos. The line cooks at my favorite roadside diner in Des Moines may well feel that this means they deserve a raise, but nothing has happened to the passing motorists’ willingness to pay for the cheeseburgers they can make each hour. Unless one of the few thousand people involved in those projects happens to be among them.

Especially after adjusting to life without restaurants, bars, hotels etc. I don’t see consumers suddenly paying the prices that would support significantly nicer lifestyles for all the workers involved in these things.

But don’t they have to eat and pay rent? I keep wondering where all these people that have decided previous jobs aren’t for them are getting by.

When you loose your job, that tends to give you a jolt that forces you to change your life. When the government gives you money at the same time, you go improve your situation in a way you couldn't before because you didn't have a spare $100.

I’m not sure I follow? Can you give an example? Do you means people are learning skills and moving up? That doesn’t seem like it could account for all the help wanted signs I see all over.

That, or taking the time to start their own business (you don't have to see a lot of success to beat serving), or etc.

But part of it is also that the government has continued unemployment past the point they normally would, due to the pandemic. The decision between working 40 hours a week for $400, or being paid $300 a week and not working, is pretty obvious. It will be interesting (in a cynical "oh my God what the hell is wrong with this country" sort of way) to see what happens in the states that are slashing those benefits, and whether that leads to reduced help wanted or not.

>and whether that leads to reduced help wanted or not.

It will but not by a significant amount, on the other hand those states will see more stagnating wages.

>But don’t they have ... pay rent?

Not until this month, there are lots of bets on what's going to happen to the housing market but I'm glad I don't own a house.

Wage stagnation is probably a myth caused in part by highly paid boomers exiting the work force.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/05/25/have_u...

Seems like you'd just look at the median wage among groups of similarly-aged people to get a "final answer." Like this:

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/09/2...

Its not a stretch at all to say that median incomes have been stagnant since the late 90s.

Am I missing something? In all of those graphs I see at least a 20% growth in income comparing 1989/1999 and 2019.

Sure: people's lives don't linearly interpolate; 2019 was the first year to be better than 1999 for several age brackets.

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