some more info on that kristol piece from yesterday that angered me

commenter penix (!!) pointed me to dani rodrik's blog which has a good response piece to the times op-ed insulting the obamas. wanted to share with those of you who don't click through to the comments. the salient point, which i was vaguely certain of yesterday but had no real data to back it up at all:

People like me with graduate degrees have done great. But the median compensation (that includes fringe benefits, by the way) of high school graduate men has declined by about 10 percent since 1980! Mr. Kristol: that means that for a high-school graduate, the odds that his compensation would have fallen by more than 10% is 50-50. Note that even college graduates have not seen any income gains since around 2000. The increase in labor productivity has outpaced the earnings of all these groups, including that of workers with graduate degrees.

thanks for pointing me to this, i only barely scraped by economics in school (i received what some of the commenters on rodrik's blog refer to as a "gentleman's c") so i'm pretty terrible at expressing these things myself!