The great U-turn revisited: economic restructuring, jobs, and the redistribution of earnings

Abstract

The author's principal position is that despite the prolific number of jobs generated in the US, real wages have stagnated and income inequality has risen markedly since 1973. He provides analyses indicating that wage stagnation and growing inequality have been invariant to upswings in the business cycle and demographic shifts in the labor force. Drawing on his own research and that of others he argues that deindustrialization, declining unionization, and the minimum wage freeze have combined to disadvantage the American worker. He also shows that industrial restructuring has increased the degree of wage dispersion by dramatically increasing the returns to higher education while reducing income returns to those who complete only a secondary school education or less. There are comments on the article by T.J. Plewes, pp 39-43. -from Editor