Sex and the State
Sex and the State Podcast
A quibble
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A quibble

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Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m a writer working on decriminalizing and destigmatizing all things sex. I use evidence and stories to interrogate existing power structures to propose better ways of relating. To support my work, buy a guidebuy a subscriptionfollow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!

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Got a letter from a dear friend:

Dear Cathy:

Your series on the problems facing low-skilled native-born men has been, as usual, insightful, thought-provoking, and mostly on the money.  I hate, therefore, offering a quibble.  However, you made several references to the idea that real wages for the working class have declined over the past 30 years or so.  While “working class” is an amorphous term, and I am sure that your statement is true for certain categories of workers, I think there is reason to be skeptical of this claim at large:

  1. Most studies that show declining wages are based on hourly wage workers.  They do not consider salaried workers, yet the percentage of salaried vs wage workers has been increasing steadily.  And while many salaried workers fall into the professional or upper-middle class, many others  are jobs that have generally been considered working-class. 

  2. Most such studies do not consider no-wage compensation.  But workers are increasingly receiving compensation in the form of benefits rather than wages.  In many cases, workers prefer benefits to wages.  In other cases, government policy (most infamously employer-provided health insurance) pushes workers in that direction.  We may believe that cash would be better, but we can’t ignore the value of those benefits.

  3. Scott Winship has pointed out that CPI measures significantly overstate inflation, making real wage gains appear smaller than they were.  According to Winship, personal consumption expenditures

  4. As Russ Roberts points out the biggest problem with the pessimistic studies is that they rarely follow the same people to see how they do over time. Instead, they rely on a snapshot at two points in time. So for example, researchers look at the median income of the middle quintile in 1975 and compare that to the median income of the median quintile in 2014, say. When they find little or no change, they conclude that the average American is making no progress. But the people in the snapshots are not the same people. You can’t use two snapshots to conclude that only the rich have made progress. It’s possible that everyone from the earlier snapshot has gotten richer and then been replaced by different people whose incomes will also rise. This is especially true when there is immigration. If new immigrants are disproportionately less skilled than Americans already here, measured incomes can fall even when those who are already here have steadily improving economic prospects.

  5. Scott Lincicome, from whom I’ve stolen liberally, suggests that in context, “while the American middle class is indeed shrinking, this trend has been caused less by ‘polarization’ (i.e., Americans moving both up and down the economic ladder) and more by Americans simply getting richer.”  See: https://www.cato.org/commentary/annoying-persistence-income-stagnation-myth.

I don’t know that these arguments are dispositive, not does it significantly undercut your central premise, but I do think it raises at least yellow flags about this particular argument.

Keep up the brilliant work,

Michael

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Sex and the State
Sex and the State Podcast
A podcast which is me reading you my newsletter about power.