The standards of modern journalism:
Wages in the United Kingdom grew 7.8% in the three months to June, the fastest annual rate since records began, the Office for National Statistics said Tuesday.
“Coupled with lower inflation, this means the position on people’s real pay is recovering,” said ONS director of economic statistics Darren Morgan.
UK consumer prices rose 7.9% in June compared with June 2022.
Sigh. If wages are rising slower than inflation then real wages are falling, not growing at all. Given that we have had real wage rises within living memory this also isn’t the fastest wages have grown since records began, either.
As to why wages aren’t growing as we’d hope and expect them to this is not, sadly, some aberration of macroeconomics and the fiscal stance. Instead it’s because the country is beclowned with people insisting that they’re creating jobs. With solar and boilers and wind mills and low traffic zones and ULEZs and all the rest.
All of these things - and many more - could be good things to do. We don’t think so but that’s us not some insistence of the universe. What is absolutely true though is that the benefits of these things, even by the definitions of those promoting them, are not in hard cash numbers. They’re in things we do not include in GDP, they’re about externalities to market prices and processes.
OK, but that means that the benefits of them do not arrive in wages, one of those hard cash numbers which are market prices. We’re deliberately spending our wealth and effort on things which even if they have benefits do not, by definition, benefit real wages. Because, by definition again, those externalities are not things that we spend our wages upon. Then people wonder why wages aren’t rising.
It’s not just journalism that gets wages wrong. Sadly, it’s the entire body politic. Everyone shouting that solar provides more jobs than nuclear - something which is both true and which many people do say - and therefore we must have more solar is pushing down labour productivity and thus all the wages in the entire country. That’s just the way reality works.