There has been a huge amount of concern about rising inflation in recent months, and it’s made worse by the fact that wage inflation has not been keeping up. A few workers in high-paid jobs have enjoyed higher bonuses and inflation-busting pay rises – it has just been reported that CEO pay has recovered to pre-pandemic levels for instance. But for the majority of workers, higher price inflation is now eroding the real value of what they earn.
More than a fifth of workers are struggling to afford the things they need to live. For them, the cost of living crisis is not some hackneyed political slogan but a fact of life. It spells real hardship. Its resolution calls for a rethinking of policies towards inflation and indeed the economy more generally.
Economics textbooks teach us that lower unemployment is the cause of higher wage inflation – the negative relationship between unemployment and wage growth forms the basis of the so-called Phillips curve. The textbooks also refer to the possibility of wage-price spirals, where higher prices fuel higher wages. This way of thinking gained support from the experience of the 1970s, when higher prices and higher wages coexisted, leading to a period of stagflation.
