Wage Growth Did Not Plummet In February

You may have heard reports on Friday's jobs numbers saying that wage growth slowed sharply from January. It did not.

As I point out each time this becomes an issue, the data on hourly wage growth are highly erratic. This means the change from one month to the next is largely driven by errors in the data. Since errors do not tend to repeat in the same direction, a sharp uptick is likely to be followed by a sharp downtick and vice-versa. This pattern should be familiar to any economist or econo...