Demographics are driving wages lower, which is negative for investment returns
So now the question is this: when will wage growth resume its upward path? A lot of research into this question has been focused on productivity. But the Federal Reserve of New York has just released some research that points to demographics as a defining issue. They write that across the US economy, all segments of the population “display rapid real wage growth early in a worker’s career, with positive real wage growth ending when the worker is in his/her forties. This is followed by a period of either flat (high school graduates or less) to declining real wages (some college or more). By age 55, all education categories are, on average, experiencing negative real wage growth.” . . . We have shown that U.S. real wage growth has been slowing down over the past thirty-five years with the aging of our workforce. Abstracting from cyclical factors impacting the labor market, this slowing is likely to continue in the years ahead as more individuals near retirement and experience negative real wage growth… Consequently, the aging of the U.S. population will continue to act as a headwind to labor productivity and wage growth.