Bad news! Food for thought! Mass illegal immigration is a good guess as it takes away large numbers of entry and difficult to fill jobs.
Then there is more intense competition going on with respect to international supply chains and foreign trade. Sourcing and buying cheap products from foreign countries has never been easier.
"A new economics paper puts its finger on something that American workers have felt for years, even though economists keep describing it too abstractly: it has become much harder to use one job as a springboard to a better one.
The paper is very good at establishing the decline of upward job mobility. But it misses the major causes: deindustrialization and [illegal] mass immigration.
The economists/authors seem to be dead wrong when they blame "noncompete agreements" for the wage stagnation! These noncompete agreements play most likely a rather minor role.
Let’s start with what they get right. For most workers, the biggest raises don’t come from annual reviews, cost-of-living adjustments, or even internal promotions. They come from getting a better [job] offer somewhere else. When those offers stop coming, wages stagnate even if the economy is still cranking out jobs. ..."
From the abstract:
"We quantify how structural changes in the U.S. labor market have contributed to wage stagnation over the past four decades by weakening the job ladder. Using Current Population Survey microdata from 1982–2023 and a partial-equilibrium job-ladder model, we estimate that employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a better-paying outside offer as they were in the 1980s. This decline is unlikely to reflect less efficient matching, weaker labor demand, or changes in workers' acceptance behavior.
Instead, cross-state variation is consistent with rising employer concentration and the growing use of noncompete agreements having curtailed opportunities for job shopping. In a general equilibrium version of the model, we find that these changes have reduced annual real wage growth by 0.68 percentage points—roughly one-third of the post-1980 slowdown—with about two-thirds of the effect operating through equilibrium wage setting rather than mechanical reallocation."
Breitbart Business Digest
