They have given us fuck all for raises during a period of rampant inflation and now they want to take away the one good thing that covid-19 did for workers.
BLS has been tracking this number and it has skyrocketed in the last generation (Number of Jobs Held in a Lifetime): https://www.bls.gov/nls/questions-and-answers.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf ("young baby boomers" age 18-56, years 1978-2020)
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsyth.pdf ("older millenials" age 18-36, years 1998-2021)
The "Chart 1" in both of those seems to be almost the same logarithm and the 18-56 "baby boomer" chart at age 36 appears to be roughly the same number of jobs. It might even be slightly higher in the baby boomer chart at age 36.
edit: changed country to county
It's an oft-mentioned point in the last few yearss to focus on raw income and not on spending power. if you get 50% more pay but rent doubles, the vast majority of people would have less spending power. same with job numbers. "Unemployment is historically low!". meanwhile, gig and part time worked soard while full time jobs dipped.
In addition, you look further and realize how people who "gave up" after 2-3 months without an interview are not counted as "unemployed" and you realize there's a lot to break down, that no one is breaking down
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/persons-not-...
https://www.bls.gov/cps/lfcharacteristics.htm#discouraged
BLS may not be perfect but they're not idiots and it's wildly better than other countries.
The numbers OP cites can be 100% accurate and reflective of reality while it is still also true that people in the Bay Area struggle to pay for housing.
However, the person to whom I was replying used cheap and not-so-cheerful language to suggest that it was possible to talk about this en masse. Assuming that to be reasonable, I replied with an en masse response.
Certainly if you break it down at the county level, I expect you'd find multiple different patterns, and would then be faced with which ones to call "typical" or "indicative".
While they have gone up (almost certainly faster than inflation), they are not part of the inflation numbers that we hear in the news.
Yes, they are [1][2].
[1] https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/methodologies/RIPfac...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-does-the-consumer-pri...
Which actually makes my point even more clearly: yes, there are a lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent, but these are not supported by the statistics for inflation and median income. Doesn't mean that they are wrong, but makes it more likely that there are other reasons for the proliferation of these stories.
They are, as one of the inputs to imputed rent for owner-occupied housing.
> lot of anecdotes about not being able to make the rent
A lot is explained by regional variation. For example, real mean wages in San Francisco are back where they were in 2017 [1].
but no one is digging in to talk about the regional variation. SF going back to being "still one of the highest CoL post genrification" instead of "unbearable for all but the elite" isn't exactly comforting.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-has-outpaced-wage-gro...
Maybe this isn't that Axios journalist's field, but that huge spike of 9.1% annual inflation in 2022 won't be made up for by a 1% difference in 2024. Showing only the current rate and not the cumulative effects seems disingenuous.
You're both right. Real wages are down from the pandemic, but that's because they spiked massively due to the stimulus spending [1]. Real wages today are where they were in Q1 2020, which was the highest they had been since at least 1982.
Both the Axios and Journal charts are confusing because they're taking the first derivative of a complex curve.
How do you navigate Fred effectively? I can usually find something close to what I want, but not exact through Google searches of the site.
Kagi :P. I know the names of most of these data series, so it’s searching e.g. real weekly earnings fed fred.
What would prefer me to do? Post a dozen links that all the same thing, arguably less obviously?
I have not seen a single one yet that shows a decline in real wages.