Ben Glasner
@benglasner
Senior economist with the Economic Innovation Group. Ex-post-doc with the Center on Poverty & Social Policy (CPSP). Ex-Ex-Grad Student at the Evans School (UW). All good posts are from my dog. Links:
Women at 35, in 2025 dollars. With a degree: $56,854 → $72,757 Without: $28,814 → $36,158 Up on both sides, and by more than men, while still lower than men in terms of $ levels.
Split the men at 35, in 2025 dollars. With a degree: $88,137 → $99,814 Without: $53,727 → $52,473 But ... ~20% of Boomer men had a degree at 35 and ~40% of Millennials did. The lines are not actually the same "group" and we shouldn't conflate based on easy coded labels.
US wage earners at 35, in 2025 dollars: Boomer $46,023 → Millennial $60,630. Obviously the workforce has changed and expectations around quality of life changed with it. A median, 40 years apart, is not in fact the same mix of people. What about men and women by education?
Academics/researchers/anyone really. If you haven't updated your personal site in a while it just keeps getting easier. A few minutes for integrated GitHub, refresh publications/citations automatically, and animated scroll wheel. bnglasner.github.io
Meanwhile prices rose 3.5% through June and have outpaced pay every month since April. It will be interesting to see what we find when the next round of price data comes out...
A frozen job market means no outside offers, limited bargaining, and low leverage. When the tight labor market disappears, so does the wage growth. Average hourly earnings rose just 3.2% over the past year — the weakest reading since May 2021.
Where did the drop come from? Not private employers, they added 30,000 in July (still an under performance). Government payrolls drove the decline, local government education declined by 50,000 in July.
The revisions did more damage to the story than the print itself. BLS cut May's gain 66,000 and June's 37,000. About four and a half times July's own −23,000 decline. It is worth caution on the read since a single-month move is noisy, but still worth thinking on.
July payrolls fell 23,000, so it might be a good time to reevaluate the hiring pickup narrative. The three-month average is now just 20,000, against a pre-pandemic normal near 177,000.
Well, if we are rehashing the election, friendly reminder that the biggest declines in vote shares for Harris took place in the most expensive and most populous counties. The drop was a huge break from the trend line.
what if 2024 income (via 2025 CPS ASEC) was kept at the 1969's household mix? Median household income would look about $22,000 higher. That is huge. It is equivalent to ~75 percent of the actual real gain since 1969.
Are your single friends making us "poorer"? Obviously not, but the way we count household income means more one-person households *can* look poorer than a world with more married couples even if no single person earns a dollar less.
The CPI-U is up 0.5 percent (seasonally adjusted) after rising 0.6 percent last month. Year-over-year the all items index increased 4.2 percent before seasonal adjustment. Not a good look compared to wages (AHE)
California's jobs grew 3.4 percent. Take out healthcare and social assistance, and the rest of the state economy actually declined by 0.3 percent. One in six California jobs is in healthcare. The question is what holds up the job market in California when the money pulls back.
Where you work shouldn't bar you from being able to invest in your own retirement. We need to expand retirement access so that everyone can save for the future. #Retirement #CSPAN #RetirementSavings
Same image. Same quality. Totally different value. AI’s not likely to replace the human touch. #AI #Economics #technology #ArtFraud
Automation perfected recording and replaying music, but people still pay for the humans anyway. #AI #FutureOfWork #Economics #Jobs
Check out my upcoming appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss Pres. Trump's proposal to create private-sector retirement accounts.
Today we launched our OZ housing and affordability initiative. Remember, we CAN build and we NEED to build. Let’s take the steps to make it happen.
Workers want us to tackle affordability - lowering costs and making home ownership achievable. What didn’t they want? Raising tariffs. www.instagram.com/reel/DUYZeRq...
Yale making tuition free for families under $200k has sparked the inevitable take: “$200k is the poverty line now.” In 2024, only 16% of U.S. households earned $200,000 or more. Calling the other 84% “in poverty” is nonsense.
It isn’t the bottom specifically, given the distortion by assigning 0s, but the median for prim age with $0 assigned wage would capture some of that employment effect.
Black unemployment has risen rapidly since “Liberation Day,” up 31.7%, from 6.3% to 8.3% as of November. Compared to usual flows/changes, we are well outside the norm and in some concerning company... Source: fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14...
Involuntary part-time work is surging. From September to November 2025, the share of employed workers working part-time for economic reasons rose about 20%. In the raw data, that is 2.741% to 3.352% of employment, and 4.579M to 5.488M workers. Full analysis here: t.co/kAcnPMQp0O
Who are the “missing” manufacturing workers? About 29% of the gap comes from motor vehicles & parts, where worker surveys show employment near historic highs while business data say it’s just around its long-run average. Think R&D, logistics, HQ staff, and “factoryless” firms.
Manufacturing is an outlier. In most sectors, worker surveys show fewer jobs than business data. But in manufacturing, ACS employment is 22.7% higher than BDS even though ACS counts 13.1% fewer private nonfarm jobs overall. That should absolutely raise a flag about measurement.
Business “establishment” data (like the BDS) say there are about 12.3M manufacturing jobs. The ACS says ~15.1M. That’s a gap of 2.8M jobs.