What happened to hourly pay over the past 50+ years? That’s the topic of my latest paper.
One answer (from @AmerCompass) is this— it rose by 1% over the 50 years from 1972 to 2022.
That’s not right—though it’s only off by a factor of about 30, so… Another answer, from @EconomicPolicy, also giving the misimpression that pay has lagged productivity:

OK, here are the charts I couldn't update in time for our event.
1. Median household income: Down from 2021, sure, but also down from 2019. Still a 30% real increase from 1979 if you use chained CPI linked to PCE. (33% post-tax). BTW, those figures exclude employer health coverage and are pulled down over time by the rising share of retirees. Not American Carnage.

Why stop with lunch when we have breakfast and dinner too? Why stop with kids? Why stop with food?

https://twitter.com/paulwaldman1/status/1683533578750050304

Universalism is wasteful and bad. Focus narrowly on people in need.

This chart from @JonHaidt (via @arpitrage) leads me to ask: what if some of the decline in mental health during the smartphone era is due to overly pessimistic news being easily consumable & shareable for the first time coinciding with the Great Recession? Obviously wouldn’t explain the pre-1985 rise in the chart, which is also interesting.

This Matt Desmond article on poverty is definitely in the running for most embarrassing-or-dishonest piece I’ve ever read. There is not a credible poverty measure that doesn’t show a big decline in poverty over the long run. nytimes.com/2023/03/09/mag… Here are some leading estimates of child poverty. Even the official poverty measure—which no one thinks is good—shows a drop.

I'm very excited to lead the new Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, with @kevincorinth , who is coming back home to AEI.

https://twitter.com/AEI/status/1612812986908819460

POV:
- Markets are great, the American economy is strong. Two problems though: unequal opportunity to benefit from what is a near-miraculous wealth-creating dynamo and not ENOUGH dynamism in recent decades.

New research note by @kevincorinth & Bruce Meyer reanalyzes Hoynes-Patel 2018 (basis for EITC simulations in NAS child poverty report) and the Hoynes-Patel '22 "addendum" to that paper. bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicag… Corinth and Meyer correct an error in the H-P calculations and get participation elasticities between 0.99 to 1.38. Remember, CTC-expansion advocates have said for over a year that Corinth-Meyer's 0.75 is an outlier.

Thread on my new paper looking at trends in children living with two parents. Gist is that the decline for the most disadvantaged kids mostly stopped in the early 1990s. Can you guess what I think might have caused the arrest? aei.org/research-produ… Before getting to that, let me acknowledge @RichardvReeves & @ChrisLPulliam , whose research inspired this report, which builds on their earlier one and is partly based on code they shared. brookings.edu/research/middl…

This Biden Admin talking point needs to go. Here's a list of papers/studies finding that pay has kept up with productivity or that labor's share of income has not fallen "in recent decades" (at least through 2008, often to this day). A thread.

https://twitter.com/SecYellen/status/1394774999312093191

And do not reply that median pay hasn't kept pace with aggregate productivity, which NO ONE disputes. (But we don't know what happened to the median worker's productivity.) This is the equivalent to the amateurish "Did you adjust for inflation tho?" rejoinder.

Oren conveniently rejecting empirical arguments by saying he's already refuted them in previous reports that rejected empirical arguments.

https://twitter.com/oren_cass/status/1384940225818935297

If you want to know why I & others that have spent time studying the question rely on the PCE deflator to measure inflation rather than the CPI-U that Oren and AC repeatedly use for stagnationist claims, please do read the 3,000 words I wrote on it in 2015 forbes.com/sites/scottwin…

There are beliefs both sides have of the other's motives that are widely off the mark. Having spent years interacting (and self-identifying, sort-of) with both sides at one time or another, I'm here to report to conservatives the following: Liberals don't support child care subsidies & paid leave because they are opposed to women (or men) staying at home to raise kids. They certainly aren't doing it for 3D-chess political reasons ("if we get them out of the home, they'll evolve into Democrats!")

I have a new piece up at @thedispatch critiquing the new inequality report from @AmerCompass (and, more broadly, its other economics research). thedispatch.com/p/what-a-new-r… The report says income inequality has grown, robbing the non-rich, destabilizing society, and leaving the middle class worse off in terms of wealth. But the best inequality data show that it mostly stopped rising 30 years ago.

Here's my testimony from today's Senate Budget hearing on inequality, which forced me to get back up to speed on the income concentration lit.aei.org/research-produ…
A few key takeaways to accompany this flattering pic: I continue to be persuaded that income concentration has risen a lot less than everyone thought around the time of Occupy Wall St. Auten and Splinter find the top 1% share is up from 9% in 1979 to ~13% today (I'm extrapolating from their 2015 estimate.)

One factor increasing support among younger conservatives for government subsidization of parenthood is the widespread and MISTAKEN view of these cohorts that they are doing badly economically relative to past generations. nzzl.us/BAWgTZ2 When you compare yourself to the peak of the housing bubble, yes, wealth is down. When you compare comparable years (and remember that rising student loan debt finances a lifetime of additional income worth far more), median wealth is up, not down, among people under 35

The reason that antipoverty policy is (or should be) harder than "just give people money" is that we *all* think there are some behavioral effects. You can't argue that child allowances are better than TANF because they reduce the marginal tax rate on working or getting married unless you think behavioral effects are real.

I thought Niskanen had (correctly) resolved its identity issues by calling itself "moderate." On safety net policy, it breaks from pretty much the entire conservative coalition--from American Compass to the Heritage Foundation--in dismissing concerns about work disincentives.

https://twitter.com/NiskanenCenter/status/1357345946745507845

(In this report, that dismissal appears to be on the basis of a single study of Canadian policy.)

It's incumbent on center-right researchers who care about poverty and racial inequality to distance themselves from and even condemn this kind of "research". link.springer.com/article/10.100… If you want to make a controversial and broadly hurtful argument about a sensitive topic such as racial inequality, you better hold yourself to an exceedingly high evidentiary standard before publicly writing about it.

This thread critiques Section III of Oren Cass's paper, "The Cost-of-Thriving Index." It includes 53 tweets. Eventually, the threads for each of the sections of his paper will be linked in a master thread. /1 We finally get to Oren's Cost-of-Thriving Index. He says that it will answer the question, "Does [a changing] wage cover a middle-class family's needs?" That, he says, is the right question, not "how much has the money supply affected price levels in the economy?" /2

This thread critiques Section II of Oren Cass's paper, "The Cost-of-Thriving Index." It includes 35 tweets. Eventually, the threads for each of the sections of his paper will be linked in a master thread. /1 This section purports to show that using inflation-adjusted income measures to look at changes in well-being presents an incomplete picture. It does so, Oren says, because it ignores the "affordability perspective" /2

This thread critiques Section I of Oren Cass's paper, "The Cost-of-Thriving Index." It includes 35 tweets. Eventually, the threads for each of the sections of his paper will be linked in a master thread. /1 Oren indicates Section I will be "a review of those [inflation measures] already available." (p7) However, he actually only reviews two measures, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) & the Personal Consumption Expenditures Chain-Type Price Index (PCE) /2

This thread critiques the introduction to Oren Cass's paper, "The Cost-of-Thriving Index." It includes 17 tweets. Eventually, the threads for each of the sections of his paper will be linked in a master thread. /1 Oren claims that "inflation measures the increased price of buying the exact same set of things as in the past," (p6) but that's not true. Inflation measures the increased price of a changing set of things that provides the same utility over time. /2