Think it might be grading on a curve. Wages have long lagged inflation. Lagging less than 2 percent over 5 years is bad, but less bad than most 5 year periods in recent history.
Yeah and if wages were already significantly worse than inflation, and continued to stay below it, then peoples buying power decreased even more. It didn’t decrease faster than it was, but it still decreased from what it had been, making them worse off. Looking at 5 year trends foesnt really matter if theres never a true upward swing and its just a consistent downslide. You can say ‘yeah but here in this spot you slowed down slightly’, but the person is still closer to the bottom than they’ve ever been.
Counting back from July 2020, the average weekly earnings per worker came up just short. But the huge addition of workers during the economic recovery would have been expected to dent that further.
Compare the exact same comparison from July 2019 versus April 2025, we have weekly earnings going up from $964 to $1236 (28.2%), while the inflation over that time period was 24.6%. So workers gained across even that metric over this time.
But we’d never say that the economic conditions for regular people improved between July 2019 and July 2020. Those huge job losses during the first few months of the COVID recession were devastating for regular people, even if the average earnings among people who kept their jobs shot upward. It wasn’t because their wages went up, it was that the people who were the lowest earners lost their jobs. As they reentered the workforce, they were taking higher paying jobs than the ones they were previously laid off from, so that overall average stayed stable with the artificially elevated July 2020 number, through improved bargaining power during the great resignation and some recovery of union power, especially in the summer of 2023.
That’s why economic conditions for regular people can’t be measured by a single metric, and all the different stats need to be read together.
These sentences:
answer the implicit question in this sentence:
It wasn’t really a good run. Wages didn’t keep up with inflation. Even though wages are higher, the buying power with those wages is less.
Think it might be grading on a curve. Wages have long lagged inflation. Lagging less than 2 percent over 5 years is bad, but less bad than most 5 year periods in recent history.
Yeah and if wages were already significantly worse than inflation, and continued to stay below it, then peoples buying power decreased even more. It didn’t decrease faster than it was, but it still decreased from what it had been, making them worse off. Looking at 5 year trends foesnt really matter if theres never a true upward swing and its just a consistent downslide. You can say ‘yeah but here in this spot you slowed down slightly’, but the person is still closer to the bottom than they’ve ever been.
Counting back from July 2020, the average weekly earnings per worker came up just short. But the huge addition of workers during the economic recovery would have been expected to dent that further.
Compare the exact same comparison from July 2019 versus April 2025, we have weekly earnings going up from $964 to $1236 (28.2%), while the inflation over that time period was 24.6%. So workers gained across even that metric over this time.
But we’d never say that the economic conditions for regular people improved between July 2019 and July 2020. Those huge job losses during the first few months of the COVID recession were devastating for regular people, even if the average earnings among people who kept their jobs shot upward. It wasn’t because their wages went up, it was that the people who were the lowest earners lost their jobs. As they reentered the workforce, they were taking higher paying jobs than the ones they were previously laid off from, so that overall average stayed stable with the artificially elevated July 2020 number, through improved bargaining power during the great resignation and some recovery of union power, especially in the summer of 2023.
That’s why economic conditions for regular people can’t be measured by a single metric, and all the different stats need to be read together.
Decreasing the rate of loss is good. Not great. Just good. It’s certainly better than average, since average was a much bigger loss.
But it’s semantics. We need to do better regardless.