Are Americans Getting Richer or Poorer? (Eco's Journal Club #1)
Channel: Eco Gecko
Date: 2022-02-10

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If you're at all interested in politics, you've probably seen a graph of the divergence of worker productivity and wages, suggesting that for most people in the US, pay has stagnated since Reagan's presidency. But other sources, especially on the right, contest this, claiming that the last 40 years have been a period of unprecedent prosperity for Americans. So what's really going on? In this video, I dig into the latest academic literature on incomes in the US to figure out the truth of the matter. 

In Eco's Journal Clubs, we deep dive into recent, cutting-edge academic research on specific socio-economic topics to separate fact from fiction in an internet increasingly packed with overwhelming and contradictory information. I'm always open to suggested future topics--please let me know if there's something you'd like addressed.

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Introduction: 0:00
Part 1: What's happening? 2:10
Part 2: Why is it happening? 12:46
Conclusion: 23:21

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Sources used in this video:

Autor, Katz, & Kearney (2008). Trends in US wage inequality: Revising the revisionists.
Congressional Research Service (2020). Real wage trends, 1979 to 2019. 
Kristal & Cohen (2017). The causes of rising wage inequality: The race between institutions and technology.
Kristal, Cohen, & Navot (2020). Workplace compensation practices and the rise in benefit inequality.
Piketty, Saez, & Zucman (2018). Distributional national accounts: Methods and estimates for the United States.
Purcell (2018). Trends in men's wages, 1981-2014. 
Stansbury & Summers (2020). The declining worker power hypothesis: An explanation for the recent evolution of the American economy.
Taylor & Omer (2019). Race to the bottom: Low productivity, market power, and lagging wages. 

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