I'm going to post a chart you've seen a million times before (the myth of wage stagnation)

[lumberjack_jeff]

50. Your first bolded text is a non sequitur.

nothing about the data you've provided indicates that wage growth prior to 1972 was limited to white men. What you have shown is that since 1972, women have entered the workforce, and in the face of declining wages for men, it is easy to infer that this was for economic survival reasons.

Luckily, I can provide the context you're trying to invent.



This is what has happened to men's wages in the last 50 years.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-struggles-of-men/?_r=0

Why don't white men vote for us? As this thread shows, we consider their problems to be social solutions.

And while we're on the topic of declining wages, how about this analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research?

The Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration

"The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally 'explains' about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less."

Almost everybody knows that in the past 40 years, the real wages and job prospects for low-skilled men, especially low-skilled minority workers, have fallen. And there is evidence -- although no consensus -- that a rising tide of immigration is partly to blame. Now, a new NBER study suggests that immigration has more far-reaching consequences than merely depressing wages and lowering employment rates of low-skilled African-American males: its effects also appear to push some would-be workers into crime and, later, into prison.

"Remarkably, as far as we know, no study has examined if there is a link between the resurgence of large-scale immigration and the employment and incarceration trends in the black population," co-authors George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson write in Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks (NBER Working Paper No.12518). The authors are careful to point out that even without increased immigration, most of the fall in employment and increase in jailed black men would have happened anyway. Nevertheless, the racially disproportionate effects of immigration on employment are striking.

Changing technology, government programs, and a stagnant real minimum wage have all been blamed for the poor labor market performance of low skilled and minority workers. Another key reason, the authors show, is immigration. Using census data from 1960-2000, the authors trace the evolution of wages, employment, and incarceration rates for particular skill groups in the black and white populations. They then relate the trends observed in these variables to the increases in immigration experienced by each skill group. The observed correlations suggest that immigration is an important underlying factor influencing the observed trends. In particular, their analysis finds that a 10 percent rise in immigrants in a particular skill group significantly trimmed the wages of black and white men alike. For African-Americans, the decline was 3.6 percent. For whites, it was actually slightly higher: 3.8 percent. Beyond that, however, the black-white experience differed markedly, especially for low-skilled workers. Take employment rates: from 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points -- from 88.6 percent to 55.7 percent -- the authors found in their analysis of census data from 1960 to 2000. The decrease for white high school dropouts was only roughly half that -- from 94.1 percent to 76.0 percent.

One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employment. For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points.