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Women at 35, in 2025 dollars. With a degree: $56,854 → $72,757 Without: $28,814 → $36,158 Up on both sides, and by more than men, while still lower than men in terms of $ levels.

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Split the men at 35, in 2025 dollars. With a degree: $88,137 → $99,814 Without: $53,727 → $52,473 But ... ~20% of Boomer men had a degree at 35 and ~40% of Millennials did. The lines are not actually the same "group" and we shouldn't conflate based on easy coded labels.

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US wage earners at 35, in 2025 dollars: Boomer $46,023 → Millennial $60,630. Obviously the workforce has changed and expectations around quality of life changed with it. A median, 40 years apart, is not in fact the same mix of people. What about men and women by education?

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Academics/researchers/anyone really. If you haven't updated your personal site in a while it just keeps getting easier. A few minutes for integrated GitHub, refresh publications/citations automatically, and animated scroll wheel. bnglasner.github.io

Meanwhile prices rose 3.5% through June and have outpaced pay every month since April. It will be interesting to see what we find when the next round of price data comes out...

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A frozen job market means no outside offers, limited bargaining, and low leverage. When the tight labor market disappears, so does the wage growth. Average hourly earnings rose just 3.2% over the past year — the weakest reading since May 2021.

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Where did the drop come from? Not private employers, they added 30,000 in July (still an under performance). Government payrolls drove the decline, local government education declined by 50,000 in July.

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The revisions did more damage to the story than the print itself. BLS cut May's gain 66,000 and June's 37,000. About four and a half times July's own −23,000 decline. It is worth caution on the read since a single-month move is noisy, but still worth thinking on.

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July payrolls fell 23,000, so it might be a good time to reevaluate the hiring pickup narrative. The three-month average is now just 20,000, against a pre-pandemic normal near 177,000.

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Well, if we are rehashing the election, friendly reminder that the biggest declines in vote shares for Harris took place in the most expensive and most populous counties. The drop was a huge break from the trend line.

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So, just keep the math clear that comparing "household income" across 55 years partly compares who lives together and not just how much they earn.

what if 2024 income (via 2025 CPS ASEC) was kept at the 1969's household mix? Median household income would look about $22,000 higher. That is huge. It is equivalent to ~75 percent of the actual real gain since 1969.

Household income is about who shares a home. In 1969, married-couple households were a far higher percent of all households. Over the same span, one-person households rose. So if the typical American household got smaller, that will likely mechanically "lower" household income.

Are your single friends making us "poorer"? Obviously not, but the way we count household income means more one-person households *can* look poorer than a world with more married couples even if no single person earns a dollar less.

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

The CPI-U is up 0.5 percent (seasonally adjusted) after rising 0.6 percent last month. Year-over-year the all items index increased 4.2 percent before seasonal adjustment. Not a good look compared to wages (AHE)

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

California's jobs grew 3.4 percent. Take out healthcare and social assistance, and the rest of the state economy actually declined by 0.3 percent. One in six California jobs is in healthcare. The question is what holds up the job market in California when the money pulls back.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

The EO creates a TSP-like option for uncovered workers and supports the newly eligible workers with improved savings. It is just a first step though. Legislation needs to follow!

agglomerations.eig.org

Fixing the U.S. Retirement System: A Q&A

The Trump administration’s new policy is a first step in the right direction.

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Trump's new EO is a real step toward fixing the U.S. retirement system. We spend hundreds of billions a year in tax breaks to fund retirement savings and the top 20% of households capture more than 60%. 54 million private-sector workers, nearly half, have no plan at work.

whitehouse.gov

Promoting Retirement-Savings Access for American Workers by Establishing TrumpIRA.gov

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to ensure that every American worker has

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Seeing people who dismissed real wage gains in government data now eager to cite the same data showing declines. Tight labor markets drove gains, but that got waved off to preserve a stagnation story. Keep it simple: when wages rise, that’s good; when they fall, that’s bad.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Where you work shouldn't bar you from being able to invest in your own retirement. We need to expand retirement access so that everyone can save for the future. #Retirement #CSPAN #RetirementSavings

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Same image. Same quality. Totally different value. AI’s not likely to replace the human touch. #AI #Economics #technology #ArtFraud

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Automation perfected recording and replaying music, but people still pay for the humans anyway. #AI #FutureOfWork #Economics #Jobs

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Yeah, the generation by age by outcome figures have a mixture of issues around smoothing across time and age, especially with differing year effects. Been a big topic of discussion among my team on how best to address it while still capturing an accessible visual

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Check out my upcoming appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss Pres. Trump's proposal to create private-sector retirement accounts.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

High-skilled immigration reform is overdue.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Ignore inputs at your own risk!

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

We train talent, then lose it. That is a (bad) policy choice.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

Five years from now token limit windows will have absolutely destroyed white collar commuting patterns. Hell, even weekend work schedules are going to be impacted. Reflections from a long weekend of playing with Codex and Claude code

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Today we launched our OZ housing and affordability initiative. Remember, we CAN build and we NEED to build. Let’s take the steps to make it happen.

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The U.S. Retirement System: Fast Facts

Latest data & fast facts on who’s left out of America’s retirement system: eig.org/whos-left-ou... eig.org/rural-retire...

eig.org

Originally published on October 3, 2024, this analysis was republished […]

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Any serious response to the retirement savings crisis has to start with expanding workplace access, especially for low-income, rural, and part-time workers.

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Geography matters too. Half of rural full-time private-sector workers don’t have access to a workplace retirement plan, and rural workers hold roughly $55,000 less in retirement savings than their urban counterparts on average.

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Zooming out, about two-thirds of the bottom half of workers by income lack access to a workplace plan — versus just one-quarter of the top half. The system works primarily for higher earners.

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Income drives who gets left behind. Nearly 80% of full-time workers in the bottom income decile lack access to a retirement plan, compared with just 18% in the top decile.

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Even among full-time private-sector workers, access is far from universal: 42% lack access to any workplace retirement plan. In absolute terms, that’s 40.6 million full-time workers left out.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

More than 53 million U.S. workers don’t have access to an employer-provided retirement plan. That fact puts today’s “$955 saved” headlines in context — the retirement crisis is fundamentally about access.

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Workers want us to tackle affordability - lowering costs and making home ownership achievable. What didn’t they want? Raising tariffs. www.instagram.com/reel/DUYZeRq...

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Yale making tuition free for families under $200k has sparked the inevitable take: “$200k is the poverty line now.” In 2024, only 16% of U.S. households earned $200,000 or more. Calling the other 84% “in poverty” is nonsense.

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

People warn about desensitization to state violence. What they miss is that desensitization cuts both ways. The more threats are used, the less they work on protesters who stood their ground and keep recording.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Excited to share I’ve been promoted from Economist to Senior Economist at @innovateeconomy.bsky.social!Grateful for the chance to work on research that connects real-world policy to the data—and for a team focused on building a more dynamic, inclusive economy. More work ahead. Let’s go.

linktr.ee

Ben Glasner | Instagram, TikTok | Linktree

Economist. Read, write, and research. Ex-post doc. Ex-Ex grad student. Ph.D. from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance.

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Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

It isn’t the bottom specifically, given the distortion by assigning 0s, but the median for prim age with $0 assigned wage would capture some of that employment effect.

Ben Glasner @benglasner.bsky.social · 17/12/2025

Black unemployment is less a generic labor slack gauge and more a measure of the health of a specific segment. Still, a lot of research argues it’s more sensitive to the cycle than other groups, often rising faster early in downturns and sometimes serving as a warning sign.