If some misanthropic economic god wanted to put the American worker on a forever treadmill, he/she/it could not have perfected upon the work of the monetary central planners at the Fed.
We are referring here to the impossible odds that over a 47 year span, the cumulative rise of the CPI and the hourly rate of pay for U.S. production workers would come out virtually identical to the second decimal place.
Yet that’s exactly what happened: Between August 1971 and August 2018, the CPI-U rose by 3.95% per annum and the average production worker’s hourly wage grew by 3.96% per year.
Apart from the substance of the matter, that outcome surely gives spurious accuracy a whole new definition.
But the most remarkable thing about the chart below is not just that the average US worker has had a zero real wage increase during the past half century, but that our Keynesian monetary central planners think that the 521% cumulative rise in the hourly wage rate during that period isn’t any big deal.