alt Hacker NewsAverage weekly and hourly earnings were up in May [1], though “real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [2].
Nominal wages being up rejects the hypothesis that folks are being downsized into lower-paying roles.
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The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.
In absolute terms AI is nibbling on a fairly small slice of the global pie of jobs - junior coders, lawyers, accountants, bankers.
The average person earns an average salary doing something very different to the stuff we on HN stress about.
be careful with "real" hourly earnings. if they're using the CPI then it can be very misleading. One need only compare nominal wages vs nominal rents per square foot for the last 50 years to see that actual wages have dropped by 30% and yet the "real" hourly average wage calculated via the CPI is flat, falsly implying that actual wages have not dropped.
It's quite frustrating that they track average rather than median wages. As wealth inequality increases, average will be less and less representative of worker health.