alt Hacker NewsThis thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
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>In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation at all. In the absence of economic growth I would expect the average individual's earnings to be flat.
The only way for wages to go up across the board is if productivity increases. If you're not creating more wealth than last year, the only way for one person's wages to go up is if someone else's goes down.
> The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career.
> and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
This is an extremely unrealistic expectation. There are a multitude of reasons for people's incomes to fluctuate other than retirement. People make career changes that result in lower income for many reasons, like taking a better job, changing careers, transitioning to a lower demand job when they have children, or moving to a new city with lower wages for personal preference.
For many jobs the earnings are also dependent on the company's earnings. Incentive structures, bonuses, RSUs. Even low paying companies scale their staff up and down based on demand. They can't hold a monotonically growing set of staff and also monotonically increase their wages when the incoming demand for their product is not monotonically growing.
The only way to come close to an "idealized society" like you're proposing is a totally self-sustaining, command and control economy where a central authority determines not only everyone's income, but their expenditures too. It's not possible to keep the entire economy and everyone in it moving in the same direction unless you're dictating where all of the money goes in society to a fine degree. Variations of this have been tried. The members of that society do not find themselves more well off.
Nothing is "idealized" in the real world forever.
The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.