I preferred to look at a measure that combined the two factors: growth in average hourly wages. If the economy were actually close to putting all willing and productive laborers to work, we would expect wage growth to rise steadily, indicating that employers were having to jack up pay to compete for scarce labor (and pointing to growing inflationary pressure). Instead, average wage growth has been flat and well below rates associated with full employment. While wage growth remains dormant, talk of tapering or tightening strikes me as premature.

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Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times: Wage stagnation may be our most important economic problem. Wages are supposed to rise with productivity. As workers produce more, it stands to reason that they will be paid more. But as you can see above, wages have lagged productivity since the 1970s.

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Derek Thompson, The Atlantic: The story of the year was the labor market vs. the stock market. It was a meh year for the former. It was a banner year for the latter. And that made it a banner year for the top 10 percent of the country, which holds about 80 percent of all stock market wealth.

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Ben White, Politico: Household net worth surpassed its nominal all-time high this year. It's "probably already taken," White told us via Twitter, "but as far as hope for stronger 2014 this one on household net worth hitting record is my favorite."

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Heather Boushey, economist, Center for Equitable Growth: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty's data charting the fall and rise of income shares of top earners are well known at this point. The past thirty years have seen the incomes of those at the top explode and the top 1 percent received 95 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2012. With top earners now receiving as much as that group did during the Roaring Twenties, this chart is a reminder of just how inequitable our income distribution has become.

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Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic: You have to admit, there is something a bit crazed about America's minimum wage policy. Every so many moons, Congress battles over whether it's time for a hike. Eventually, Democrats win out. Then we let inflation eat away at its dollar value until liberals decide to pick up the issue again, as they have this year. And so you get the blue line below, the real value of the minimum wage zig-zagging, mostly downward, since 1968. Whether or not we end up raising the minimum wage, wouldn't it make sense to at least index it to the cost of living? After all, if we're going to have a minimum wage at all, shouldn't it remain the minimum?

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Heidi Moore, The Guardian: Here's why I love this chart: it nails the issue with the inequality at the center of our economy right now. Corporate profits are our only consistently rising metric of economic success. Everything else that matters is bumping along the bottom. Job openings have only modest gains, and nowhere near what we had before the crash. Personal income is stagnant. Unemployment is still absurdly high. That leads to the policy question: is it our goal as a country to fuel only corporate profits? Or do we have some other responsibility to the citizenry?