Nighttime Must-Read: Kenneth Thomas: What Is Noah [Smith] Thinking?

…purporting to show that things aren’t so bad for the middle class… immediately shows us a chart of median household income. Stop right there….. We need to look at individual data, aggregated weekly… to know what’s going on…. The individual real weekly wage is still below 1972 levels, [so] households… have traded time and debt for current consumption. This is not an improvement in the middle class lifestyle…. Richard Serlin points out that we also need to consider risk…. The middle class is less secure than it was in 1972. Noah has lots of interesting things to say, and you should check out his blog if you haven’t already. But this is an error on his part, and I don’t understand what he’s thinking.