Letter from the Editor

摘要

This issue of Challenge is devoted to the question I think is maybe the most urgent in the U.S. Why America has become a low wage society? Low wages, measured in various ways including weekly and hourly wages, are manifested in stagnating wages for income levels at the 60th percentile or below and falling wages for low income workers. Another manifestation is that the growth in individual income has badly lagged the growth in productivity. A third, related to the second is the historically low share of GDP wages to GDP. A fourth, a product of all these, is the rapid rise in inequality that is widely reported, fretted over, and not reversed.