[Retracted] Simpson's paradox strikes again: there is no great stagnation?

Link description: the source for the numbers in the OP is unclear; it is certainly not the Census data, which does not agree even approximately with these numbers. The Census data shows that the median wage of white non-Hispanic men has stagnated while that of female and some minority median incomes have grown substantially.

CronoDAS's linked post does indeed reflect the census data. Huh.

Ah, yeah, I looked up the median household income and was slightly surprised it hadn't dramatically increased as you'd naively expect if the OP's explanation is right. Thanks for explaining :)

Yes.

This reminds me of reading about something mentioning that the growing gap between the rich and the poor is not the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It's the rich getting richer, the poor getting richer, and a bunch of people immigrating to replace the poor people.

Do you have a cite or remember generally where you had read that?

You're making an unwarranted assumption that the overall stagnation needs a macroeconomic explanation.

Imagine, for a moment, that most of the increase in a workforce happens in low-wage, low-cost-of-living regions. It's entirely possible for average wages to stagnant even as average buying power increases, with no changes to any local costs of living; what mechanism in supply and demand can explain this? Is cheap food entering the country from Mexico and driving the cost of food down? That's the problem with hidden variables.

Instead of looking for an explanation in supply or demand, first you need to look at the hidden variables, and see if there's an inherent explanation there. By asking whether it's a supply or demand issue, you're effectively ignoring the hidden variables, and declaring that the broader statistics are meaningful.

Asking what mechanism in macroeconomics can explain the stagnation is a bit like using the Kidney Stone example used on wikipedia and asking whether maybe doctors aren't sterilizing their equipment properly prior to performing procedure A.

Edit: To clarify exactly why this is the wrong question to ask, this phenomenon is perfectly well described by demand for workers increasing in all sectors, but increasing in some sectors more than others. It's also perfectly well described by demand for workers staying constant (relative to population). It's also perfectly well described by demand for workers declining across all sectors, but decreasing in some sectors more than others. (Absent additional information not present in this data, that is.) That is, you can obtain the same results with relative increases, relative stagnation, and relative decreases in demand for workers. "Supply and demand" in this case is an answer seeking a question.

Can you remember what that was?

That isn't a bad heuristic either! However in practice the aggregate claims about scores are often used to make an argument relying upon internal homogeneity, and I don't see the corresponding "scores are up among all groups so aggregate scores must be higher" often, which would require more information and space.

Even better would be to use more of those omitted variables: age, education, time in the workforce. One could use the General Social Survey for a rough take, using this link. I'd be curious to see the analysis if you'd like to do it.

Simpson's paradox is a simple mathematical explanation for the error, "political correctness" is a complex socially-constructed one intimately tied up with particular political positions. Occam's Razor favors the former, overwhelmingly so.

There is no need to introduce the hypothesis that the error is due to people not agreeing with the particular political views of the Blue Party (which is what the "political correctness" hypothesis states), when simple math suffices to explain it.

How so?