So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 48) Why wages aren't rising

Happy Monday (for you insomniacs on the West Coast) or Tuesday (for the rest of you). Since November 11 is Veteran's Day this year, I'd like to share the three poems that always spring to mind on this occasion: Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen; Aftermath by Siegfried Sasson; and The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell.
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And now, for a clumsy tonal shift: I'm closing the voting on what manner of holiday-related content I'll be including in the December issues of So What, Who Cares? and the pop culture votes took it in a landslide. The good news: there is a lot of excellent holiday-related pop culture out there to appropriate for your own Yule traditions. The bad news: I have an unfortunate weakness for Hallmark holiday movies and the channel has already made my season merry with The Nine Lives of Christmas, so brace yourself for an exegesis on the made-for-TV holiday movie genre. It is coming.

Here is what not coming: two issues of the newsletter this week. Look for So What, Who Cares? to return to your inboxes on Thursday night/Friday morning and Friday night/Saturday morning.

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One of the questions baffling economists: As the U.S. labor market approaches full employment and the economy shows indications of being "healthy" (i.e. productivity indicators), why aren't wages rising? There are three possible answers to the question.

The first is that the areas of major job growth are also the areas with the lowest wages, i.e. service industry jobs.

The second is that the statistics for unemployment are not reliable because they leave out part-time workers, many of whom would like to be full-timers, and so we can't really look at the unemployment rate in the U.S. as low because it does not include the underemployed.

The third explanation, which builds on the other two:

Globalization and technology is allowing corporations to expand productivity, which shows up in earnings reports and stock prices and other metrics that analysts typically associate with a healthy economy. But globalization and technology don't always show up in U.S. wage growth because they often represent alternatives to U.S.-based jobs.

So what? Handy reminder: Wages have been virtually flat for a decade (vol 1, issue 37). Knowing why they're flat may be useful in determining things like "Who is likely to challenge this current state of affairs?"

Who cares? This is yet another indicator that a big political issue for 2016 is going to be wage growth and/or a minimum guaranteed working wage in the U.S. Remember that we've already seen a thriving grassroots movement among fast-food workers for living wages (vol 1, issue 24) and last week, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota all approved a hike in the state's minimum wage. How Americans are compensated for their work is about to break big across all sorts of news outlets.

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People are less likely to believe something is a problem if they don't like the proposed solution to the problem. Or so say Troy Campbell and Aaron Kay of Duke University, who theorize that people's tendencies to form their beliefs based mostly on what makes them feel safest -- i.e. we are not motivated by cold hard truth but warm fuzzy feelings -- means that they are prone to deny the scope of a problem if the solution runs counter to their beliefs.

Campbell and Kay ran experiments to confirm that this was not a "conservative brains work like this while liberal brains work like that"-type thing, and discovered that conservatives downplay the idea of climate change if the solution proposed included "government regulations" while liberals had no truck with any concern home invasions if the proposed solution included "less gun regulation."

So what? This news is one tiny piece of evidence contra the news on how conservatives and liberals have biologically different brains, because the news here is that no matter what your political leanings, you are going to plug your ears and chant "La la la la la" if the problem-solution dyad challenges your beliefs. It also adds supporting evidence to the observation that we, as a species, take a "don't confuse me with the facts!" approach to the issues of the day:

In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Who cares? Don't make me use the "The More You Know" graphic again -- if you can identify "solution aversion," then you find ways to subvert it. Remember: A lot of our behavior is rooted in negotiating the gap between our hard-wired biological traits and conscious behavioral choices (vol 1, issue 46).

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Your pop culture note of the day: I hated Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree as a child. Every once in a while, some well-meaning church volunteer would have us read it in CCD, and every time we did, the only thing I took away from the experience was a burning desire to even up the relationship by turning "the boy" into fertilizer for the tree's roots.

So I really enjoyed this New Yorker piece on "The Giving Tree at Fifty," which includes Silverstein's own words about the book: “It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.”

Because the book is 50 this year, there have been a lot of people talking about what The Giving Tree is about and what it all means. My favorite takes came from Anna Holmes and Rivka Galchen. Also, if you would like to see The Giving Tree reimagined as a horror story, read Mallory Ortberg's take.

Are there any classics of children's literature that you're still fuming over several years after the fact? Share them via email or Twitter. I would love to find out which cherished children's classics make you seethe.

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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "I remember there was an issue with a Philip Seymour Hoffbrau joke, but when ...?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was September 24, 2014, btw.)

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.