Matt Yglesias catches the press confusing real and nominal wages in their Kerry bashing:
Damn those lying, pessimistic Democrats. Except that as the Post had to concede yesterday, Kerry’s actually right:
On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for suggesting that wages had fallen behind. We were wrong and Mr. Kerry was right: Hourly wages for non-supervisory workers rose 2.2 percent, while the consumer price index rose 3.1 percent.
So back to USA Today while “wages are picking up” nominally, real wages — called “real” because they’re the ones that matter — are actually going down, not “heading upward.”
Could someone please institute and require a bootcamp for journalists to cover basic statistics and economics principles? Not that I’m above a Statistics for Dummies class myself, but for those whose job it is to clarify policy and analyze our society, it especially doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Meanwhile, I’ve been having fun with the Economic History net, which contains not only a handy converter to constant US dollars, but also has an interesting Ask the Professor section, where your pressing economic history questions are answered.
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