Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Nominal Aggregate Wage Growth by Decade


Click to enlarge.

1960s: 7.56%
1970s: 9.47%
1980s: 7.24%
1990s: 5.65%
2000s: 3.68%
2010s: 3.90%

Sense a downward trend? Is it any wonder that GDP growth is anemic and interest rates are so low?

It isn't that the 2010s are extremely weak. They are. It's that wage growth in the 2010s is extremely weak even with rapidly falling unemployment *and* a complete lack of recessions (so far). We're barely beating the 2000s and that era had both a dotcom bubble *and* a massive housing bubble pop. Talk about setting the bar low.

Will the 3.90% growth rate in the 2010s hold for the full decade? I believe that it would take a miracle to go another 5+ years without a recession. I won't be holding my breath. Let's just put it that way.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Compensation of Employees, Received: Wage and Salary Disbursements

4 comments:

Stagflationary Mark said...

Just to be clear, I'm displaying annual growth rates as determined by exponential growth curve fitting for each decade.

Troy said...

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=LCI

employees vs. 74% of 15-64 peeps

10 million more people out of work compared to the good times of 1999

"2,000 zero zero"

Troy said...

Each decade 1970, 80s, 90s saw 20M jobs added

2002-2014 has seen +10M jobs, twice.

Not quite the same thing

Stagflationary Mark said...

Troy,

Not quite the same thing

Understatement of the year! Sigh.