As with young college graduates, young high school graduates are experiencing a much stronger labor market today than before the pandemic and at any point since 2000. The fast economic recovery from the pandemic shock is a direct result of the aggressive fiscal policy response that matched the scale of the problem—in stark contrast to…
Real wages factor in inflation. Nominal wages is just the dollar amount you get
What the article states is that factoring for inflation, wages have gone up
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/nominal-wage-vs-real-wage
I would like to additionally point out that people often misconstrue “Inflation” with “CPI”. Whereas inflation is the devaluation of the dollar, CPI is the cost increases consumers actually face. Inflation is not horrendous at the moment, but the price gouging companies attribute to inflation is much greater than the actual inflation amount. This makes the cost of goods way higher and makes comparing against inflation effectively moot.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/has-pay-kept-up-with-inflation/
Barring the issues CPI has itself with properly measuring costs on consumers, it seems your source does indeed agree that pay is falling behind the increase in cost of goods, consistently
Could you quote the section of the article where it says pay is consistently falling behind increases in cost of goods? My quoted section seems to disagree.
“Nominal pay has done somewhat less well in keeping up with increases in the costs of goods and services that are much more salient to consumers, measured by CPI. This pattern is consistent across time periods, with pay deflated by CPI experiencing smaller increases” (last sentence compared to PCE)
Right, what that says to me is that there are mixed increases and decreases.
Could you tell me how that says there are consistent decreases? I mean, it even says there are consistent smaller increases.
Edit: additionally, the data tool they provide shows an overall increase in pay with respect to CPI.