I was thinking through Robert Reich's proposal to mandate that countries who want to trade with us set a minimum wage of half their median wage, and I ended up digging into some median wage statistics* domestically. For those fuzzy on the terms here, median means, essentially, in the middle. If I make $6, and Matt makes $7, and Tom Friedman makes $150, the median wage is $7. The mean is the average, so in this example, it would be $54.33. If we outsource Tom's job to a bright Bangladeshi making $1, my wage is now the median, and the mean is $4.66.
America's mean wage in 2005 was $35,448.93. That's the number you generally hear quoted. Its median, however, was $23,962.20. And if you want another example of rising inequality, in 1990, the median was 71% of the mean. In 2005, it was 67%. Indeed, over the same time period, the mean wage increased by 75%. The median only increased by 65%.
*This is why I'm fun at parties.
Also at Tapped.
