The stagnant male wage

There's a brief post at The Atlantic which provides graphs on the stagnant male wage in the U.S. The key graph is this one:

You can see that median annual earnings for men have fallen since a peak was reached in about 1970.

Falling male income

How are American men faring in the workforce? Not well at all. Real wages have stagnated for some decades and fewer men are in paid employment. And that has created some truly extraordinary statistics.

The median level of income for men has declined dramatically over the past four decades (the median being the wages of the man who is exactly in the middle of the income distribution). The following statistics measure the median income level of all men, whether they are in employment or not:

the median man whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma had his earnings fall by 47 percent in the last four decades.

Workers who didn’t even graduate from high school had a median income decline of 66 percent, largely because so many of these high school dropouts subsequently dropped out of the labor force, too, once they saw what job opportunities awaited them.

Even those men with college degrees are not generating the same levels of income. The median income for such men has fallen by 12% since 1969.

These are amazing statistics. True, the situation for men who are in full-time employment is not as bad - most men have had their wages stagnate over the past four decades, and men with university degrees have seen small improvements.

But all those men who successfully get to the end of high school are now generating only half the income that a similar group of men did in 1969. Half! No wonder family outcomes are falling away amongst that group of men.

Note too that GDP per capita has more than doubled in the US over the past 40 years. So there has been a doubling of output per capita, but the median income for men with high school degrees has halved.

And what if we exclude all those men who aren't participating in the workforce? The figures are still bad. The median wage for full-time male workers with a high school diploma has fallen 28% and without a diploma 36%.

Here's a chart showing what's happened to median earnings regardless of educational outcomes:

You can see that median earnings rose for full-time male workers until 1973, but have fallen since then. The median earnings for all men also hit a peak in 1973 but plummeted after 1978.

What happened to the male wage in 1987?

The above chart comes from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1997. It shows the turning point for men's wages in the United States (you can click on the chart to enlarge it).

If you were a man aged 25 to 34 in 1967, things might have seemed pretty good in terms of wages. The median wage was nearly twice as high compared to your father's generation.

If you were a man aged 25 to 34 in 1977 things were still OK. The median wage for men had barely grown for ten years, but you were still doing appreciably better than your father had done at your age.

But for men aged 25 to 34 in 1987 things weren't so good. The median wage for men had fallen by this time and was actually lower than what the father's generation had earned.

And by 1997 the gap had continued to open up. Now young men were doing appreciably worse than their father's generation.

So if you're an American man and you think that your father may have had it a bit better than you when it came to supporting a family, you might well be right. The days of each generation of men being better off appear to have finished back in 1987.

(Source: here p.29 of PDF, p.19 of document)