Worker Shortages

Wolfers is one of the couple hate follows I allow myself on the twitter. He isn't bad, but he's sort of a caricature of the particular kind of stupid that only economists can be, though he lacks the psychopathic libertarianism that really completes that package.

An important puzzle right now is how to reconcile increasingly convincing anecdotes of rising wage pressure, with quite comprehensive data that barely see any evidence of it.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 4, 2018

Reporters love to write stories about businesses complaining about wage pressures and how they can't get highly skilled workers at $12/hour. Even though politically we think "rising wages" are good and that's why we need tax cuts (not that this makes sense), all economics reporting contains within in it the assumption that Actually, Rising Wages [for other people] Are Bad.

So every time someone asks for a raise, the New York Times dutifully writes up a complaint about how there's a "worker shortage." And these are your "anecdotes of rising wage pressure" (note this does not even mean anecdotes of rising wages!).