NY Times Calculator Mislabels Salaries as Wealth
Dean Baker has a lot of praise for this calculator:
The NYT has a very nice feature in today’s paper, a calculator that allows you to see how wages have grown over the last four decades. You can make comparisons for a wide variety of demographic characteristics, occupations, and industries. You can even plus your own info in and see how you’re doing compared to your peers. This is nice, it’s giving people real information. That’s what newspapers are supposed to do.
I agree but I have one nitpick with the title which talks about “wealth” whereas the calculator graphs real salaries. Their instructions continue the error in terminology by calling this salary calculator a “wealth calculator”. Could someone let the New York Times know that stocks and flows are different concepts.