[CardenB]

So you are arguing that there is increasing mobility?

Or do you argue that people are bouncing between jobs with lower wage growth and higher wage growth, so the bottom 25% of wages are getting worse and worse, yet they are only temporary?

It seems pretty clear that 25% of earners experience no growth or negative growth YoY while 25% of earners see wage growth that outpaces inflation. Unless they are swapping places constantly, it's not really healthy for this to occur over a long period of time (as it has).

[woobar]

Are you sure that this chart shows bottom 25% of wages and not the bottom 25% of wage change?

They provide this definition: Wage Growth Tracker is a measure of the nominal wage growth of individuals. It is constructed using microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS), and is the median percent change in the hourly wage of individuals observed 12 months apart.

Chart 1 plots the time series of the median, along with the mean, and the 75th and 25th percentiles of the individual wage growth distribution

I believe this chart will almost always show little or negative numbers for the bottom 25% of wage growth. By definition.

[CardenB]

I think you’re totally right. My big mistake facepalm

Still trying to make time to play with the data myself but I suspect it won’t really contain the information I want.

[ta2234234242]

Are you arguing there's not increasing mobility, with this new fangled internet and the series of tubes and what have you? Upward mobility has never been more available across all income brackets.

Again... you want to look at the number of people in poverty. That's the true metric of an economy, not the unemployment number.

[CardenB]

True metric of an economy is not just poverty rate.

I can have 3x the income of monthly food budget (poverty threshold). What happens when housing per month is also 3x the cost of food per month?

Poverty threshold is a poor indicator of the economic health. Poverty can lower while the ability for the average citizen to support a family continues to drop.

> Are you arguing there's not increasing mobility, with this new fangled internet and the series of tubes and what have you?

That's not an argument. Technological improvements can result in consolidation of capital and rising inequality. Something like that would be indicated by... top 25% of wage earners outpacing inflation while bottom 25% continue to stagnate or fall behind.

EDIT: The last poverty rate publication showed the supplemental poverty rate rising (taking into account more factors that traditional poverty rate). Previous to the pandemic, they were largely correlated. We will have to wait until the 2024 results to see if the inversion holds true.

source: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...