People who quote statistics should understand them - discuss

We are told this:

Over a decade ago, the answer to increasing earnings might have been to work more hours or train for a better-paid job, but these days work no longer pays. Workers in the UK are £11,000 a year worse off after 15 years of wage stagnation.

It’s not just that it’s a non sequiter - whether work pays or not is a function of the returns to not working, not to some mythic standard - nor that it’s logically invalid. After all, wage stagnation would not mean a fall in wages, it would mean not a rise in them. What does matter is that it’s simply not true. Even though The Guardian says so:

Workers in the UK are £11,000 worse off a year after 15 years of “almost completely unprecedented” wage stagnation that signals a failure of recent economic policy, according to the Resolution Foundation.

No, that’s not what they did say. Rather, they said that if wages had carried on going up as they had done in the boom then wages would be higher now by £11,000. Nobody - well, OK, this writer at The G, The G itself are but they’re wrong - not even the Resolution Foundation, are stating that British workers are worse off. They’re just not as well off as if some trend had continued. After all, if real wages had continued to grow at the 3.7% rate of March 2015 (YonY) then we’d all be squiddledepop richer. And?

We can even back test the original claim. In 2008 average (from median to mean) wages were in the £20,000 to £25k range. If that had fallen by £11k then real living standards would have declined by 50%. Which, despite whines and whinges, really has not happened.

Just a little hint, those who do not understand an economic claim or statistic - even those who have trouble with numbers - should not try to misuse an economic number or statistic to bolster an argument.

Of course, it’s also logically possible that this is intentional, an attempt at misinformation. But that would be naughty and no one would do that, would they?