Lately the old-timers here at Cato’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives — which is to say, Jim Dorn and I — have been talking a lot about the Phillips Curve, which seems to be playing a part in monetary policy discussions today almost as big as the one it played in the 1970s. And you can bet that, because both Jim and I actually remember what happened in the 70s, and afterwards, neither of us has a good word to say about the concept, except as a very reduced-form means for describing very transient relationships.
Because Jim has a CMFA Policy Briefing on Phillips Curve reasoning in the works, I won’t belabor here his — and my — general objections to it. My main concern is to draw attention to a current example of that reasoning at work, in the shape of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jared Bernstein, entitled “Why Real Wages Still Aren’t Rising.”
Noting that, despite the low and still falling U.S. unemployment rate, real wage rates for workers in factories and the service industries have been stagnant for several years. Mr. Bernstein finds this stagnancy puzzling: According to the BLS, he writes, as of this June money “wages” (presumably meaning hourly wage rates) grew at an annual rate of 2.7 percent, whereas “looking at the historical link between wages and unemployment, wage growth should have been rising about a percentage point faster.” The “historical link” to which Mr. Bernstein refers is based partly on the Phillips Curve — a negative relation between the unemployment rate on one hand and the rate of either nominal “wage” or price inflation on the other — and partly on the historical tendency for the rate of nominal wage inflation to exceed that of price inflation. In the present instance, prices have failed to rise as rapidly as the decline in unemployment suggests they should, while wages — factory workers’ wages especially — have been rising still less rapidly.