Median incomes are not growing as fast as they should be. This is true. And it is a serious problem.

[cthulu2016]

31. Yes, the pressure from the artificial floor should decrease somewhat as you go up, but

not as much as it might seem it would.

Now, wages were flatter back when the minimum wage was stronger, but I think that was more about the very top. CEOs used to make 10 times what a workman on the line made, versus 1,000 times. (Rather than the effect being due to burger flippers and carpenters converging)

I think that if Job X paid twice the minimum wage (and nothing changed except the minimum wage) there will remain an attractor for it to pay twice the minimum wage... it got there the first time, after all.

The job is worth twice the value of a generic employee.

Bill James used to focus on "replacement level" in talking about baseball player salaries. There is a constant pool of decent fielding second basemen who would hit .180 in the majors, and can be had all day for the league minimum salary. A decent fielding second basemen who hits .280 is a very valuable player. So his huge salary is being paid only for 100 points of batting average. No matter what, there will be somebody out at second who can field the position okay... so the replacement level is subtracted from all players.

Every job above minimum wage has *something* about it that is beyond the "replacement level employee," and that gap (which remains just as wide) should have a real value.

(If one assumes markets don't work then non of that would apply, but they do. There is some reason beyond charity that carpenters make more than fry-cooks.)

Unions are, unfortunately, not the factor they were in the 1960s (when minimum wage kept pace pretty well), but you can bet that in a union negotiation in 1967, if bus drivers had been making 316% of minimum wage in 1965 their 1967 target was no less than that 316%. It is how we measure a wage, relatively.