It's okay bruv. Pay doesn't have to be okay with what you say mate. Nothing matters. Stay in your home. Go to hell. Go to hell.
Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
151–160 of 859 posts
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#152This isn’t exactly great news, but it’s probably not as bad as you think. It means that inflation is a tractable problem. The Fed as a lot of tools at its disposal (first of which is to take its foot off the gas). If we were in a situation where workers were demanding higher wages because they were expecting prices to go up, and businesses were raising prices to pay workers who were demanding higher wages, then we’d…
That narrative makes sense, except for one thing: why wouldn't the Fed have taken their foot off the gas once inflation hit, say, 4%? Why wait until we're at 6.8%?
The other mandate of the Fed is getting full employment. Pumping money into the economy helps increase employment and there is a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic levels on that metric.
They believed the inflation was transitory, and were going to wait it out. Now it's very clearly not transitory, so they are taking action
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, if you hang out in certain parts of the internet, it feels like a revolution is coming, but it reality Bernie still can't win the primaries, so I don't think the numbers are actually there. But I also won't be surprised if the next generation of voters is more socialist-leaning.
The revolution will not come from the left. The "left" elites have forgotten the people, and the left in general is talking more about identity issues than class issues. The revolution will be more Trump than Bernie. Like in the early 1900, where more revolutions where fascist than communist.
> The "left" elites have forgotten the people, and the left in general is talking more about identity issues than class issues.
You mention this in a discussion about Bernie Sanders? Probably the politician with the most single-minded focus on class politics in the country
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, if you hang out in certain parts of the internet, it feels like a revolution is coming, but it reality Bernie still can't win the primaries, so I don't think the numbers are actually there. But I also won't be surprised if the next generation of voters is more socialist-leaning.
The revolution will not come from the left. The "left" elites have forgotten the people, and the left in general is talking more about identity issues than class issues. The revolution will be more Trump than Bernie. Like in the early 1900, where more revolutions where fascist than communist.
Sure, but the rise of communism also came around that time.
And to be perfectly honest, the fall of communism, kind of coincides with when the balance of rich vs the rest started to go off rails.
Communism is dead, but that doesn't mean something else cant come and replace it (and probably be just as bad)
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#155Inflation is a neat (and usually the only) way to lower the wages without losing people. Of course they're not going to let go of it.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inflation doesn't - fundamentally - change the power balance between employers and employees. Market forces will cause the situation to find a fair market price. If job hopping can't get you better wages, then you probably don't have enough market power to resist if an employer flat-out cuts your pay. Though to try and prevent misunderstandings - I do think inflation is bad for people who are paid wages. Market force…
Late last century inflation and then wages keeping up with that inflation enabled a generation of folks to pay off their first mortgages quite quickly.
Absolutely but this also assumes a fairly "elastic" housing market able to absorb the demand. I am not sure the market is still able to do that with the NYMBYsm and malthusianism around new housing. In high tension area, the price could quickly increase faster than general inflation. I believe CPI does not include house prices.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when someone come to you asking for a raise, how often do you give it?
Their peers if they're nice enough will let everyone know "Don't ever show up with an offer or you'll be fired." So it happens rarely if at all.
I think skywal_l was asking about an employee asking for a raise without a competing offer.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#158If it does, inflation has failed as a policy: https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi... "in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sus…
Once again, I'd like to understand why "lower unemployment" is more important than people actually being able to make a living.
What is all that employment for if people can't pay their bills from it?
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#159As someone who does OK, but lives in reality (not the bay area), I feel a revolution coming. I hope it's not a violent one, but who knows at this point. Hopefully it's just a politician with big policy changes. People feel completely disenfranchised. You keep hanging housing over their head but just out of reach like some baby toy, then inflation spikes everything else. What's the point of working even? I don't know…
Watch Ray Dalio's videos on the long term debt cycle and how the economy works in general. Another interesting topic is what is called the "fourth turning" which sort of says that major changes happen around once a human lifecycle. We are going to have some major economic changes in the next decade, but no one knows how that will look. I think it's 50/50 whether it's violent or not.
I read the fourth turning book. I couldn't finish it just because how tenuous the argument was. It was also debunked by experts. I find it absolutely not interesting at all.
Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation
#160If anyone assumes this is specific to the US and that companies (from the US operating) in developing countries would provide inflation matching raises due to lower cost of labor, let me put that to rest. The multinational companies operating in India don’t match inflation either. The inflation in India has been around 6-7% for a couple of decades (and higher for long before that), and wages have just eroded over time.