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Wages falling for young, educated adults
College students watch the jumbrotron during a basketball game in College Park, Md. Can young adults still look forward to the American Dream even as real wages keep falling?
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Bob Moon: Young Americans: you're underpaid. So concludes a new study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. For men and women between 23 and 29, the average income dropped between 7 and 11 percent in the past decade.
The head of EPI, Lawrence Mishel, joins us now. Welcome.
Lawrence Mishel: Thanks for having me.
Moon: Why is the income level going down for young people?
Mishel: Well, wages have had a very disappointing growth over the last ten years. And when wages are performing poorly, young workers really get it on the chin. People coming out of school -- either high school graduates or college graduates -- are earning less than their older brothers, sisters, cousins, did when they graduated a few years prior.
Moon: And can this come back?
Mishel: For high school graduates, the entry-level wages have been dropping for a very long time; and for young men, are now 25 percent what they were back in the late 1970s. For college graduates, they have done poorly over the last ten years, and I suspect they won't improve a great deal.
Moon: What does this mean for the economic future of the country? Is the American Dream just that -- a dream?
Mishel: What it means is that workers of every education level are not doing well, and their wages and full compensation with benefits is not keeping up with the overall growth of productivity. And that doesn't augur well for the economy, because we increased our consumption in the past based on the housing bubble, the stock bubble, and people going into debt.
We haven't been able to do that recently; we're not going to do that in the future. So we really have to have a wage regime where people are seeing their real wages improve if we're going to have a growing robust economy.
Moon: Lawrence Mishel, at the Economic Policy Institute. Thanks for your insights.
Mishel: Thank you.
first if you went to school i am sorry i went through the same thing 6 years of school two degrees and a lot of dept to pay no job im going to tell you all how to be happy if this happend to you. first turn off the video games the i phones the angry birds and any thing else you are distracting your self with get in your car sell everything you have and spend a month doing nothing but helping as many people that you can for free. I garantee you will find a job and you will be happy doing it. life is better the more human you are not how educated you are school at one time was a great thing now it has become way to get you in to the dept trap that mutch faster. we have global communication now info on tap why do we need school. I say we need groups of people that wont to solve problems conecting and educating them selfs in the fields they speculize in.
