Our friend David Foster has pulled together a summary
post with links to several others, on the question of whether wages and happiness stagnated or fell in America over recent decades. Here are a couple of more
links on that subject which tend to take the position that
fiat currency is responsible for a lot of disruption.
I'm not sure how "fiat" currency can be blamed for much of anything since all government-sanctioned currency is fiat, including medals-back currency. Government sets the value of its approved currency and varies that value whenever that seems convenient to the men and women in power. That's always been the case.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
You're welcome to read the arguments and see if they aren't using the term in a different technical sense than yourself. There's a lot about the end of the Bretton Woods system.
ReplyDeleteI'm still gonna blame the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. It was a big advantage for D.I.N.K. mortgage borrowers at first, but then housing prices started chasing what two-income couples could get approved for, which meant that more women chose to join or stay in the workforce, which meant that fewer could afford a home without a second income . . .
ReplyDeleteWhen the labor force participation rate of a group making up approximately half your working age population shifts from just over 40% to near 60%, one can logically infer that this might have an effect on wage growth -- especially if the wage-gap is real.
I remember dad using that acronym, "DINK," back in the 80s. He was definitely unhappy about the effect they were having on the economics of that time.
DeleteNothing lasts forever. The social and politic conditions that produced Bretton Woods and the Global Economic Order for the most part no longer exist. I don't see how the US could have remained on the gold standard given the rapid run up in oil prices in the 1970s. We would have bankrupted the Fed trying to buy energy (Britain dropped off the gold standard for the pound in WWI IIRC for the same reason).
ReplyDeleteTangential, a lot of those comparisons, like most economic comparisons, are very sensitive to the time frame you use for a base line. As I noted there, Noah Smith's claim about wage stagnation vs wage growth relative to globalization is sensitive to what you consider to be the period of globalization.
Douglas2..the effect of more two-income couples...the addition work should produce additional economic output, which should be counter-inflationary...unless a substantial % of the new jobs were less directly productive. Although in some cases, employers might have had the option to choose a less-expensive employee for the same or similar work, which would have been expected to have some effect in increasing male unemployment. As I believe was the case with the new mechanized textile mills in Britain circa 19=800, where women (and children) were valued as employees on account of their more nimble fingers as well as the lower pay for which they could be hired.
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