>Heather Boushey made an assertion I found stunning (but which is almost
>certainly correct if her past carefulness is anything to go by) on Doug's
>show last Thursday: that from the late 80's to the late 90's, the wages of
>all workers in New York except for the top 10% fell.
>
>And she also said a bunch of other interesting things in the same vein.
>And I was wondering where she's written this stuff up. Is it in the URPE
>reader she just edited perhaps? Or posted up on the LBO website
>somewhere?
It ain't written up anywhere yet. Heather gave me a copy of some tables summarizing her findings, which I'm quoting in A New Economy? (now racing towards completion - reserve your copy today!). The real wage of the bottom half of NYC workers fell by about 20% between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. Only the top 10% was up - and that by just 2%. Heather didn't say this, but the real winners were the top 1-2%, who don't really show up in the Census/BLS Current Population Survey, which is what she based these stats on. She also reported that the share of the NYC workforce earning less than $10.73 an hour (in 1999 dollars) rose from 30% in the late 1980s to 42% in the late 1990s.
Doug