“If you’re like most American workers, you probably deserve a raise,” says University of Massachusetts Amherst economics professor Arindrajit Dube. He spoke with PW about his debut, The Wage Standard (Dutton, Mar. 2026), which probes the gulf between American productivity and American wages.
Why have wages lagged so badly?
Productivity has soared by 70% over the last 40 years; you would think that pay would go up at similar rates. For most Americans it’s grown by maybe 20%. There’s a yawning gap between what we produce and what we’re paid, and a larger and larger share of the country’s overall income has gone to a narrow segment of the population. In the early 20th century we had a wage standard, and the workforce was largely unionized. Between 1948 and 1980, wages and productivity grew similarly in a way that made sure that most families were benefiting from a wealthier society.
You write that “the freedom to quit a bad job is one of the best indicators of how competitive a labor market really is.” Why is that?
The ability to quit bad jobs is the most powerful way to determine our own economic futures. If you can’t quit, your employer won’t feel pressure to improve conditions. There have been a number of countervailing forces that make jobs better, like strikes and unionization. But only 5% of jobs in the private workforce are unionized.
Does it make a difference where in the U.S. you live?
Half the country doesn’t have a meaningful minimum wage—the federal rate was last raised more than a generation ago. There are about 30 state-level minimum wages; as economists, we look at the data and see what these policies really do, and how these 30 states that raised their minimum wages are faring. We’ve created two Americas: one that has no economically meaningful minimum wage, and one that does. This is an experiment of sorts.
How do we close the wage gap?
As voters, workers, and consumers, we can think about how we can make the labor market work better for us all, and what we can do to make a change. We can vote for a union. We can vote for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage. We can think about how to set pay standards for many sectors: not just fast food workers but care workers, hospital workers. This is how we can push and rebuild the kind of standards we had better and more of 40 or 50 years ago. If we wait until the federal government isn’t broken anymore, we’ll be waiting a long time. We see some states experimenting, and we should follow their example. We’ve pursued policies of full employment in the last 10 years, and it’s paid dividends. But our work is not yet done.
