Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute examines popular complaints about stagnating pay for American workers.

Doomers on the political left and right agree that economic growth has failed to translate into higher wages for American workers, with some claiming that pay has barely risen in 50 years. Such sentiments have been buttressed by flawed analyses that, comparing apples to oranges in a variety of ways, have found that the pay received by workers has not kept pace with productivity gains. …

… [W]orker pay has kept up with productivity growth. Whether the starting point is 1973, 1948, or 1929, aggregate pay is exactly where productivity growth would predict.

However, after keeping pace with productivity growth for 25 years, the pay of the median worker has lagged gains in productivity since the early 1970s. In part, this relative stagnation likely reflects a fanning out of worker productivity. …

… The slowdown in median pay also reflects the particularly slow growth in pay among men. For all but the highest-paid men, compensation has grown more slowly than it has for the lowest-paid women. Decelerated pay growth for men reflects the transition from a period in which men occupied a privileged place in the economy. First, being dominant in the high-productivity goods-producing sector through the mid-20th century, men saw their pay decelerate over time as employment shifted toward lower-productivity service-sector jobs. …

… Second, men benefited earlier in the century from median pay growth that exceeded productivity growth and remained elevated for decades. … Many working- and middle-class men received “breadwinner rents”—pay in excess of their marginal value to their employer—because of the widespread ideal that a husband should be able to support a family on one income, while mothers should not work. …

… Third, as the traditional male breadwinner role weakened, marriage declined. …

… The painful transition for men is largely behind us, and the median male worker has seen significant pay growth over the past 30 years. Policymakers should prioritize raising productivity growth and helping the children of working- and middle-class Americans obtain the skills and knowledge they need to exploit fully the economy’s strength.