The American Worker Project from EIG compares the U.S. worker of today against the U.S. worker of the past. My aim is to add a new dimension, comparing U.S. workers to their counterparts in the rest of the world.
Specifically, I look at the abundance of jobs in the U.S. and abroad, trends in wage growth, and the distribution of worker pay.
Jobs have been abundant in the United States and other advanced economies.
BWorkers in the United States have experienced dramatic events in recent years, ranging from the global Covid-19 pandemic to the enormous fiscal response to lockdowns and related threats to
Americans’ income security.
Price inflation and real wage declines returned across advanced economies for the first time in over a generation, triggered in the United States partly by the scale of fiscal stimulus.
Real wage levels, however, have held up far better for American workers than for European workers in recent years.1 The strong recovery in U.S. job creation pushed down the unemployment rate to below 4 percent for an unprecedented period of more than two years, and it has restored employment-to- population ratios to their pre-Covid ranges.
But at the same time, Figure 1 illustrates that in the United States the recovery in the employment-to- population ratio for the 15–64 year old working age population—arguably the most relevant metric for broad labor market health—actually lags behind the recoveries in the EU27 and Japan, even though the U.S. has outpaced them in GDP growth and enacted a much larger fiscal stimulus
