Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
&gt;In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year.<p>Right away, they&#x27;re presenting some large number that&#x27;s actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.<p>They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.<p>I clicked through to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-avenue&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;21&#x2F;low-wage-work-is-more-pervasive-than-you-think-and-there-arent-enough-good-jobs-to-go-around&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-avenue&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;21&#x2F;low-wag...</a>, which linked me to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;meet-the-low-wage-workforce&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;meet-the-low-wage-workfor...</a>, which says the definition is on page 5 of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;201911_Brookings-Metro_low-wage-workforce_Ross-Bateman.pdf#page=5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;201911_...</a>. It&#x27;s actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition:<p>&gt; While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time&#x2F;full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so.<p>...<p>&gt; The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.<p>They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.<p>Moving on:<p>&gt;However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.<p>If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn&#x27;t really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.<p>&gt;Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.<p>For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:<p>&gt;After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.<p>Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there&#x27;s nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that &quot;Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades&quot;<p>The other half is a weird claim. &quot;health care, housing, and education&quot; are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more &quot;health care, housing, and education&quot; than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.