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obrero | 10 years ago

> industrial capacity has been rising

that is what "more capital equipment exists" means. Its utilization of 87%+ in the late 1960s to below 77% in 2011 is the problem.

> inflation-adjusted hourly compensation has never been higher

The chart you refer to is very obviously NOT inflation adjusted. Adjusted for inflation it was higher in the early 1970s - it has fallen over 45 years.

> making up random facts

I am citing data correctly. You are pointing to charts showing hourly wages are 10 times what they were 50 years ago and saying they are not adjusted for inflation.

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yummyfajitas|10 years ago

You are right, I copied the wrong graph for compensation. Here is real compensation per hour:

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

My mistake, thanks for the correction. It's still going up.

The claims that wages have not risen are based entirely on cherry-picked data, carefully choosing endpoints, and ignoring non-wage compensation as well as the fact that CPI wildly overstates inflation in the long run [1].

Also, the graph I provided is industrial production, which is going up. You might be right that capacity grew faster than production (cite?), but production has also gone up.

[1] See, e.g. Boskin commission, the lack of hedonic adjustments in healthcare, and the variable basket of goods used in chained CPI which prevents it from actually being a long term inflation measure. (I.e., inflation from 1970->2015 should only include goods invented in 1970, but chained CPI adds new goods yearly in order to accurately measure 1983->1984 inflation.)