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A front-page New York Times article last week asserted that after accounting for

inflation the median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2% since 2003.

The article echoed concerns that while the well-off continue to

prosper, lower wage workers are losing out in the American economy.

Kata policy analyst Will Wilkinson disagrees with these claims.

Do you take issue with the claims made by Stephen Greenhouse and David Lianhart in New York Times?

Well yeah I do.

I take issue with a whole article in fact partly because I think it's just

substandard economics journalism and they have a special responsibility to

present economic news as clearly as possible to the reading public this was a

page one above the fold article with a prominent

headline, real wages fail to match rise in productivity and they give it a very heavy political

significance. But the article is simply misleading.

The numbers that they look at at the beginning of the article, which is the part that people

read, is for money compensation to workers in isolation from their benefits but total

compensation their money wages plus benefits is the relevant measure. In a blog post

at Cafe Hayek George Mason economist Russ Roberts directs us to a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph Mr.

George Mason, economist Russ Roberts directs us to a Bureau of Labor Statistics graph

that shows that real hourly compensation, that's wages and benefits

...