Any rise in wages SD enjoyed between 2002 and 2008 was fake, total BS. Housewives were pulling down $100k taking orders from house buyers. Brokers were making a killing making expensive loans to any one who could fog a mirror, etc.
SD went from wages falling after the fake Dot Com bubble burst to another fake up-tick with more flash-in-the-pan bubble jobs.
Looking thru those rose colored glasses, can you see another bubble on the horizon that will keep SD wages from falling for years to come?
“During this entire economic cycle since 2000, working people here in San Diego have not made any significantprogress in earnings,” said Murtaza Baxamusa, research and policy director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a local think tank on labor issues.
“With inflation much higher in 2008, it’s going to be downhill from here. Families are facing a tougher struggle to get by.”San Diego’s median income dropped sharply in 2002 after the high-tech boom stalled; rebounded from 2004 through 2006, coinciding with the rise of the housing bubble; but then stalled in 2007 after the realestate market peaked”
The bubble areas had the bubble wages to temporarily boost the wage figures. The non-bubble areas got their asses kicked.
Your wage figures are a bubble anomaly not real wages. [/quote]
Really? My income has more than doubled during that timeframe, and I assure you, I’ve never done anything to make money with real estate. And I was one of the ones that was laid off during the dot com bust.
I can tell you that is true of most engineering positions – the salary paid out now for a given pay grade is significantly higher than it was in 2000 for the same pay grade. I know – I’m involved in hiring engineers now, and their starting pay fresh out of school right now is roughly the same as what I was being paid in 2000 as a mid level engineer (and WAY above my starting salary when I was a junior engineer).
Other industries? Probably not as good. Is SOME of that 30% appreciation over 8 years due to the bubble? Almost certainly – as you point out, there were a lot of people in industries directly related to that bubble who were making a lot of money specifically due to that bubble who are no doubt going to see that income disappear or at least reduce quite a bit.
But enough to account for all of that income appreciation? Not hardly. San Diego may have had a lot of realtors, appraisers, loan officers, construction workers, etc during the bubble, but there are also loads of highly paid jobs in San Diego that have nothing to do with real estate like engineers and biotech workers. You also have a substantial military presence, who have also gotten some decent raises over the years.
Please bear in mind, when an economist says things like:
“During this entire economic cycle since 2000, working people here in San Diego have not made any significantprogress in earnings”
they are talking about inflation adjusted earnings, which as you pointed out above, using national inflation data, was roughly 20% over the time period we’re talking about. They are not talking about nominal wages.
