Real median wage growth highest in 15 years

The Atlanta Fed regularly publishes a measure of median nominal wage growth for several interesting demographics, but for some reason, they don’t publish any measure that is adjusted for inflation, so I created one using a running 2-month average of the Trimmed Mean PCE Inflation Rate.

As you can see, real median wage growth was stronger in November than it has been in 15 years. If this persists, Trump will preside over another golden age of growing wages like we had in the late 1990s. Voters who selected Trump because they wanted change may have been upset by low-low wage growth under Obama, but things are finally looking up recently.

This is a bad measure of overall wellbeing because the majority of Americans have a wage of zero dollars per hour because they don’t do market work. But everyone consumes market goods in order to live, so what we need to measure wellbeing is a measure of median consumption like MELI. During the recession a lot of low-wage workers were laid off which kept the median wage growth fairly steady until after the recession officially ended. Median consumption fell because of the large rise in unemployment.

This graph is just a measure of how well the labor market is performing to help the median worker.