Clive Crooks apparently thought he stumbled on some new revelation when he read a piece by Robert Lawrence at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Lawrence showed that we look at the pattern in average wages, and use a net measure of productivity (rather than gross), and a common deflator for adjusted wages and output, real wages kept pace with productivity growth, at least until the Great Recession.

I suppose Lawrence deserves some sort of congratulations, it took him less than a decade to replicate our work. Of course progressive economists had long known that the story of wage stagnation was overwhelmingly a story of redistribution among workers, from factory workers and retail clerks, to doctors, bankers, and CEOs. For this reason, the fact that average compensation had kept pace with productivity was hardly news to any of us, but I suppose the fact that Robert Lawrence and his centrist colleagues are now discovering this fact may qualify as news.