I find all the hubbub over "Don Boudreaux's time machine" to be rather baffling. Boudreaux is a libertarian economics professor who, tired of hearing that middle class wages are stagnating, came up with a clever thought experiment to silence the ungrateful curs. "Would you rather live in 1967 on $46,000 a year (the 2004 median), or in 2004 on $35,000 (the 1967 median)?" (all figures in 2005 dollars) Seems rather pedestrian to me -- technology good! But the right's gushing over it in the sort of lavish tone better suited to movie posters. "By far the best thought experiment of the Summer!" "If you engage in only one obtuse hypothetical this year, make it Boudreaux's!"
As it turns out, when progressives worry about wage stagnation, we're not really ready to sacrifice 40 years of technological advance to gain a couple thousand bucks. Hopefully, we'll just slink back to our 21st century habitation pods, enter our automatic garages, get in our fuel-efficient automobiles, roll up our electric windows, turn on our microchip-aided ignition, and realize it's tough to kill ourselves in a low-emission car. That'll show us.
Only...something about Boudreaux's experiment seems, I don't know, odd. It's not entirely clear why technological advance enters this picture. Indeed, it would seem that if the American worker had made more money, they'd even be able to buy more cool technology, allowing them to further enjoy 2006's fruits. So here's a counter-thought experiment. Call it Klein's Anti-Stagnation Device. Let's imagine two worlds, one in which you live in 2004 on the median salary of $46,000 a year, and the other in which you live in 2006, but median wages had kept pace with productivity post-1973 (as they did between 1947 and 1973) and you make this world's median salary: $60,000.
Which would you prefer?
That's the point. Boudreaux's argument that technology has improved our lives is indisputably true (I would rather make my lowly salary in the age of the internet than cash it in in the age of the telegram), but it's really neither here nor there so far as concerns over middle class wage stagnation go. The question isn't now or then, but now or better now.
