Playing With Numbers to Make Wage Growth Look Better

The average hourly wage has risen by 2.5 percent in the last year. We have that on pretty good data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's okay in a context of inflation around 1.7 percent (it translates into 0.8 percent real wage growth), but hardly great. It is not keeping pace with trend productivity growth and is not allowing much catch-up from the bad years in the Great Recession and the immediate aftermath. It also indicates no acceleration from the last two years in spite of unemploym...