Wage Stagnation Is One Disease With Many Causes
First it was low productivity. Then it was health insurance. Then it was China. Then it was….
No one’s been waiting for a raise longer than these guys.
Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images North AmericaOne of the most vexing and puzzling problems in the U.S. economy is wage stagnation. There are many proposed culprits -- globalization and foreign competition, the decline of unions, automation, outsourcing and industrial concentration. Plenty of high-quality research is being done to disentangle these causes. But stepping back and looking at the history of wages in the U.S. over the past half-century provides a few clues -- as well as raising some intriguing mysteries.
Since 1964, when data first became available, average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers have increased more or less steadily, from $2.50 an hour then to about $23.00 today:
