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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Wages growth for the 99% has been more or less stagnant for nearly half a century. Maybe fix that and stop worrying about inflation. https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

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I think we have it backwards.

The biggest expense for most people is housing: rents are high, buying is shockingly expensive compared to the 1980s-1990s. Raising wages, which should happen, will only drive those prices even higher unless you drastically increase the supply.

Building a massive amount of practical starter homes around every major city would go a very long way.

You also need to address (with e.g. a land value tax) landlords' tendency to raise rents and capture wage increases that way.

You also need to address feature inflation. Governments in Australia at least keep adding 'standards' that in aggregate really increased the real cost of providing that home.

Don't forget to pay some of it out as a citizen's dividend so that everyone gets a fair slice of the earth.

But the line about wage growth has always been "we can't fix that, it'll cause inflation".

It will

The wage growth for much of the world has been significant over the last decade. US workers have lost out, perhaps deservedly, due to the global equalization of wages.

The wage graph in the article you linked shows that they have not actually been stagnant. They went up by 25% in the period.

The price of everything else also increased at much higher rates

No, they haven’t. The graph in question is inflation adjusted. Non-inflation adjusted wages have grown by much more than 25%.

Haven't unskilled wages more than doubled in the last 2 years? Pre-COVID, I used to always see Now Hiring signs barely above minimum wage. Now the same signs all say $18-$20 an hour.

https://loyolaphoenix.com/2021/03/theres-no-such-thing-as-un...

I can't make any sense of that. Is it saying that since unskilled jobs are important, they don't exist? Remember that "unskilled" is about how many people are capable of doing a job, not how important it is that someone does it. Anyway, if you object to the term "unskilled", then pretend I asked this instead: "Haven't wages for jobs that require neither completion of college nor trade school, and for which all required skills can be learned on-the-job, more than doubled in the last 2 years?"

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