True but the alternative from Boskin is hardly unbiased. It's super controversial precisely because it's believed to understate inflation. Also, at least part of the modelling seems to be based on difficult-to-verify guesstimations. By comparison the CPI is measured using an internationally agreed-on standard and is not the result of a presidential working group looking for ways to reduce government spending on welfare.
Yea I guess NBER, The Economist, Treasury, etc. are all after the same thing.
Or, in reality, it's not controversial, you just disagree with it because it comes to conclusions you don't like.
Just Google 'Does CPI overstate inflation'. It's not controversial in the slightest.
That's precisely the point. Individual real wages aren't growing
Umm yes they are that's the entire point. If you divide 100,000 by 3 and 100,000 by 2 the people in the second group clearly have more. I'm not sure how much simpler I can make it.
but one way to make it seem like they are is to focus on households and then to exclude an increasingly larger cross-section of the population. The stagnation, as pointed out by Elaugaufein, is hidden because women's participation and earnings are up -- so dual income households seem like they're better off.
The stagnation is hidden because it doesn't exist. What you've written here doesn't even make sense.
Because it's irrelevant. If you're arguing wages then exclude it, if you're arguing total income from all sources then include it.
My claim was that real wages have not improved. Which is true. Inequality in the US is also
way up; the middle class is shrinking and more wealth than ever is being distributed to fewer and fewer people.
The middle class is shrinking because people are joining the upper class.
http://static.seattletimes.com/wp-c...a7e8-a9e8-11e5-8ccb-07e94f98c393-1020x825.jpg
Some are worse off but the majority are better off.
To recap then: extreme neoliberalism ideology is a dud and you need look no further for evidence of that than the changes in economic circumstances of ordinary Americans over the last 40 years. It's bullshit. I'll take Australia's "welfare state" any day.
Australia is actually one of the best example's of 'neo-liberalism' of any state, having followed it for more than three decades now. The only nation-states to have outperformed us are Hong Kong and Singapore, the two that took neo-liberal reforms to the most extreme.
If you want another example look at Chile, the only state in South America to have made real gains on the developed world. Guess what ideology was responsible for that?
