Once a year my academic base, CUNY’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, holds a workshop featuring cutting-edge research on inequality. At this point in my life, I can’t claim to be doing cutting-edge research (hey, even Paul Samuelson was writing mostly survey papers and history of thought by the time he was in his 60s); but I’m still asked to give a talk on research issues that I find interesting, hopefully with some relationship to the general theme of the workshop. One virtue of this grand-old-man role, by the way, is that it forces me to tear myself away for a little while from the awful political headlines.

In the past I’ve used the ECINEQ talk to discuss issues involving inequality and macroeconomic performance, both vulnerability to crises and long-term growth. Both areas are still very much unresolved; but I’m not sure I have anything new to say. So I thought I’d do something different, and focus on an issue some very smart economists have been worrying at: the puzzle of continuing wage stagnation despite very low unemployment.

An aside: the way this discussion is taking place marks a kind of new frontier in the mechanics of scientific communication – and, I think, an unfortunate one. Once upon a time economic debate took place in the pages of refereed journals, but that stopped being true at least 30 years ago, with working papers becoming the principal means of communication. Even that turned out to be too slow in the face of rapid change; so during the crisis years, say from 2008-2013, a lot of discussion and debate moved to blogs, which I’d say worked very well. In retrospect, the debates we all had over leverage, monetary policy, fiscal policy and more were really classic – the 21st-century equivalent of, say, Keynes vs. Ohlin on trade balances and relative prices.

But this latest debate has taken place largely through dueling Twitter threads – which is, I’d say, awful. The economists involved are very smart, and the threads very informative; but for people trying to keep track, including students, this is really a mess. If you want an entry point, you might try this tweet by Nick Bunker. But guys, we really need something like, you know, articles – blog posts would do the trick — that summarize your positions.