It’s not a bad measure but I don’t think it’s the best, I’m currently working my way through Spirit Level and so I think some measure like the Gini coefficient would be important.
I think that median income, Gini coefficient, poverty rate and something like the human development index would give a decent overall picture. I don’t think a single metric really does the job.
Its certainly difficult to judge the qwuabity of life by any measure
Amen, Brother 🙏
I mean, you’d also need to take into account cost of living, the rate of un/under employment, hours worked per week, working conditions in general, and a bunch of other stuff.
What
Why would the lowest full time annual wage be the best measure of anything to do with an economy?
Economies are huge. No one single data point on the spectrum of wages is the best measure of a anything
It would however be amazing to have a high floor for individual equity.
Why not do the lowest, at the very least there’s a median which is disproprotionate already. Might as well be logarathmic or whatever
Why have a median then, middle class?
The lowest are likely to have serious issues and not be particularly helpful (how well the paperboy, special needs cashier etc is not particularly representative or useful.)
We also have measures that capture most of what you’re looking for there in the poverty rate.
What might be helpful is stuff like the interquartile ranges (think medians but more of them) or specific medians e.g., what’s the median for the bottom twenty, bottom forty etc.
Measures at the extremes are rarely very helpful except for arguing in ignorance or bad faith.
Idk, I’d counter that the paperboy or special needs cashier would be a good starting place because they deserve the same quality of life for their work as others 🤷♂️ why should they be paid less and just ignored in the data “because they’re problematic?” Keep in mind that we are discussing full time wages.
The least a full time employee can make is absolutely an indicator of how good the economy is, as it impacts if there’s opportunity or not for the worker to better themselves. If the full time employees on the bottom couldn’t possibly work to the middle without additional assistance, the economy is shit.
First, full time wages isn’t how median income is calculated. It’s simply taxable income, could be from capital gains, inheritance, working part time etc.
If we switch to full time employee, are we ignoring shiftwork? Counting it as full time if they have enough hours? (Which really starts to skew when you think about the service industry where a bartender or server walks out with a few hundred for a few hours hard work.)
But let’s just ignore all that, pretend everyone is on a 40 hour a week job. Even so, again at the low end you still run into oddities that really warp the statistics. When I was 16 - 21 I had a full time job as a camp counsellor but a large part of my wages were what’s called “in kind” wherein they covered my food and board. When I was in school, I worked security and made minimum wage but with the understanding I could do my schoolwork (in essence, another type of in-kind pay) so I took that over a better paying job. Similarly, you might have apprentice or entry wages. Or as above, a program that gets special needs folks a job eith a willing employer where some of the wage is shared by the government or goes to paying the costs associated with employing that person. (Consider these programs from the employer’s perspective, if the employer was paying the same wage regardless, why would they hire someone with challenges etc when they could hire someone who wouldn’t require accomodations.) Again, all of this stuff happens at the very bottom and really isn’t a good indicator of the economy.
If you did large bottom swathes, bottom 10/20 % you’d still have some of these issues but they’d get smoothed out a little bit.
The lowest wage might tell something about the most shitty boss and the most desperated worker.
But it does not tell anything about an economy.
