Oh dear! I'm afraid this
bit of research from the Pew Research Centre, telling us that for most people
there has been stagnation in the past 50 years, because "real wages have
barely budged for decades", is wide of the mark. It was written by
someone who sees a very incomplete picture. We see this kind of absurd claim
made time and time again, but it's facile, not so much in the speck of truth it
asserts, but in the plank of truths it omits.
It is too lightweight an analysis
to forget just how our earnings are linked to the substantial changes in the
quality of life we've seen over the past five decades. The number of hours it
would have taken to acquire many of today's basic luxuries 50 years ago far
exceeds that of today. Equally, there are countless luxuries available today
that weren't available to people 50 years ago, not to mention increased
knowledge and connectivity, scientific and medical capabilities, amount of
leisure time and increased life expectancy.
To use but one example by
way of illustration - consider the Smartphone you own, and on which you may
even be reading this blog post. Depending on how much you earn, it probably
costs you at most one, two or three hours' wages per month. Now try to imagine
how many hours' wages it would have cost you 50 years ago to enjoy even some of
the benefits your Smartphone brings to your life - you could have worked for a
year in 1966 and not acquired even a third of all the things you could acquire
at the touch of a button while waiting at the bus stop for your ride home.
Even putting aside the
immeasurable increase in convenience to your life that the instant phone calls,
texts, camera and video-camera, music, movies, flashlight, calculator and
sat-nav provide, imagine how many people and hours it would take to get you information
on the nearest Thai restaurant, tomorrow's weather in London, the price of
mattresses cost in John Lewis, whether it's currently safe to travel to
Tunisia, and the countless other things you may like to know. And all that's
nothing compared with the thousands of lorries that would be required to
transport all the books, magazines and newspapers' worth of information
available to you on your Smartphone.
Further, ask yourself
questions like, would you rather live in a 1966 apartment or a 2016 one? Would you
rather drive in a 1966 car or a 2016 one? Would you rather make Sunday lunch in
a 1966 kitchen or a 2016 one? Would you rather be treated for cancer with the
medical technology of a 1966 hospital or a 2016 one? To those questions, and
many more like them, you would always choose the 2016 option.
The upshot is, only a very
sub-standard enquirer looks to compare real incomes over several decades and
tries to insinuate that we've been stagnating. Pick a dozen goods from a catalogue
in 1966 and do the same with a catalogue in 2016 and, as well as the improved
quality, figure out how long you would have to work to purchase those dozen
items in respective years. The answer will be, longer in 1966. And that, along
with the things aforementioned, is what constitutes the improvement, and blows
the idea of 'stagnation' out the water.
One final hypothetical,
purely for the fun of it: Who would be more astonished: Isaac Newton being
shown the technology of Roger Penrose in 1966, or Roger Penrose in 1966 being
shown the technology of Roger Penrose in 2016? It's probably a closer call than
you might initially imagine.
