Explaining Things Which Are Not There: The Weak Wage Growth Conundrum

The Wall Street Journal had a piece last week that purported to explain why wage growth remains weak. The explanation is that people are more reluctant to switch jobs than they had been in the past.

While this is a concern (I have often noted the surprisingly low quit rate, given an unemployment rate of less than 4.0 percent), real wage growth is roughly where we might expect given the extraordinarily low productivity growth of recent years. The real average hourly wage has risen a bit more than 1.1 pe...