MEGAN MCARDLE: Sick of Slow Wage Growth? Here’s Who to Blame.

The U.S. unemployment rate is 4.3 percent. That’s not just good; it’s fantastic. The last time unemployment was that low, “Stutter” was topping the Billboard charts, George W. Bush had just been sworn in as president, and Osama Bin Laden was a name known only to a few national security wonks.

Everywhere you look, you see signs of a tight labor market. Employers are complaining that they can’t find the workers they need, and when you look at the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (aka Jolts), you see that openings are up, while unemployment claims have fallen. Americans are less likely to be laid off than they have been in decades.

There’s just one place that the good news doesn’t seem to show up: wages, where growth remains, as the Washington Post recently remarked, “somewhat tepid.” If employers are having such a hard time finding workers, why don’t they do the sensible thing and offer more money? This, says Kevin Drum, is “the mystery of the tight labor market.”

It’s no fun reading a mystery without a solution, and as it happens, I have a few here in my pocket. Look at other recent trends in the labor markets: Both the supply curves and the demand curves for labor have been undergoing substantial transformations that may simply have shifted the economy to a new equilibrium. Which is an economic jargonish way of saying this may be the new normal.

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