A provocative essay, Don’t Blame the Robots, makes the bold claim that “Housing Prices and Market Power Explain Wage Stagnation.” (Foreign Affairs) In other words, the stagnation of the bottom 95% of wages isn’t caused by automation or offshoring, but by the crushingly high cost of housing:

“Yet recent academic work in macroeconomics suggests that current wage stagnation has less to do with robots and more to do with real estate and market power.

Real wage growth is a function of two things: changes in productivity and changes in the share of national output attributed to labor. If the share of GDP going to workers doesn’t change, then real wages simply track productivity.”

The market power argument is straightforward: as competition declines, cartels and quasi-monopolies scoop up a larger share of the national income, leaving relatively less for labor.

The high housing costs crush wages argument is more nuanced. The high cost of housing means that much of the nation’s available capital stock is invested in housing, rather than in productivity-boosting capital investments. This diversion of capital from productivity to housing reduces the productivity gains that enable higher wages.

The authors describe a second dynamic: the soaring cost of rents / purchasing housing in high-productivity cities such as New York and San Francisco effectively locks out lower-productivity/wages workers, pushing them into low-productivity locales which then have an oversupply of labor, further pressuring wages.

The authors claim that wages have dropped because workers have to devote a larger share of their earnings to housing, but this erroneously conflates real wages and disposable income: the two are entirely different.

If a worker earns 12% more pay annually, and inflation is 2% per annum, her real (adjusted for inflation) wages rise by 10%. If her housing costs rise by 20% in the same time period, her disposable income, i.e. what’s left after paying for housing, declines despite her higher income.