On Wage growth — three graphs

Here, for your Thursday morning contemplation, are three graphs from the bls.gov site.

The first of these, median weekly earnings, in constant (1982-1984) dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), for full-time workers, both hourly and salaried.

Not great — wages dropped precipitously at the end of the Carter administration, recovered during Reagan’s term, dropped again with the early 90s recession and climbed with the dot-com boom, finally reaching their earlier levels only to drop again with the current recession.

But look at this (sorry, I’m having trouble getting the graphs to align):

A nice, steady progression, with admittedly some leveling off starting in 2003.

That’s women’s earnings (median full-time, constant dollar) in the same period.

And, if you haven’t already figured it out, that means that men’s earnings don’t tell the same nice tale, and, in fact, is downright depressing:

For another view on men’s earnings, here’s a graphic that goes back more years than the BLS data:

What do you make of this?  Does that mean that earnings is a zero-sum game and men have lost because women have gained?  Or is it more complex than that?

That’s the question for the day.  (And now I have to start my usual workday, so, for the moment, this is just food for thought.)

Here, to finish off, is the source of the graphs — I can’t just add a URL because it requires going through a search routine on the bls site: