[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... [2]https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
> If Worker Pay Had Kept Pace With Productivity Gains Since 1968, Today's Minimum Wage Would Be $24 an Hour
It looks like when it was shortened one of its most important words were dropped.
It's an interesting question in its own right. Do the very lowest paid people in the economy have it better or worse than 50 years ago. I don't know the full answer to that question, but I do know that in 1968 about 5% of American households didn't have full indoor plumbing.[2] Just based on that datum, I'd much rather trade places with a very poor American in 2020 than 1968.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm [2] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS0...
I even met people whose diet consisted mainly of expired food. They had to fish it out of dumpsters, which wasn't nice. But they had free food!
(I have, with some shorter suggestions.)
Median is the appropriate statistic for such cases.
It's fine if you want to focus on median wages, but at the same time you need to compare against the median worker's economic output- not aggregate productivity. Otherwise you're just comparing apples to oranges.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOfK
Note the increasing spread between GDP/household and median income. That's the US's entire socioeconomic problem--from rising consumer debt levels, rising deaths of despair, and the rise of reactionary politics--shown in one chart. The median person is falling behind.
>The wage distribution is right-skewed; the majority of people earn less than the average wage. For an alternative measure, the median household income uses median instead of average.
Unfortunately I'm having a hard time finding the median number of annual hours worked. But using the average hours worked, that puts the median worker at $20/hr.
Obviously not perfect unless we can get the median hours worked.
Also, like other commenters have said, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the bulk of productivity gains will go equally to the minimum wage as the median wage, since the latter is usually pretty low leverage work in general.
Even then, the median annual wage divided by the median annual number of hours worked won't necessarily be equal to the median hourly wage.
Interesting to see how those numbers aren’t as drastically different from my country as I’d assumed.