Hidden wages.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Wages and salaries, and productivity research - Brief article

In September a front-page New York Times story reported that while productivity is up, workers aren't getting their fair share of the gains: The real median hourly wage is down 2 percent since 2003, and wages and salaries now make up the smallest share of 6DP since at least 1947. Meanwhile, corporate profits are at their highest point since the 1960s.

Sounds bad--but the Times may have given its readers a distorted picture. As George Mason University economists Donald Boudreaux and Russell Roberts point out, there are several problems with the paper's interpretation of the data. For one thing, it picked an odd year to start with: The recession ended in November 2001, but the Times analysis begins in 2003. Furthermore...