Talkin’ ’bout long-term stagnation

Politics is often a messy squiggle, but this morning’s Resolution Foundation event did much to reduce it to a binary choice. Do we follow the US into a decades-long stagnancy around low-to-middle-income earners? Or do we not? James Plunkett explained the basic dilemma on Coffee House earlier, but more was said by a group of panellists which included Jared Bernstein, Martin Wolf, Steve Machin and Lane Kenworthy. Here, for the saddest CoffeeHousers, are eight points that I’ve distilled from my notes. This is more reportage than opinion, but I thought you might care to applaud or eviscerate some of the arguments that were put forward:

1) The UK triumphant. Or not quite — but at least we’ve outpaced the US on most measures of income growth for low-to-middle earners. Courtesy of the Resolution Foundation’s Gavin Kelly, here is a chart which shows how median pay has moved in line with GDP growth across various economic cycles: 

In other words, British middle-class types have benefited more from recent economic growth, in terms of pay, than their American counterparts.