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Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

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Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#61

Post by antupis »

dnautics wrote: post #39

If 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…

Smaller European nations did this kinda policies through 60s-90s and it worked fine. Now thanks Euro this kinda lever has closed most of them.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#62

Post by hattori_hanzo »

devcpp wrote: post #29
terminalcommand wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax cuts for companies, increased government spending to boost stock markets, state subvenventions, significantly lower interest rate than inflation.

That's all from the government, and by extension from the population at large, not from any set of rich people.

Well yeah. From the government, for rich people. I don't know any poor people who can directly profit from corporate bailouts, tax cuts or has access to loans with such low interest rates. Even though as you say it comes from the population at large.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#63

Post by baron816 »

Supermancho wrote: post #41
baron816 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It never does. The first thing in the article is a graph where 7 our of the 11 years shown have positive real wage growth. If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest.

How does that math work? > If worker pay never kept up with inflation, the country would be among the world’s poorest. That is flat wrong. Even if you were still making 23$ an hour as you did in the 70's: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/04/50-years-of-us-wages-... https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/ ...you'd still be among the top 20% of earners across the earth. Let's take another step do…

Maybe we need a better definition of “never”. Are we going back 11 years, or 50 years, or 255 years? If wages truly never keep up with inflation in this country, then we’d be living like they did prior to the industrial revolution. You can’t argue that technology hasn’t had in impact on everyone’s quality of life over longer timespans, which doesn’t get taken fully into account in the data.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#64

Post by paxys »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #53
paxys wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who? CPI does include housing.

CPI includes housing as "Owners' equivalent rent of primary residence (OER)". If that inspires confidence in anyone, please, I'd like to hear how.

Standard internet discourse.

Numbers are bad - "See everyone, things are fucked. I told you so." (which is what this post is about)

Numbers are good - "Meh, I never trust the underlying data anyways. It is all meaningless."

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#65

Post by mission_failed »

tjpnz wrote: post #40
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #20

We had an all-hands meeting recently where we got to submit anonymous questions. One of the questions was 'with inflation rising at 6%, will the company reconsider their 'standard' 2% raise?' The lady answering looks dead in the camera and goes 'Honestly? No' and goes on to talk about how we're reasonably competitive with the local market. Hey, credit where credit is due, at least she was a refreshingly straight shoo…

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

The best thing you can do is form a union

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#66

Post by kqr »

neonbjb wrote: post #55
baron816 wrote: post #18

This 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…

This is wrong IMO - the fed has NO tools in its hands. Its last tool was inflation rates, and it burned that during the great recession. It is now caught in a pickle: raise interest rates, causing a mass exodus of wealth from securities to savings accounts and CDs and causing the stock market to tumble (like it arguably always should have done since 2008), or let inflation take its course. I am not an economist, and…

That the fed has no tools is correct to the best of my understanding. The central banks are tasked with solving problems they have no mandate to solve.

Inflation is, among other things, a problem of the market having too low a demand for money compared to the supply. One obvious way to fix that is by taxing money out of existence faster, decreasing the supply and thus increasing its value assuming demand stays fixed. (And there's reason to think it will; demand for money is a relatively unflexible parameter.)

But of course, central banks do not control taxation, so there's not much they can do.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#67

Post by onion2k »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #54
tjpnz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience HR are never receptive to those types of arguments. If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job.

> If you want a raise the best thing you can do is find a new job. Note that this doesn't always even involve taking it. Go get a job offer that pays better and bring it to your boss. If they want to match it, great. If they don't, bye.

From the other side, whenever a member of my team has come to me asking to match an offer I've always refused and wished them well in their new role.

If someone is unhappy enough to start job hunting rather than talking to me then it's a clear sign that they'll leave soon regardless of any pay rise. Psychologically, every pay increase makes someone happy for a short time, and then they get used to it and they start to wonder if they should have asked for more, or they focus on other reasons why they don't like the role they're in and wonder if the other one would have been more fulfilling. If you match an offer, or even beat it, the person is likely to have left in a year anyway.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#68

Post by aeternum »

ars wrote: post #17

Is this inflation due to expansion of the money base? Or inflation due to rising costs? If the second one, there where is all that money going? Who is that "cost" that is benefiting?

Likely some of both. Many of the costs are going to the supply-chain bottlenecks, IE: meat packing plants, lumber mills, container ports, chip manufacturers. Demand is high and it's hard for new supply to be brought online so those in the right position benefit significantly. For example AMD and NVDA revenue up 50%+, income 100%+

Eventually these high margins will attract competitors and bring down the margins but it takes quite awhile to get a chip fab up and running, and similar with meat-packing, lumber mills, etc.

Re: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

#70

Post by whydid »

silisili wrote: post #58

As 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…

This is why I love to study history, you can almost predict the future by studying the past.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

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