Inflation! Inflation! Inflation! Inflation! Inflation! Inflation! Inflation! Inflation!

Over at the Washington Post, Heather Long is scratching her head:

By just about any metric this is the best job market since the late 1990s. The economy has been adding jobs for 110 straight months — a record streak. Jobs are plentiful. Unemployment is at a half-century low. And the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Americans with less than a high school education are all at the lowest levels since the Labor Department began keeping track. There’s a lot to cheer.

But one of the few head scratchers in this strong jobs picture is why wages aren’t growing as fast as they did in the late 1990s, when yearly wage growth routinely topped 4 percent.

Many hoped this would be the year wages really accelerated. After all, business leaders have been complaining for months they can’t find enough workers — both highly skilled and not — and the natural response to that is usually to bump up pay. But wage growth peaked in February at 3.4 percent and has pulled back since then, puzzling economists. “From late 2017 through late 2018, it looked like wage growth was picking up. That ended. Wage growth has been backsliding this year,” tweeted economist Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Do I even need to write the rest of this post? Long presents a couple of charts that show nominal wage growth even though inflation was a point or two higher during the late 90s than it is now. Accounting for inflation, here is wage growth for blue-collar workers:

The six-year stretch from 1994-2000 showed wage growth almost identical to the six year stretch from 2014-2019. Wages today are continuing to grow at about the same rate that they’ve been growing during the entire period since 2014.

What makes this especially bizarre is that Long suggests a few reasons for the wage “slowdown,” and one of them is inflation! But then she sort of poo-poos the whole idea, acknowledging only that “Some say wages do not need to rise as much if inflation remains low.” Some? How about every single person in the world who understands what inflation is?

It’s at times like this that I wish I were a drinker, because I could use a stiff belt right now. How does this stuff keep happening?

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate